In business, staying the same in terms of services offered, who you market to and how you operate doesn’t enable you to maintain your position – it only means you’ll get left behind.
When it comes to client experience, constantly striving to improve is a central tenant of growing the company and maintaining your existing client base as you seek to expand it.
Reassessing the current services that you offer and participating in training are also strong tactics for continually driving client experience. They can be useful exercises when it comes to planning how you will increase your market reach. Specializing in a certain field or diversifying your services to include options that your competitors don’t provide may open up a whole new category of client.
“You have to adapt,” restaurateur Jerry Labooty told the Republican Herald, noting that making changes which will draw in new prospects is also important. “You have to constantly adapt, weekly, monthly, yearly.”
Have you devised one-, five- and 10-year plans for where you want your business to go? Be sure that when updating these strategies annually, you are considering the client experience element. Do you have a service level agreement in place for your clients? Is the current suite of products or services you offer enough? Are there other things you could be doing to deepen the client relationship or be of more value to the client?
Asking these questions can help you take charge of the business and lead it in a direction that is more immune to outside forces such as an economic downturn or the arrival of a new competitor in town.
“What keeps us going, and I think it’s true for any type of company, is customer service,” said Valerie Holstein – co-founder, president and chief executive of Fort Lauderdale-based CableOrganizer.com – at The Miami Herald‘s annual Small Business Forum. “As long as you are there for your customer, and you have value added, you don’t have to be the most inexpensive.”
Offering a meaningful client experience by anticipating needs, granting assistance beyond your scope of responsibility and making the client feel appreciated can also further your networking efforts.
Another panelist, David Clarke – the chief executive, co-founder and managing partner of BGT Partners – was quoted by the paper as comparing customer acquisition to elephant hunting.
“Once you get one elephant, they come herding in, because they all talk to each other,” Clarke said. And, we would like to add that an elephant never forgets!
