For your commercial cleaning business to succeed, you need to work towards both consistently acquiring new clients and retaining old ones. The former is crucial for overall growth, while the latter is essential for cultivating loyalty and also a good measure of how customer satisfaction.
Unfortunately, some businesses tend to focus more on acquisition than retention. It’s always good to get new customers; however, if you want more revenue lifetime value, you also need to focus on keeping your existing clients happy.
Other advantages of client retention include lower costs, brand advocacy, and a better reputation in the community.
If you want to start retaining more of your commercial cleaning clients, here are some best practices to adopt ASAP:
Open Yourself to Feedback
One of the keys to customer retention is continuous improvement. To do this, you must conduct regular evaluations of your services to pinpoint where you can make changes. However, it’s not as easy to be objective when you’re the one assessing your own performance.
This is where customer feedback comes in. Through both positive and negative comments, you can easily determine what you need to continue doing and what you need to make better.
Being open to customer feedback also boosts retention because customers want to feel that they’re being listened to. To this end, make it a habit to send a response to every comment you receive. Even a simple acknowledgement along the lines of “Thank you for your feedback. We will use this to continuously improve our services,” can go a long way.
Establish a Rewards System
Another key to customer retention is to reward loyalty. This way, you’ll give your already loyal customers even more reason to patronise your company.
One of the most common rewards that many companies implement is giving a free product or service after a certain number of availments. For example, after a total of 5 office cleaning service bookings, the next session can come with free carpet cleaning.
Other types of rewards you can try giving your loyal clients include:
- discounts for consistent bookings, e.g., one cleaning service per month
- points accumulation that can be exchanged for products or services
- exclusive services, e.g., using special cleaning products
- cashback system after a set number of service availments
- birthday discounts
If you want, you can try out a variety of rewards and see which ones are the best received. It’s also important to personalise your offerings, so make sure to gather customer data and insights regularly.
Develop a Referral Programme
If you want to hit two birds with one stone—that is, if you want to both attract and retain customers—you should consider developing a referral program.
What you have to keep in mind is that in a significant majority of situations, most customers trust the word of other customers. This means that marketing ploys don’t always work. As such, it’s a good idea to capitalise on word-of-mouth and have your existing customers advocate for your business.
In exchange, you can offer referrers additional benefits like discounts, store credit, free products, and the like. This not only fosters good will, but will also give your existing customers more reason to participate in this type of programme.
Be Present in Multiple Channels
Different people have different preferences as to when and how they want to contact and be contacted by businesses. Some like sending emails, while some want the convenience of chat messages. Others prefer to have someone to talk to over the phone.
By being omnichannel, you can respond faster to enquiries and create a more personalised customer service experience. The former is particularly important, even if you aren’t able to resolve the concern right there and then. What matters more is that the customer knows that you’re actively working towards a solution within a specified timeframe.
Cultivate a Community
As with employee retention in companies, engagement is a crucial component of customer retention in businesses. One way to cultivate healthy interactions amongst your customers is through online communities, whether it’s through social media or on your website.
Aside from providing a welcoming space for customers to interact amongst themselves, it also creates another platform for you to introduce new services, loyalty programmes, and the like. You can also use the conversations within the community to derive actionable insights and be more proactive in providing solutions.
No matter the industry, a business’s existing customer base is its biggest asset as it provides some of the biggest if not the most value to a company. As such, it’s only logical to work hard on campaigns to retain your most loyal clients.
If you have a commercial cleaning company, consider implementing the above-mentioned client retention practices if you haven’t yet. It can take some time to notice the results, but it will definitely make a huge difference in various facets of your business.