As a lawyer, real estate broker, coach, and yogs teacher, my entire 20+ year career has been in some form of client service role.
Whether you’re a coach, trainer, teacher, consultant, real estate agent, or any client service role (including as a parent), your outcomes are the same:
- to help your clients thrive
- to cultivate client loyalty
These two outcomes go hand-in-hand. When your clients are thriving, they want to continue to work with you.
The basics of client service are obvious, yet we also tend to forget them. It’s easy for complacency to set in.
Here’s the hard part: when clients leave you because you failed to deliver on any of these 3 things, they rarely tell you.
They just distance themselves in the relationship, leaving you wondering what went wrong.
(On that note: these three things will take you far in any relationship.)
Here are 3 things to give to your clients to help them thrive and cultivate loyalty.
(1) Acknowledgement
Maybe you know that it’s important to celebrate your clients’ big wins. Of course, it’s also fun to celebrate the big wins.
We all want to be recognized for what we accomplish and achieve.
That said, many people, especially high achievers, were raised in environments where we were only acknowledged and celebrated for our achievements.
Read: What We Miss When We Focus On Our Big Achievements
Sometimes we show up to do the work but we don’t get the outcome — at least not right away.
It’s even more important to celebrate and acknowledge the effort, even — perhaps especially — in the absence of the big wins.
Acknowledging how your client shows up encourages them to keep showing up. And it’s the consistency in showing up that will eventually lead to the wins.
(2) Appreciation
Everyone wants to be appreciated. Not just for what they do, but also for who we are.
As a service provider, we may be accustomed to receiving appreciation from our clients for what we do to help them.
It’s important to remember that our clients choose to work with us.
- How often do you thank your clients for choosing to work with you?
- How often do you express your appreciation to your clients for putting their trust in you to guide them, coach them, train them, teach them, and shepard them through whatever process they are going through?
- How often do you express your appreciation to your clients for entrusting you with their fears and hopes, their big goals that others may laugh at, or the challenges that they don’t share with anyone else?
One of the biggest reasons clients change practitioners is because they feel unappreciated or uncared for.
As a real estate agent, some of my best clients have been clients who left their previous agent because they felt their agent no longer cared.
As a real estate broker, coach, trainer, and yoga teacher, my clients and students place trust in me to hold their confidences, guide them through their biggest fears en route to their biggest dreams. I try my best not to take that for granted. Every day, I try to earn that trust.
It doesn’t matter how skilled or smart you are if you don’t show genuine caring and appreciation for your clients.
Read: The Most Effective Business Strategy
(3) Acceptance
We are constantly bombarded with messages that tell us that we’re not good enough. That we are deficient. That there’s something wrong with us.
Accepting our clients for who they are, without trying to change them, is one of the greatest gifts that we can give to them.
When we accept our clients as they are, we give them permission to accept themselves. That acceptance is the foundation required for change.
This doesn’t mean we aren’t also offering guidance on how they can improve or what habits they might want to change.
Acceptance creates the safety necessary to embark on change. Nobody changes in response to judgment.
If you can’t accept where you are, you won’t get where you want to go
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