“Data! data! data! […] I can’t make bricks without clay.” Sherlock Holmes complained to Dr. Watson in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. Same as for the world’s most famous consulting detective, data and feedback from your customers is crucial to your business’ success.

Judy Garmaise in her book The Power of Follow Up stresses the importance of following up in business to both: (1) be front and centre of mind of your customers and (2) to have early notice of any issues which they might have.

To stay front and centre of mind, it is a good idea to reach out to your clients and prospects every couple of months to remind them that your business exists to tell them about some new product, feature or sale, for example through an email newsletter. A holiday card or birthday greeting also goes a long way to win customer loyalty. Letter correspondence through the postal system is generally more effective than email (which itself is more effective than most other means of reaching out). Yes, actually mailing a letter costs money, but the impact is significantly greater than a simple email. Including something handwritten to that correspondence adds a truly personalized touch and will further increase its impact. As an aside, stamps can generally be purchased below their face-value on classified ad sites.

Following up to have advance notice of issues is of extreme importance. If your business has recurring sales with customers, take the time to follow up after they buy for the first time and when they stop purchasing. This follow-up after their first sale should thank them for their business and encourage them to contact you if there is an issue. The next follow-up once they stop purchasing, this one is critical, should be to check-in and to make sure that everything is alright since you notice that they stopped purchasing. You once again want to give them an opportunity to reach out and tell you about any issues which might have occurred stating that you will do what is necessary to make it right. The sooner you are aware of issues, the greater your chance of saving the customer, continuing to sell to them in addition to reducing the likelihood of the issue repeating itself with other customers.

A common business mistake is to focus on growing your customer base while ignoring your current customers. Paul Jarvis in A Company of One emphasizes the shortfalls of chasing growth over maintaining the client base you already have. The Econsultancy/Responsys Cross-Channel Marketing Report quoted by Jarvis found that it costs five times as much to acquire new customers as it does to retain old ones. Of interest, that statistic indicates that there is a cost to customer retainment. Keeping customers takes time and effort, and occasionally discounts and rebates, but this is considerably less than the cost to acquire new ones (i.e. marketing and onboarding). Furthermore, current customers are a gold mine of positive reviews for your business and this word-of-mouth creates high quality referrals.

A new challenge facing business is that many customers, especially younger ones, don’t speak up as much about issues. You would think that people would reach out if there is a problem, but many people will stay silent and then stop doing business with you without notice or explanation. This means that it is very important to reach out to them, to solicit their feedback and to encourage them to contact you if there are any issues. This will reduce your customer attrition rate and give you greater insight into why some of your customers are being lost to begin with.

On the topic of addressing issues, give your staff autonomy and authority to make decisions up to a certain threshold amount, say $100, as this will give them greater ownership of their work and will remove those smaller issues from taking up too much of your valuable time.

To save yourself time following up, create email templates for yourself with parts marked out which needs to be personalized to the particular customer. When your business has enough sales, consider automating this process. As long as you can determine specific triggers for different follow-up emails, you have the possibility of creating logic trees with different outcomes based on different inputs. For example, if a service is normally rendered every two weeks and is not requested by the client for four weeks (two missed sessions), this should trigger an email to the customer checking in, making sure that everything is okay and asking them to let you know if there is a problem. The same for an email triggered after your customer’s first purchase.

I personally use Zapier to do such automations, although there are other equivalents on the market. Zapier connects thousands of applications to each other and allows you to have an output from one app trigger an event in another one. For example, you can connect your accounting software to your email provider and trigger an email if the customer is not invoiced for four consecutive weeks.

As a final note, occasionally, ask your clients to complete a quick survey regarding your business. The survey results will provide you with valuable data on how your business is performing, is perceived, as well as providing your customers with the opportunity to give you anonymous feedback and to suggest new ideas. That being said, be mindful that surveys generally tend to be filled out more by disgruntled customers, so take their average findings with a grain of salt. Best of luck!