Best Methods to Maintain Customer Retention in Design

Design industry professionals, find out how to maintain customer retention in design so you can streamline revenue and operations.

Maintain Customer Retention in Design

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One of the fastest growing industries is the design industry.

A recent survey shows half of the studied design companies are expected to expand in 2021. Therefore, if you own a design company, you are competing in a $160 billion industry against thousands of businesses. So, you will have to retain a good number of customers to remain profitable. For this reason, maintaining customer retention is essential to your business.

There are many proven and practical ways of retaining clients. However, the design industry has more specific tactics to maintain customer retention.

Understand Your Customers

The key to customer retention is excellent customer service. You will need to understand your client to provide quality service. To understand a client, you will need to conduct a complete research about their business. Researching a business involves doing a website audit. For example, if you have a client that needs a website redesign, you will want to audit the site as follows.

  •         Check the consistency of text, headers, formatting, and navigation.
  •         Identify how easy it is to find essential information.
  •         Check if the design fits with the client’s brand.
  •         Find out if the design makes reading easy.

Similarly, you will need to read and analyze the customer reviews of the business. You will find essential data that tells you what people think about the website of a client.

Listen to the Client

A website is the face of a business. Therefore, you will need to have an honest conversation with your customers about it. When you are working on a website, you will want to know the type of service your client creates. You will then create a presentation using the results of the audit and the conversation with your client. This presentation must highlight:

  •         Findings of the audit,
  •         Client’s views and preferences,
  •         Problems with the site,
  •         Proposed changes,
  •         Expected results,
  •         Execution plan and budget.

You must offer a design that captures the vision of your customer. Use infographics to present how you intend to translate your customer’s vision into an actual finished design. Your ability to create client-centric service will help you maintain and eventually improve customer retention.

Provide Honest Advice

Knowing about a business and what it needs lets you provide honest advice. Your ability to understand a business and listen to its owner will let them believe you care. By extension, clients will listen and accept whatever you have to offer.

Once a client is ready to listen, don’t hold back. For example, you can have a customer who prefers to keep the general typography of their website. If you have identified this element as the core problem of the website, you should not be afraid to let them know. You can find a middle ground by proposing a new typography setting that keeps some of the elements of the old scheme. Doing this can help you improve a site while keeping your client satisfied.

Highlight the Best Solutions

After highlighting the problems with a website, you must provide the best solutions. For example, your customer’s website may be slow to load. As a result, the general search engine ranking of the website may drop.  In most cases, having large image documents is the biggest culprit for having slow pages. Instead of a website redesign, you can reduce the size of each file. This simple yet effective solution can save your client a lot of money. It can also increase customer loyalty.

Provide Excellent Service

The moment you can get a customer to commit to purchasing a design package, you must provide excellent service. Always be patient with each client. Beyond patience, it helps to actually provide a great service. Make sure you approach ever job with creativity and research in order to deliver great results.

Working through lengthy projects with customers that frequently change the direction of a project can be challenging. In such cases, you must have customer relationship skills to handle each client. How you treat each customer affects their decision to keep working with you. Therefore, a satisfied customer will most certainly come back for more. However, an unsatisfied client can negatively affect design customer retention.

Take Feedback Seriously

When you deliver a custom web or graphic design to a client, they may give you feedback on your service. Whatever feedback – good or bad – you receive, you need to take it seriously. You will need to group common negative reviews under a few headings. Go over each feedback with your team. Find solutions that will permanently solve the lapses in your service.

If your client is satisfied, you can apply the experience gained when dealing with other customers. If they are unsatisfied, you need to sort the problem as quickly as you can. In case of negative feedback, learn from it and avoid repeating a similar mistake in the future.

Ease Communication

As a business owner, you need to simplify how customers communicate with you. When you interact with clients, interact using simple language. Always ensure that you and the customer are on the same page when addressing each issue. Simplify the conversation by using less technical terms when speaking to a client. Avoid using acronyms that sound technical to customers. For example, you may be better off saying graphical user interface than GUI to a client.

If you have the time, create and send your client a summary of each conversation. Doing this will help to ensure each party is on the same page before proceeding with each milestone.

Likewise, you will want to spend more time communicating with existing clients and less time with new customers. The more you communicate with clients, the better you can serve them. Ultimately, you are more likely to retain clients.

Conclusion

Your ability to maintain customer retention in the design sector depends on several factors. You will need to understand your clients and their needs by researching and listening to their requirements. In addition, you must give them honest advice. Similarly, you must offer the best solutions to their problems. Finally, you must take feedback seriously and simplify communication.