One of the great lessons of any recession is to appreciate what you have—be it a good job, a fixed mortgage rate, good gas mileage, excellent health or supportive friends and family. Businesses too must cherish their assets; and for most companies one of the greatest assets they have is their existing client base.

The clients you serve today are powerful resources with broad networks of colleagues, peers and friends. Will they refer their contacts to your company? Will they participate in testimonials and case studies that demonstrate your company’s value and capabilities? Will they speak positively of your brand and become an indirect yet highly effective component of your sales and marketing strategy? Your goal must be to one day—and one day soon—answer each of those questions with a resounding YES. Because without enthusiastic, vocal client admiration and reciprocity, you are conceding a vital sales and marketing channel.

Achieving true client satisfaction—or “creating raving fans”—is much more than delivering the top-notch solutions and services that you agreed to provide for a fee. In fact, that’s just your job. The real work of client satisfaction—the implementation of best practices that breed referrals, great word-of-mouth and street cred—is all in the follow-up, ongoing support and pampering you provide to those valuable clients. Build strong best practices around client satisfaction, and you are building your business.

Client Satisfaction Best Practices
Several common denominators can be seen among companies that have droves of clients willingly referring their services and solutions. Be they giant telecom companies or little delis around the corner, the best businesses know that keeping up with their clients is essential to winning their loyalty and lasting good opinion. Here are a few ways you can maintain and boost client satisfaction to the betterment of your business.

Engage the Client Across Several Levels of Your Organization–Whether you are augmenting IT teams or managing a sophisticated application development project, you need to carefully monitor solution progress at multiple levels. Project managers and team leaders must of course be diligently assessing the client’s satisfaction rate. It is also important to have senior-level staff interacting among client and delivery teams. It is surprising how many IT services businesses rely solely on their sales and delivery teams to develop and manage relationships. “What’s the danger in that?” you might ask. Simply put: turnover. Your sales rep might leave or a key consultant could move on, creating distance between your business and the client. If the client relationship has been maintained and nurtured almost entirely by an individual on the front lines who is moving on, the risk of losing the client skyrockets.

A great way to strengthen client relationships is to reinforce at the top. Identify those businesses that have not yet met with a member of your senior leadership team (CEO, President, company owner, etc.). Then build an action plan to ensure that the identified leader meets with the client to discuss progress, needs and general concerns and desires. This simple outreach effort binds the client company more tightly to your business while opening a new avenue for communication and future sales opportunities. It is also important that communications between clients and your senior leadership team continue. In fact, many businesses build these client maintenance efforts at the senior executive level into their account planning process. And why not? The more your clients see how important they are to your business, the more loyal they become.

Conduct Regular Client Satisfaction Surveys–If you want to know if your clients are satisfied and how you can make them happier, just ask. Client satisfaction surveys are a tremendous tool for keeping track of your clients, their needs and how your business is meeting them. Technology has made surveys easier and more cost-effective than ever to execute and analyze, giving you rich tools for benchmarking your performance over time as you work to address client needs. Consider online tools like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang that offer templates and do much of the survey and reporting work for you. There are even real-time customer feedback programs like Net Promoter that drive customer feedback instantly back to support and service teams in order to rapidly and positively impact client satisfaction. 

Remember though, the key word is “surveys”—with an “s.” A one-time survey is going to do little to advance client satisfaction. After all, your organization and your clients need to know how you are progressing as you work to improve customer experience and results. Bi-annual or even annual surveys will help give your organization enough regular input to benchmark satisfaction, gain insight into client needs and frustrations, and make important adjustments.

Another critical best practice in client satisfaction surveys is the practice of sharing results and spreading the news. Results of surveys need to be pushed to key audiences, from internal staff members to clients and prospects themselves. By publicizing results, you are demonstrating your company’s commitment to understanding client needs and continually working to address them. Both employees and clients benefit from seeing customer needs become a driving force in how you deliver and enhance services. It is also great to give clients insights into exactly how you are addressing any issues or complaints that arise. A forthright and proactive reaction to a client challenge discovered by a satisfaction survey is service excellence that will often erase frustrations and replace them with contentment.

Balance a High-tech and Low-tech Follow-up–Technology has made everything faster and easier and that can include maintaining contact with clients. While trendsetting tools like Twitter are great ways to keep in touch, be sure you are offering value or service with each communication. If you are checking in on a project or consultant, ask a specific question and offer your support and resources. If you are not currently serving the client but want to maintain contact, use these tools to deliver content that is useful and attention-grabbing. Offer a discount or share an interesting article (hopefully thought leadership or a case study from one of your recent successes). You can also invite them to an industry event or Webinar.

And be sure to balance digital outreach with phone and face time. At a time when technology makes it easy for us to communicate at a distance, you will make great strides to distinguish your business by also taking the time to visit your clients’ offices, sit in on key meetings and touch base with your consultants. Don’t be afraid to send a handwritten card to check in and even thank clients for their loyalty. In these days, low-tech approaches can be novel and endearing.

Reap Your Rewards
Great word-of-mouth, strong referrals and happy clients eager to spread their high opinion of your company are well worth the effort and it is important to make the most of those rewards. Invite your satisfied clients to participate in case studies, testimonials and your customer referral program. Have them become fans on your social networking sites and make sure they are well integrated into the business and social media networks where referrals and information sharing flourish today. The more satisfied, happy customers you integrate into your marketing and messaging, the more your satisfied, happy client base will grow.

About the Author

Leslie Vickrey is president and founder of ClearEdge Marketing, an agency specializing in outsourced marketing solutions for IT services firms. After beginning her career in marketing for well-known companies such as McDonald’s Corporation and Junior Achievement, Vickrey quickly found a niche in the technology services industry, where she has worked for the past 12 years managing marketing operations or providing consulting services for companies such as Spherion, TAC Worldwide, Harvey Nash, TechServe Alliance, ZeroChaos and Technisource. For more information, please e-mail lvickrey@clearedgemarketing.com or call 312.731.3149.

Lessons in Client Satisfaction Excellence from

The Armada Group

If there is a company that has successfully built a raving, passionate fan base out of its clients, it is The Armada Group of Silicon Valley. This growing technology consulting firm, which serves the most innovative of innovators in one of the most exciting technology fronts around the globe today, gets 88% of its new business from referrals or repeat business. In 2009, a very down year for the IT services industry, Armada added to its roster an impressive nine new clients—eight of which first learned of Armada through the referral of happy clients. As those numbers prove, clients play a central role in business development and growth for Armada, and the company attributes a good deal of its client satisfaction success to its ongoing customer survey program.

In 2007, Armada transformed its customer and consultant satisfaction survey process. Previously, satisfaction surveys were conducted in person and informally. In order to give clients and consultants more freedom to speak openly and honestly about their challenges, concerns and satisfactions, Armada moved all surveys online and made them anonymous. The results were dramatic. Clients and consultants alike embraced the anonymous formatting, giving The Armada Group detailed insight into how they felt the company was meeting their needs.

“Our satisfaction surveys have had a direct impact on how we run our business,” explained Lisa Sullivan, Vice President of Client Relations for The Armada Group. “We have used the results to look at how we are working and make specific improvements that will enhance our services and our clients’ experience. For example, we did a lot of research into our benefits program and made some fundamental changes after one survey identified it as a challenge area.  Recently, we turned our annual customer appreciation event into a twice-annual event that now includes families as customers explained how they needed to combine such events in order to improve their own work-life balance.”

The Armada team is rigorous when it comes to developing relevant surveys that do not intrude too far into their customers’ work days. Each survey is tested and timed. “If it takes me longer than five minutes to complete, I go back and edit it down,” said Shelley Reese, HR Manager, The Armada Group. “We do a lot of work to minimize the length of the survey and questions to ensure clients have enough time to give us robust, valuable answers.”

Those answers collected in the annual client satisfaction surveys, and the more regular consultant surveys, are then leveraged in several ways to both enhance satisfaction and support new business development efforts. First, the results are shared and discussed internally and action plans are developed to tackle pressing issues. A press release is also launched to share the results with clients and the media to demonstrate the company’s full and lasting commitment to client satisfaction. In addition, Armada incorporates the results into its sales processes and marketing collateral, sharing the company’s record of excellence with new prospects and inviting happy customers to provide testimonials which are shared online.

The company has met exemplary customer satisfaction ratings, including a 95% client satisfaction rate in 2009. In addition, Armada received the Silver Award for Excellence for the Most Effective Customer Acquisition and Retention Program from Staffing Industry Review (SI Review).

According to Armada Founder and Managing Director Jeff Tavangar, the high ratings and industry recognition are great, but the lessons we are learning about our clients are invaluable. “Our surveys found that clients like and want more face-to-face collaboration and hands on engagement management,” said Tavangar. “As a result, Armada added the role of Relationship Manager to its Account Management team, with that person tasked to spend the majority of his or her time at customer sites supporting our consultants to ensure projects are on track and proactively identify any issues, good or bad.”

Clearly happy with Armada’s direction, clients continue to refer their peers to Armada and have pushed the company’s satisfaction rate up by four percent since 2007 when the online survey first began. Armada continues to focus on increasing client satisfaction and loyalty. “You never know where your next customer will come from,” explained Sullivan. For that reason, Armada keeps its focus on client satisfaction vigilant, active and evolving.