Customer Care

How will you build and maintain customers for life?

Your goal in business should be to build lifelong customers – true fans of your business. We’ve said it before – it’s easier to sell more to a previous customer than it is to gain a new one. By maintaining relationships with past clients you build customers for life. 

If you’ve got a passion for your business – clients will stay. Clients are attracted to your energy, your expertise and the way you do business. By staying passionate and involved with your business – you attract people to your business. By staying in front of your past clients and continuing to bring them value – they’ll stay excited about your business. Past clients are your best marketing source. If they’re happy and excited about what you do – they’ll share it with others, return to you when they have a need and be your partners in developing new business.

Maintaining contact with past clients is often overlooked. I worked in an industry for a few years where past clients we not really given much thought. I had one client tell me that all he ever really wanted was a holiday card – a thank you. He’d been happy with the business but he didn’t feel appreciated.

We need to appreciate the people who make our business work. Just as our employees need our appreciation to perform at high levels – our past clients need to feel appreciated in order to bring us more business.

I’m continually amazed by how many business I work with and buy from who never follow up after the sale. They take my money and that’s it. Businesses need to understand how valuable clients can be over the lifetime of their business.

Take a grocery store for example.  I spend at least $200 a week. Over the course of a year I spend $10,400 on groceries. Over ten years I spend $104,000. If I shop at the same store every week – that’s a nice chunk of change. But if I spread my purchases around – everyone gets just a little piece. If I owned a grocery store – I would do all I could to create customers for life. I’d want to create customer loyalty to my store and to its products. I would take time to appreciate and stay in front of every $200 per week shopper.

In our construction company things worked differently.  Client would come to us for a renovation project. These projects would range anywhere from $25,000 to $500,000. We sold a service. It was a big ticket item. Most of our clients took out a loan in order to buy our services. Yet I knew that even though each client may work with us only once in their lifetime – I wanted to stay in front of them.

I stayed connected with our past clients for many reason. First of all they are the best source for referrals. Second they may need our services again – people move or add on again. And lastly I liked our clients. When you work with the RIGHT clients each and every time you do business – you end up working with people you like. We had some great clients. They were fun to work with and over the course of their project we often got to know them very well.

Everything we did in our business was tied to the creating customers for life concept. We took the time to educate clients about the process prior to beginning any work. We held weekly meetings to review the project and answer any questions they had. We sent out a letter and a gift certificate for dinner the day the project was the messiest. We sent a letter saying, “we’re almost done, the end will come.” And we took the time when the project was completed to go over every detail and make sure they were 100% satisfied.

But we didn’t stop marketing when the project was completed. We sent a thank you note after our last meeting, we did a 30 day check in call and then again at one year. In addition we added them to our newsletter list, invited them to our client appreciation party each year and kept them informed of any other events we participated in.

Our client appreciation party became an annual highlight. People came year after year and often asked to bring others. We focused the entire event on thanking our clients and letting them know we appreciated them. It was worth every dollar we spent.

The other benefit of staying in front of past clients is that you always have a source for referrals, testimonials and references. Many of our past clients willingly spoke to new clients, referred us to their friends and helped us think of new ways to market. Past clients can become partners in the business if you let them.

To create a customer care strategy is easy – following through is difficult. It’s easy to plan and want to do things for your past clients. It’s harder to actually do it. A customer care strategy involves time and energy – it’s not usually costly but it requires planning and effort.

Keep in mind, the time and energy spent on creating customers for life will pay off. It will produce results. Take the time to create a strategy and make a plan for following through – you will be glad you did.