Strong Businesses are Established on Relationship Building
It takes years to develop a great working relationship with a client and only minutes to destroy it. With a ratio like that, maintaining and satisfying your client base is a top priority.
All too often, I have seen businesses not go the extra mile for their clients in order to cut expenses. According to the Harvard Business Review, however, gaining new customers costs anywhere between 5 and 25 times more than retaining existing ones. Avoiding the hiring of non-billable people or undervaluing your current client services team will only lead to insufficient relationship building with your clients. These are critical errors that could lead to the following bad practices for any organization:
- Dishonesty
- Lack of responsiveness
- Inaccurate production schedules
- Incorrect or misguided pricing
- Insufficient project management
- Poor quality work
- Failure to communicate additional costs
To avoid these issues, you must attend to your client’s needs throughout an entire project. The key to ensuring follow-through and professionalism is hiring experienced client services people who are well-versed in project management and client relationship building. I personally like to call it CRBin’! Another great avenue to a successful client relationship builder is to train them yourself.
Ultimately, what a client really wants is to have a dependable, ethical, and experienced business partner they can fully trust. It’s the vendor’s goal to meet or exceed all expectations regarding their client’s deliverables. This partnership ensures that the client has picked a vendor that not only shares his or her journey, but also the vision of colleagues, superiors, and eventually their own customer base.
Marcus has 30+ years of client service and marketing experience and was previously a managing partner at a local agency for more than five years. On the weekends he enjoys long walks on the Montour Trail and fishing.
