Customer loyalty: How to retain customers?
For a collaboration between a freelancer and a company to work, it is necessary to build a relationship of trust. But when it comes to working with new customers, especially in different sectors of activity or typologies, it is not always easy to find the right approach. In fact, you will not interact in the same way with a director of a large group and with a manager of a startup. This problem concerns many self-employed people, whether they have recently adopted this status or are more experienced. How do you build a relationship of trust with your customers? How to retain customers over the long term, in order to collaborate regularly with them? In this article, we have brought together 4 approaches that make it possible to maintain these relationships over time.
Summary
Be genuinely interested in your customers
Frame your intervention
Become the expert everyone is looking for
Retain your customers for the long term
Be genuinely interested in your customers
A first attitude to adopt is to place yourself in a deliberately interested position. What could be more rewarding for a customer than to feel listened to? Cultivate this process of curiosity, listening and interest at all times. The best thing is to introduce this approach from the start of your exchanges in order to provide a good customer experience.
Your role consists in working with your customers to respond to their problems and satisfy their needs. It is therefore highly expected that you have an interested position to ask the right questions and promote a better understanding of the context of your customers. They will also be particularly sensitive to your interest since this will reinforce their choice to have called on you. It will also develop their commitments.
This posture necessarily creates trust, but it also contributes to the construction of lasting collaboration. You are already planting the seeds for a future professional relationship. To achieve this, a simple commercial transaction is not enough. It is necessary to initiate equitable collaboration, where everyone can learn and advance the other. You're actually going to provide them with the solutions they needed. But conversely, they “offer” you a new learning space, where you will have the opportunity to apply your knowledge and expertise to the reality on the ground. Based on these experiences, you will all benefit from this collaboration and it is very likely that the difficulties encountered could have created a link at the end of this project. It's up to you to play to maintain and solidify it!
Frame your intervention
Your customers expect flawless support from you because they have identified you as a qualified expert for the mission. In fact, you are also responsible for framing your field of intervention. Promote transparency when contracting, especially when it comes to your expectations for the project, the results you can guarantee, how you operate and your pace of work. By taking stock of all the parameters of the mission, you put every chance on your side to convince them of the success of the collaboration. Do not hesitate to adjust the delivery date, to specify your preference for teleworking two days a week or to mention the working methodologies (agile, scrum, kanban...) that are familiar to you, for example.
This transparency contributes to maintaining good communication, both on the project but also in your customer relationship. In the same way, you will need to clarify your work processes, especially if you are used to working on certain tools, your hours of availability or all the information necessary for a good understanding of the project. But you also need to be able to manage the administrative tasks of your own business. Be vigilant about receiving your invoices (Freelance invoice example) and on pending payments, especially if you charge to TJM.
Throughout the mission, keep in mind to be reachable and maintain regular contacts with your customers to reassure them and inform them of the progress of the project. We strongly advise you to prefer transparency, especially when you encounter difficulties. Open the dialogue and set your boundaries with kindness. It is quite normal that you sometimes need to reframe the mission, especially when you are missing certain information or when your customers stray from the initial framework. In fact, the more you maintain this mutual communication, the more it promotes the success of the collaboration in the long term.
Become the expert everyone is looking for
On the market, there are no secrets: the more you are a freelance expert in a field, the more opportunities there will be. Become indispensable for businesses that need your services. Thanks to your expertise, your knowledge of the sector, your understanding of your customers' problems and your previous experiences, you can (and have an interest in) differentiating yourself from your competitors. Your expertise will naturally reinforce their sense of trust. Also, maintain your level of knowledge and skills through regular training. Another way to reinforce the technical nature of your expertise is to choose your missions according to specific parameters: sector of activity, type of problem or type of customer. The positioning of your offer will promote your reputation on the market and deepen the quality of your next interventions.
Except that it is not enough to be a highly qualified expert, a company will more naturally turn to someone who is compatible with its values and its internal culture. We must not forget that it is easier to move forward on a project when employees share the same vision and common values. Instead of smoothing out your personality, assert your uniqueness. Your personality and your social intelligence will be your precious allies in collaborating with companies that really suit you. It is your sympathy capital that will help you build more lasting relationships with your customers.
Retain your customers for the long term
Of course, a relationship between a freelancer and a business is not created in the blink of an eye. It is maintained over time. How do you expect to retain your customers if you disappear from their radar as soon as the mission is over? Like any relationship, you must renew your interest in the company and more specifically in the interlocutor (s) with whom you have collaborated. Indeed, depending on the duration of your mission, you have surely had the opportunity to share more informal conversations. Maybe your customers were able to share some more intimate information with you because they felt they could trust you, and vice versa. So renew your interest, check in regularly and take the opportunity to get personalized recommendations. Act like a business manager and meet them by organizing informal meetings.
However, will all your collaborations be transformed into relationships of trust? If you accept any opportunity, without taking the time to measure this “affinity” factor, the answer is no. We therefore advise you to take the time to identify the relevance of the mission, as well as the values and culture of the companies with which you think you can collaborate. If your objective is to retain your customers, this selection criterion will be part of your acquisition strategy. Some “top of mind” freelancers also share the same technique to confirm the potential for relationships with a future customer: Would they be comfortable inviting her over for lunch or coffee? The answer is a good starting point.
Fretaining your customers is not an easy task! A first step would therefore be to focus on the missions that went well. Was your customer happy with the results? Was customer communication smooth throughout the collaboration? To increase your chances of customer loyalty, also refine the targeting of your future customers and focus on those whose long-term collaboration you already identify. Bonus “Method”: get closer to the matchmaking companies. Already having the trust of a number of businesses, they will be able to recommend you to your target customers and gain you some additional trust points. There are numerous types of loyalty. Do you know them?
