All of us who have had a business always thinking about business or wants to start their own business will expect our business to thrive if you do the right things. When your business continues to grow, it will reach a point where maintaining a relationship with your customer or your clients can be challenging. In order to continue maintaining the relationship, you will need to change the way you do so.

Studies done by the Harvard Business School have measured that

1. A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to an increase in profits somewhere between 25% to 95%. *
2. The probability of selling to an existing customer is around to 60% to 70% region
3. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5% to 20%.

It makes businesses to invest in infrastructure in your business, to retain your clients and to keep them on your side, rather than to go on and find out new ones all the time.

When you start up of your business managing a small number of clients can be done in your own way. But when your business grows and you have hundreds of clients, you need to think of a different way to work with them. Customers stop utilising your services even though they could benefit from your business for the following reasons.

1. Being Inconsistent

Being inconsistent in your operations, in your production, in your marketing, in your customer services are the ways that drives people away.

2. Being Consistent

The second reason why customers may leave your organisation or your company even though they could use your services and go to your competition as you become consistent in the wrong areas, for example:

 Timely reply

Not replying to your customers in a timely manner. If you’re consistent in that, I can guarantee you that your customers will have a lower impression of your company.

Not valuing your customer’s time

Staying silent when answers expected and not valuing your customer’s time. If you are consistent in this area, your customers will walk away from you. People do not like to be ‘not valued’ for who or what they are; and if you put that value forward to them and you respect that value they will come back to you.

3. Failing to Build Relationships

Failing to build a relationship with your clients. Forgetting to engage them meaningfully and not providing the value beyond what you provide. In this day and age, many people would expect that you would form some form of relationship with them.

4. Not Listening and doing Market Research

Not listening to what they are saying about you and not making market research to happen. If you do not take feedback conscientiously and try to apply to improve, ultimately if it’s falling on deaf ears, your customers will automatically walk away from you. So if you produce a product and service which they’re happy with, but is lacking in certain things and they feedback that to you. They will eventually find someone else if you do not improve.

When your company grows rapidly, the challenge is to evolve in a way that would minimise any chance of giving your clients an excuse to move away from you and to utilise someone else’s businesses.

So, how do we resolve this?

1. Maintain Relationships.

Identify ways to maintain the relationship with your current clients and previous clients. Be clear with the experience do you want your clients current and past to have when dealing with your business. Identify how you can achieve these and leverage the use of technology to help you in that area. Get familiar with the use of technology. I use a blog to keep in touch with the people whom I work with and continue to add value to them through that.

Once you are clear with the kind of experience do you want your customers to have, if you multiply your customers by a factor of 10 and your current systems can still accommodate that, your business plans can then accommodate growth. As a result, your plan will not be affected no matter how fast your business grows. If you do it once and you plan it properly and use the technology available to leverage off in a way that you can increase your customer base without compromising on the quality of interaction and the ‘care factor’ you intend to give your customers, then, you can be confident that your customers will not walk away from your business because of the lack of communication on your side.

2. Have a Plan to Implement

Have a proper plan to implement it. Doing it ‘hap-hazardly’ will not work. If you know what you want your customers to experience in your business you will know how to implement it over a period of time. But doing it ‘hap-hazardly’ would then give your customers an inconsistent experience throughout the journey they go through with your company. So do not do it ‘hap-hazardly’. Have a methodical plan to implement it over a period of time.

Remember, it’s got to be scalable, will it work for 50 customers? Will it work for 300? Will it work for 2,000? And, will it work for 10,000? If it is a “yes” for every single one of these numbers, you have something to scalable. You just need to invest a little bit more in infrastructure to ramp it up and you can create the necessary requirements for you to give your customer that kind of client experience that you want. They will not walk away from you unnecessarily.

The cost of implementing and investing into this may incur more resources and time, but it can:

1. Save your business tens of thousands in customer acquisition costs.
2. Increasing the re-purchase rate from 20% to 70% and
3. Increasing your profitability up to 95%.

Such numbers is definitely with your considerations in looking into how you can create a consistent client experience as far as your businesses concern.

*Studies by Bain & Company, along with Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School