There is an old adage often used and repeated multiple times in various management classes that it costs 3 times more to attract a new client than to retain an existing one. In today’s competitive world, it could certainly cost a lot more.
In a young growing organisation, retaining customers is even more important as often the customer contributes significantly to your revenues and the loss of one could set you back in your plans as you would not have a large sales team that would be able to quickly replace that loss.
Then, what is the secret to retaining customers? Among other things, I will let you in on what I consider the most important one – Customer Connect
Sure, the basics in terms of quality, timelines, and costs are critical but that ‘X Factor’ is surely the way one connects with the customer. At the end of the day it is all about people and how one manages to gain sufficient mind share.
Why is it important?
Customers are partners in our journey for growth. Staying in touch with the customer regularly will help you understand the customer organisation better leading often to increased penetration for your products and services within the customer organisation.
Customers will help open new doors. A customer to whom you have demonstrated your passion and enthusiasm will often refer you to others and will not shy away from endorsing you leading to new businesses.
Customers will give you the confidence to experiment. If you are looking to expand or diversify your set of offerings, it is always better to start offering those to your existing customers as you have already proven your capabilities and won their confidence.
Customers can provide direction. Whether through a formal feedback process or through the informal interactions, customers always provide those little insights from a different perspective that help you understand your areas of strengths and weaknesses better.
Customer interaction brings better accountability. Especially for a young team, interacting with customer leads to increased levels of accountability as they are more likely to understand the priority and the impact of what they are doing from a customer’s perspective.
The above reasons notwithstanding, one should take or create every opportunity to interact with ones customer to update them on their current running projects. A proactive approach to providing status updates goes a long way in providing confidence that things are running smoothly.
The means and methods could vary with the advent of plenty of new age tools that allow for staying connected to ones customers but at best try and keep it as human as possible. It is probably said best in a recent TV ad of a mobile giant. “Baat Karne se hi toh baat banti hai”. (Things happen when people interact)
