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When good clients go ... away

7th Jun 2010
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 I have been thinking about why clients leave, and what we need to do to keep them.

As I said the other day - in this country anyway – clients will say almost anything to avoid embarrassment rather than telling you straight.
“Our new accountant is cheaper/quicker/nearer/farther away/works Saturdays/etc”, they say, when they actually mean that they just don’t like you or a member of your staff, or maybe they just think it’s time for a change.
The fact is that clients will leave if they don’t feel you are treating them right -read Michael Leboeuf’s classic book “How to win customers and keep them for life” for the classic text on this, which has been picked up by every practice development speaker ever since.
Reflecting back on the case of a client who left us recently, the reason they gave was fairly implausible. But we had allocated some key work on their affairs to a new member of our team, who wasn’t formally introduced to them, and who then made a real meal of a key assignment which would have been routine in any other case but was a big deal for this particular client. So I suspect that when this wasn’t delivered on time by our new person, the client decided it was time to go. Notice that they didn’t contact me first to complain. Nope, they just left without any prior warning.
If you only have 10 clients you can probably avoid such problems. If you have 100 or more you’re going to struggle to know what’s going on with every one of them, and occasionally your staff will lose you some. You just need to make sure everyone learns the lesson and moves on.
Oh, and don’t forget to BUTHALTSTF(*), as Chris Frederikson likes to say.
(* that’s “Back Up The Hearse And Let Them Smell The Flowers”! In other words, remind them very nicely from time to time what they’re missing).
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