How to stop losing clients | The 5-step formula you can use to maximise client retention

Are you losing clients? Experiencing some degree of churn? Don’t worry. We’ve got the formula to help you weather this storm and get on the path to retention.

It’s never easy when a client expresses dissatisfaction at the service, solution, or offering you’ve worked so hard to build and bring to the market. It’s harder still when that dissatisfaction reaches the point that they leave you for one of your competitors. It hurts your business, and it can have an impact on morale.

While even the best businesses will lose clients from time to time, there are actionable strategies you can look to employ to keep these losses to a minimum.

Here’s our 5-step formula to help you maximise client retention.

1. Understand your offer and create an ideal client profile

Before you can actively start retaining clients, you need to understand your own services, and identify how they serve your ideal client profile. You need to be able to clearly define the unique selling points, how it solves your clients’ main pain points, and how it compares to the competition.

It may become apparent here that you need to innovate and upgrade your service or offering to be in step with your competitors. Equally, you may discover that you’ve been taking on the wrong types of clients. If you’ve got equal helpings of glowing success stories for clients who keep coming back to you and clients who are leaving you, odds are the latter aren’t the right clients for your business. Look at your highlight reel and build a profile based on your returning, satisfied clients. Identify common industries, niches, expectations, goals, and even business sizes.

Pro tip: Once you’ve identified your ideal client profile, you can use the Drimify gamification platform to create a branded Personality Test that visitors to your website can take to see if your business is a good match. This is quick and easy to build and publish, and can be embedded on your website to help users understand your offering and see if your solution or service is right for them. If you offer a range of service packages, you could adapt multiple customer profiles to a Product Recommendation Quiz, which would use the same mechanics to recommend the most appropriate package for their needs.

2. Manage expectations at every step of the client journey

A big reason for client dissatisfaction for agencies across different industries is overpromising and under delivering. If you’re promising the moon and only delivering the ceiling, the client will understandably feel shortchanged. Businesses that do this regularly are setting themselves up to haemorrhage clients.

Set realistic expectations from the beginning of the client journey to avoid disappointments later on. Clearly communicate the capabilities of your products or services, be transparent and upfront with pricing, and be conservative with time scales – if you then exceed them, your customers will be that much happier. Regularly update clients on progress, address concerns promptly, and manage their expectations proactively – if something comes up that changes the timescale, communicate it there and then and explain the situation along with their options.

Actively managing expectations is a pillar of customer care and fostering stronger business relationships, and avoiding potential issues deeper into a project’s lifecycle that can lead to a lost client.

3. Automate lead generation as much as possible

The more clients you have, the less acutely you’ll be affected by losing clients.

This is an area where you can use gamification to great advantage. You can easily customise pre-made games and experiences on the platform to engage, educate, and entertain target demographics, and include contact forms to ask for personal data and invite users to opt-in to your email lists. Because playing brings out maximal concentration in users, you can really get them to focus on your branded messaging, and make them more susceptible to opting in and submitting information.

Ultimately, you can only control what you can control – some clients will inevitably leave for other service providers. By working at a sensible scale for your business and having plenty of leads in the pipeline, you’ll have the numbers to know your approach is working, the security to not be overly beholden to client needs, and be able to make sensible business decisions with a long term view as a result.

4. Leverage informative, client-focused content

Creating a help desk, or a series of resources, either audio-visual or in article form or a combination of the two, that seeks to address repeating pain points and questions you encounter is an excellent way to add value to your client-focused offering.

This allows you to be not just a service provider, but a resource and a problem solver. When clients see you as a leader in your field, they’ll be very unlikely to leave for your competitors.

Additionally, if all this content is indexed by search engines and public-facing, this could help you generate more leads, as your demographics will see their own challenges in your content, and how your solution or approach could help them.

5. Control the controllable but accept that some clients will fail

No agency or B2B business can expect to operate with a 100% success rate. The fact of the matter is, some businesses are operating with major problems. If your client’s existing product or service isn’t where it needs to be, they have a staffing or culture problem, or they’re 2 years past when they should have invested in a digital transformation, you’re going to be fighting a losing battle.

While the modern business world is all about outcomes, at scale, it’s important to focus on process over outcome. Ultimately, you don’t get consistent results without a winning process. Identify what’s in your sphere of influence, do your best work, but don’t take it personally when a failing business enters your orbit. Over time, the law of averages is what your business builds its reputation on.

Key takeaway

The occasional loss of a client is bound to happen, as is the occasional bout of dissatisfaction. However, if you’re losing more clients than you’re keeping, something needs to be done, and quickly.

Assuming your product offering or service is competitive with what clients can get elsewhere, the path to retention and stronger business relationships can be achieved with the above 5-step formula.