How Can You Increase Your Client Retention Rate

How can you increase your client retention rate? Is the spotlight for this week’s episode of ‘what would Charlotte do’. 

Now, One of the things that I find online, but for businesses altogether, is that they focus so much on getting the client. And they don’t focus on keeping the clients. I find this mad because one, we spend a lot of time and money getting the clients through the door. Two, you’re missing opportunities to be able to help those clients, even further.

I really really believe that you should be focusing on your client retention. Before you focus on getting new clients.

Now, of course, new sounds new clients are really really important in business. But what is the point in spending that money and time on getting new clients, if they’re going to leave.

So you want to make sure that you have a really solid client retention processes system in place

That’s going to enable you to keep those clients as long as possible. And therefore, having a longer client lifetime value that’s going to come through for your business.

Because, as the saying goes, it’s much easier to sell to clients that you already have, than to get new clients. Because you’ve already established a relationship with the clients that you have.

They already trust you, they already love you, they already love the service. So they’re going to want to work with you before they choose someone else that they’ve not worked with before.

There’s a couple of things that I want you to take into account here when you are looking at your client retention. And these are things that can be changed very very easily, without much investment at all. Actually, but there are things that make a huge difference.

If you’re thinking that’s well and good but I have no idea where to start with my client retention. Then listen up because these next points are going to be really, really helpful for you.

If your client service and support are lacking, then you need to look at that

So, are your clients getting the support that you would expect from a business that you are working with. For instance, here, if we take your internet provider, as an example. Your internet goes down. Log with the provider. They’re working in the background to fix the problem. But they’ve not let you know that.

How do you feel as a consumer? You start to feel stressed you start to feel frustrated. Contact them again because you don’t know what’s happening, but they’re working on this in the background. So actually, you don’t need to be stressed, you don’t need to be frustrated and you don’t need to spend time contacting them again.

They need to acknowledge you and say, hey, we’ve got this we know what this problem is, we’re working on it, and be in touch in the next couple of days.

You are not promising that it’s going to be fixed, because you don’t know when it’s going to be fixed.

You are telling them that you are working on the problem, so they know that it’s in hand. And you are also telling them an expected date when they’re going to hear back from you.

Now, if they don’t do that, and you end up getting frustrated, you end up sending more messages to end up the business ends up getting more messages through that they’re spending time and resources in reading and dealing with. They’re not acknowledging it so you as a consumer are left frustrated and annoyed. So you don’t want to give them your money anymore.

And as a business, they are spending more money and more time on the same thing that actually one simple email would have solved

Can you see here the kind of circle that ends up going round if your customer support and service is actually lacking.

You need to address that. Now, if you are a solopreneur, and you’re thinking, I don’t have the time or resources to do that. Then look outside the box, could you set up a bot? So could you set up a customer service helpline, could you use a call center company that’s going to answer your calls for you?

There are so many different things that you can do to make sure that you’ve addressed that. You can make sure that your customers are getting the service that they expect. And then they’re getting the service that they want from you and they are going to continue working with you.

Do you leave them in the dark without acknowledging them?

This is something that happens so often and it’s very much linked to the point that I just spoke about. If you just leave them with no acknowledgment. They don’t know what’s happening, and they end up getting frustrated and annoyed, for no apparent reason. Because you are solving the problem that they have.

So you really need to be making sure that you are knowledgeable

This isn’t saying that you have to have an answer there and then, but you are acknowledging that you have heard from them. And you can also acknowledge that they have actually contacted you to get an answer and you can say, hey, yep, that’s fine.

We’ve got the query, we will be in touch in X amount of time. And this is where it comes in handy when you have an individual email address for customer support because that means that you can really create a bespoke automatic reply that’s going to let your clients and customers know what to expect. Next, I also really, really, really love a one-touch inbox.

Now, with a one-touch inbox I won’t go into too much depth here but a one touch inbox, is what it says on the tin you touch an email once and it’s dealt with.

Now, there are some caveats here because there are some emails that I know you won’t be able to resolve them and then you need to do some investigating.

But ultimately, the majority of your emails here you want to be aiming for one-touch, and what you also want to do is when these more in-depth emails come through how you fix that you want to set up a template or set up something that you can reuse, in the future, because that then means that you are able to deal with that as a one-touch email. If a similar situation comes in in the future.

Now you also want to be staying consistent with the level of service

You do not want to be for the first month, giving clients, a really amazing service that you can’t sustain. Because then they’re going to get very used to having a fantastic service from you.

And when that disappears they’re going to be frustrated because they’re no longer getting that service that they have expected. So making sure that you are consistent with the level of service that you provide is really important.

Are you delivering on what they signed up for?

Now again, this is something that is very frustrating as a consumer, and that is when someone signs up to a business for a particular service, and they have been promised these things. And actually, they’re under-delivering.

Now, you want to be completely upfront, from the beginning, in what your clients or customers are going to get from you in order to help you with how can you increase your client retention rate.

If you over promise and under deliver. It’s a terrible, terrible situation to be in.

Because your customers and clients are going to expect more from you, whereas actually if you are completely honest, in the beginning, chances are those clients are still going to be happy with it because you are still solving their problem.

And they’re not going to be expecting these additional things, and sure when the client signs up, you can add additional things into that because then you’re going to delight your customers, but you don’t want to say to them that this is what they’re going to get, and then they don’t get it.

Now, I hope that’s helped with How Can You Increase Your Client Retention Rate

I hope it’s answered that question for many of you that are wondering about your client retention and how you can change that. As always if you have any questions that you’d like me to answer then pop me an email or a message and I’ll do that for you. 

How Can You Increase Your Client Retention Rate