One of the ways that you can mark how far you’ve succeeded with your business is the way that you manage to retain your clients and customers.
It can be relatively easy to attract new business – like the start of a romantic relationship, it feels simple to present your best side to begin with.
But over time as reality sets in, relationships can fade both personally and professionally, and your job as a boss is to make sure that your relationships with your clients stay strong and positive.
Here are some tips to help you out…
Work On Your Communication
First of all, it’s important to make sure that you’re a good communicator. Simply keeping in touch with your clients and letting them know that you value them is a great way to keep them on your side.
Whether that’s sending a personally written Christmas card or checking in every month or so, it’s crucial that they know that they’re important to you and to your business.
Keep your communication professional but friendly at the same time. If you need to, write personal information about your clients down in a spreadsheet so you can remember who’s who, and most importantly: remember to listen as well as talk.
Keep Improving Your Product
It can be very easy to end up resting on your laurels if you’ve started a successful business. Developing a successful product is one thing – you might manage to find a gap in the market that you can fill, which might be a product like Fuelbox, for example – and then once you’ve got a truly original idea, setting up your company and attracting customers can often be pretty easy if you have some business acumen.
But after that, other companies with similar products will start to spring up on the back of your success, which means that it’s important for you to keep developing both your product and your company. Take any complaints or comments into consideration – make sure that your product constantly improves and that your customers are aware of that, and make sure also that you keep streamlining the processes within your company.
Whether that’s hiring new staff, moving to new premises or changing the way that you work until you find the best option for you, it’s important to keep developing in business and looking to the future.
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Remember To Focus On Customer Service
Finally, the number one thing that a small business has over larger businesses is excellent customer service, so it’s important that you keep working to maintain this as time goes by.
Make sure that you have a company website that’s easy to navigate so that your customers, both your current ones and your possible future ones, can get in contact with you without any problems and can find out further information about your product as easily possible.
You’ll probably be unlikely to be able to match the bigger companies in terms of price, but you can definitely beat them in terms of your relationships that you have with your clients – focus on them and you’ll continue to be a huge success.
