Let’s assume that the work you have been doing for your clients has been delivered; you will need to continue to keep the clients happy between projects in the same way you won them in the first place – by being helpful, professional and adding value to their business. However, for any organisation, one of the key aims for keeping customers happy is to have repeat business.
To me, this isn’t about you having all these accreditations like IIP or BS 5750 – some organisations see quality standards as applicable to procedural matters, keeping customers happy is about ensuring that everything has gone as planned on each project and then maintaining contact with your clients using their experiences as a way of improving your business.
An even better system than the routine of despatching customer standardised satisfaction questionnaires is the infrequent (but in depth) client review meeting. However, before having such meeting, try and do an internal review so you can try and assign a monetary value of the client to your organisation and review cross selling opportunities. For the former, not all clients are profitable and some are more profitable than others. Maybe scrutinize the figures and construct some sort of lifetime projection. For the latter, are there opportunities to exploit so that you can become more valuable to the client client…and vice versa?
Ultimately, dialogue between you and the client is essential and without it, someone else may be tapping into your client!
