How to Increase Customer Retention Percentages by Understanding Your End User
Beyond conducting a
friendly relationship with customers, no matter what service you offer, you
must be educated in terms of times, deliveries, requests, and payments. "The
customer is always right" is a phrase that currently, and perhaps in the
past, should not apply at all if we really want to offer a service that stands out and that meets the
needs for which they hire us. Improving your customer relationship can, therefore,
increase customer retention.
Retention is shared
and is part of a relationship and mutual agreement of responsibilities, rights,
and results. When a client hires your services, regardless of whether you are a
freelancer or a well-established agency, you must achieve a full understanding
of the employment relationship that is beginning to be established. You really
have to understand your clients to increase customer retention percentages.
For this, it is
important that you previously develop your rules in several aspects: response
and working times, technical and intellectual capacities, your rights and
responsibilities and those of the client, economic terms or payments and
possible extra charges.
This can be
established in a service contract which should be well structured and
understandable to avoid any confusion or future claims or conflicts between
both parties.
In addition,
regardless of the contract, to maintain a conversation prior to the client
accepting the proposal that you send him, it is important that in those
previous meetings the comments and clarifications of what are those rules that
you establish and understand are made by the client. In this way, both parties
will know at the beginning if it is convenient or not start a working relationship.
- Communication First
The relationship of
service provision goes beyond simply winning a project or an account and
offering a service for a specific time. In reality, it is a work of human and
technical understanding and of the needs that the client has every day.
Communication with customers can also really help you with customer retention
too.
You should not only
see the customer as one more income to the bank account of the agency and your
own portfolio. The customers are more than that. They are humans who seek to
achieve their professional and work goals.
If you manage to
understand and communicate continuously with your client, you can take the
labor relationship to a deeper level, where your future as a professional and
service provider is secured.
It is this client
who can recommend you, speak well of you, support and even offer more projects,
as long as you stop seeing them as just another client.
In the end,
understanding and educating the client is not absolutely bad, on the contrary, it
will help you to generate lasting relationships that will allow you to open
more doors for greater professional and personal growth. Using these methods to
understand your end user can help you a lot with custom retention.