How To Lose A Client In 4 Ways

As anyone in the service industry will tell you, there’s nothing more important for the survival, sustenance and the growth of your business than your clients. A happy clientele equates to a good run in the world of business.

Every single day, hundreds of digital agencies spring up to design and develop ground-breaking ideas into stellar products. And in the race of earning more bucks, getting bucket loads of new projects, and to be recognized as a sought-after agency, many teams forget one thing — to make sure their existing clientele is happy. Once you don’t have this agenda at the top of your priority list, things can quickly turn nasty to the point of your business taking a nosedive.

As someone who has been at the thick of client acquisition and account management, here are some ways I have seen in which digital agencies often lose their clients.

Short-Term Profits Over Long-Term Gains

Now, we all agree that revenue is an important cog in the wheel of your digital agency. However, there are times when you should let go of short-term monetary gains for the betterment of your relationship with your client. Clients are like clay — they will almost always bend as per your insistence but they will also retain the dent you made. They will remember when you benefitted from their helplessness and asked them to cough up a few dollars when the task at hand could have been done without it.

If a client wants a new but minor feature added to their website or their app, see if you can have it incorporated without charging them. They will remember this for the rest of your relationship with them and though this act might make you lose some money, it will get you something money can’t buy — a much tighter bond with your client.

“Make a customer, not a sale” — Katherine B

Not Investing Yourself In the Vision Of Your Client

Most digital agencies work on projects as something that they need to design, develop and then deliver. This is one of the most defining factors that separates average teams from sought-after teams. Average teams rarely offer alternate solutions to problems that occur when the client is formalizing their concept into actionable features. They tend to always go with what the client says thinking that it is what makes the client happy. Very rarely is this ever true. Most of your clients will not have the highest technical acumen and hence they will always appreciate your inputs as you’re the experts.

Always put yourself in the shoes of your clients. Think of their idea as yours. Talk to them about their vision behind their product. What made them think they should get such a product developed? What are their long-term goals? What are their fears?

Not Being Proactive Enough

This is a major part of effective client servicing. Hopefully, you’ll always have had delivered more projects than your clients. That makes you more experienced and thus more able to foresee hurdles from both the technical as well as the operational viewpoint for any given project. When you don’t proactively help your client avoid issues, they tend to lose trust in you as the experts. If you inform them of problems when they can clearly see the problems too, it doesn’t make sense for them to be trusting you wholly with their product.

I have never had a client who didn’t like the fact that I told them of a concern that might arise because of the way they want one of the features in their apps to work. They will almost always reply very positively with words like I would never have thought of that or That’s a good point. Being proactive also allows for a better relationship with your client as they feel that you have their back in case something untoward happens.

“The customer’s perception is your reality” — Kate Zabriskie

Not Setting The Right Expectations

This is a tricky one! Often times, you have clients who always seem to have one new feature up their sleeve that they don’t hesitate from wanting to add to the product in the middle of the execution process. This not only leads to delays in delivery but often messes up with the architecture of the product itself. As software-based products rarely have stand-alone features, modifying one aspect of the product leads to a snowball effect that jeopardizes all the other aspects too. This, in turn, only ever results in frustration at both the ends — your client as well as your team. I have never seen a project that goes through this successfully getting delivered with all the parties fully satisfied with the result.

As experts, you need to assert your authority in front of the client. They need to know that proper milestones and clear scope are the pillars of any successful product. Get them to sign on a well-documented scope and always keep them informed of the consequences of not adhering to the same. The same goes for letting clients know the costs of various aspects of the products. If something is going to take no less than 10 days, you must inform the client as is. It is always better to Under-promise & Over-Deliver rather than the other way round.

These are just some of the fatal mistakes that many teams make and then lose their clientele and in turn, their business. Make sure your next clients don’t face these issues and try making amends with your existing clientele so that you both can work towards creating great products.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on March 24, 2018.