If you’ve been serving clients for some time, you may start wondering what you need to do to maintain long-term relationships with them or how to guarantee their satisfaction with your services. The answer to this question is consistency! Yes!
And if you are a newbie, or looking for your first client, trust me, a time will come when this question will be relevant to you, so keep reading 🙂
Consistency is vital in building and sustaining long-term relationships with your clients. If you keep showing up for your clients consistently, they will depend on you. A long-term relationship will form because they can count on you. By its very nature, virtual assistance is part of the service industry. Being that it’s in the character of what we do, we decided to take on a servant’s heart at my business. We do all our work from a place of love. We prioritize our clients’ needs. Unbeknownst to our clients, we often pray for them, their businesses’ success, and their families. Bringing a heart of service into our clients’ businesses makes us stand out from the crowd. One of the modules of my coaching program, Fast Track to Clients, focuses on helping you identify your core values so that your services align with the work you do.
Many people are in business primarily for money. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, when you serve people wholeheartedly with humility and love, hearts are touched, and lives are changed. People tend to reciprocate with gratitude, appreciation, and love. And a beautiful relationship is formed, founded in mutual respect and love. It’s very fulfilling to be in a virtual environment where love, trust, respect, and gratitude consistently flow between you and your clients.
I didn’t start my business with a clear understanding of what my core business values were. It took time for me to determine what I wanted my company to represent and to stand for. Over time I identified four critical areas where I needed to show up consistently in my business. They form the acronym “RICE.” I decided to make these the core values for my business and taught them to my team because I wanted everything we did to be rooted in these four standards.
R – Reliability: Be consistently reliable. Reliability will help build trust with your clients. Your clients will want to work with you regularly because they know that they can count on you to deliver what you promise without fail.
I – Integrity: This is our second core value. Having integrity is essential for our core values, our goals, and ourselves. Maintaining integrity has helped us remain steadfast in interacting and conducting business with our clients and team members. Your clients will get to know you and what you stand for as your relationship develops. And if you esteem trust, you will begin to form a relationship built on respect and trust – Your clients will want to keep working with you because they will respect you.
C – Care: Our third core value is Care. We genuinely care about our clients and the success of their businesses. You can’t fake caring. Your clients will know if you genuinely care about them or not. It will be evident in the quality of your work and how you prioritize tasks.
E – Excellence: In Chapter Six, you discovered that you have so many assets. Perfect your gifts, talents, and skills by doing your absolute best work for your clients. Make going the extra mile a core value in your business. Make your clients feel like they have the best deal on the planet, and like working with you is a gift from Heaven, for indeed it is! Make your clients feel like you are the world’s greatest hidden secret, and they were lucky to discover you. Doing your absolute best work, being thorough, over-delivering on your promises, beating deadlines, and going above and beyond to exceed your client’s expectations will make your clients want to hoard you for themselves, and this will guarantee a long-term relationship. No one willingly lets go of a good thing. When you do excellent work, your clients will have something to say about it, and they will be happy to send you referrals.
Whether you are a freelancer or own a virtual assistant business, your core values are fundamental because that’s part of what your clients will experience as they work with you.
I would love to know your core values. Share in the comments 🙂
- What are your core values?
- What do you value the most when working with clients?
- And if you don’t have clients yet, what are some of your personal values? (And by the way, you are the heartbeat of your businesses, so your business values reflect your core values)