Studies have found increasing your customer retention by 5% will increase your revenue by 25-29%. Your business needs to prioritize building and maintaining client relationships to retain customers. Almost half your business’s revenue comes from 8% of your loyal clients through continuous business and quality lead generation.

We’ll offer some of our best tips for building and maintaining client relationships. By implementing these tips, you’ll create a positive client experience that will help grow your business.

Know and Strive to Meet Your Client’s Needs

To build and maintain a lasting client relationship, your sales force needs to research, investigate, and listen to your client’s needs. This will take time and resources but ultimately generate lasting relationships and revenue. To understand your client’s needs, you’ll need to conduct:

• Customer interviews
• Market research
• Customer support and feedback surveys

Identify your client’s pain points, challenges, goals, and values. Your clients will feel valued and understood when your business provides solutions that continue to satisfy these needs. It also enables your sales team to pinpoint messaging that resonates with your clients and creates a loyal customer base.

Prioritize Consistency Across Channels and Interactions with Your Client

Customer loyalty isn’t built on a single interaction. You’ll need to create a consistent relationship across digital and personal channels and several interactions for your client to feel they can trust your products and services. But with so many ways for a client to interact with your business, maintaining consistency can be challenging.

McKinsey & Company recommends creating a consistent experience through:

• Customer Journey: Create a consistent experience from the moment they interact with your brand, purchase services, and seek customer service.
• Communication: Ensure that your business follows through on promises and perceived expectations.
• Emotional: Instill customer satisfaction and loyalty through building positive customer experiences over time where the client feels they can trust your business and services.

So how does a business create a consistent emotional connection? You can create a consistent emotional connection by prioritizing the customer experience every time the client interacts with your brand or services.

Focus On Open Communication

Open communication is critical to establishing lasting relationships with your clients. Your client should feel comfortable contacting you to ask questions or resolve concerns. They should be able to contact customer service or their sales representative easily. 86% of clients become long-term brand champions when they experience good customer service.

Here are some effective ways to promote open communication:

• Provide easily accessible customer service through chat, phone, email, or text.
• Schedule regular conference calls.
• Provide daily email updates.
• Conduct brainstorming sessions with your clients.
• Hold in-person meetings as often as possible.

When the client feels you’re readably accessible and strive to resolve questions or concerns, you’ll build lasting client relations.

Share Knowledge

In the same vein of open communication, you should share knowledge readily with your clients. Customers like to be informed before making a purchase. Establishing your business as an knowledgable source and trusted industry expert for information is critical to closing the sale. You can do this by providing:

• Providing essential information about relevant topics.
• Post blogs or news articles that follow the 80/20 rule for generating content marketing. 80% should be informative content about relevant topics to your customer, and 20% should promote your business, products, or services.
• Over-communicate deliverables and roadblocks that may arise to manage expectations.

Utilize Project Delivery Tools

It’s critical to utilize project delivery tools to appear organized, professional, and efficient. Clients will perceive a positive impression when your work is consistently professional and organized. Thank goodness you do not need to reinvent the wheel to create project delivery processes. There are a number of third-party services that can help your business deliver:

• Project proposals
• Contracts
• Client reports
• Invoices
• Referral Partnerships

You’ll want to research the best applications and services to automate and simplify these project delivery processes and tasks.

If you need help generating referral partnerships for your clients, Twiz is a reputable agency that matches your clients with other member businesses that target the same customer base but don’t offer the same services.

Strive to Exceed Expectations

We know exceeding expectations is easier said than done. Customer experience should be critical to your business goals and values. When you exceed your client’s expectations, you solidify their trust and loyalty. You’ll become a reliable resource for them, and they’ll become your advocate. Here are a few ways to exceed client expectations:

• Provide training tools on how to use your products and services. This saves your customer service department by addressing frequently asked questions before they even ask.
• Share expertise beyond the designated scope of work. Think outside and beyond the box of how you can apply your expertise to help your client with a wider set of problems or business needs.
• Deliver projects ahead of schedule. When you finish projects in a timely matter, it sends a message that you value their business. Pad your timelines to accommodate hiccups or roadblocks to your deliverables so you can leverage that extra time if needed or deliver early.

Make Your Client Relationships a Priority

When you strive to know your client, communicate openly, and deliver a consistently positive customer experience, you'll grow a loyal customer base that will generate quality leads and continuous revenue.

It’s critical to analyze your customer experience, service, and communication channels and make the necessary changes to meet client expectations. If you need help, utilize third-party services and applications to ensure a positive experience.

Twiz facilitates partnerships for increasing revenue through referrals. Our targeted approach helps your business reach more potential customers through strategic partnerships within your niche.