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As recruiters, you do your best to make sure your candidate experience is top-notch. However, candidates are not the only variables to making sure your business thrives; clients are just as important, too.
If a future client asks you, “How many customers do you currently have, and are they loyal ones?”
Would you be able to give a compelling answer?
What is Customer Retention Rate?
How long do your clients stay with you — that’s what customer retention is all about.
The rate at which you keep your clients over time is a key metric in measuring the overall health of your staffing firm. Although your customer retention rate can have many factors, generally speaking, the more clients you’re losing, the higher the chances that you should re-evaluate your business strategy.
This may sound intimidating, but it’s actually easy to calculate. Here’s how:
- First, log the number of clients you have at the end of the period you want to measure. This can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.
- Then, subtract the number of new clients you acquired during that period.
- Once you have the total, divide that by the number of clients you had at the start of the measured period.
- Finally, multiply the result by one hundred.
To help you visualize, you may refer to this formula:
One best practice is calculating as far back as you can get the complete data to analyze. Through this, you can see if your customer retention rate is increasing, decreasing, or just the same. If your customer retention rate is showing a downward trend over time, then revisiting your overall strategy may be necessary.
Why Customer Retention Matters
Retaining your current clients is more profitable than continuously sourcing new ones. As a recruitment agency, your business viability is built on how happy your customers are with your services. When client experience is done right, it can result in a threefold benefit for your staffing firm:
- Enhanced recruitment brand reputation. Satisfied clients are more inclined to favor your firm over others for every opening they need. This will help build your credibility as a great recruiter of choice.
- Building brand loyalty. They can also bridge new opportunities with other potential customers through referrals. Loyal customers can be great means to get organic marketing as they won’t hesitate to tell others about your services.
- Increased profit. You secure more profit and skip through the marketing and labor costs involved in sourcing a new client. In fact, 79% of recruitment agencies generated at least 50% of revenue from repeat clients.
Repeat clients are invaluable for the business strategy of your staffing agency. This means prioritizing your client experience is essential to reaping the benefits of a positive client retention rate.
5 Tips on How to Retain Clients
There can be many reasons why your clients leave, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t take proactive steps to ensure that they’re getting the best client experience possible.
Let’s take a look at five things you can do to improve your customer retention rate.
1. Personalize their experience.
Each client is different; they come with their own needs and preferences. Taking the time to get to know them will allow you to cater to their unique needs and deliver a more personalized experience. The principle of making it personal applies to candidates and clients alike. The more they feel valued and well-taken care of, the higher the chances they’ll choose you as their recruiter of choice.
As a recruiter, one of the hallmarks of a great customer experience is the fact that you can anticipate their hiring needs even before an opening happens. But this will only be possible if you know them, so be intentional in building relationships. Make it a point to regularly check in with them throughout their tenure so you can keep them engaged and you’re always up to date with their company progress. By cultivating a dynamic where they feel like customers and not just transactions, you’re leaving a lasting impression that can make them want to stick around for the long haul.
2. Deliver beyond expectations.
Setting clear expectations with your clients early on will be beneficial in making sure that client satisfaction is always high. Meeting expectations is one of the most sure-fire ways to leave an impressive reputation among your clients, but this starts with listening to what they’re saying instead of telling them what they need right away.
You can’t meet an expectation you don’t know, so it would be best to spend time finding out who they are, what their current business challenges are, and what their long-term goal is. You can also ask them to list their expectations with your firm and settle on actionable goals. This information will help you better understand their expectations, plan your recruitment strategies, and set actionable goals so you can give them exactly what they need and more.
3. Market your recruitment skills for highly specialized niches.
Be able to deliver a rare service that is a great advantage to making clients stay. This is where upskilling and reskilling play a major role. In addition, having a specialized team of recruiters and sourcers who can secure highly skilled and elusive talents will make your staffing firm even more desirable to your clients.
Once you already have technical sourcers and recruiters for different market sectors, it’s only a matter of ensuring you deliver their expectations. A stellar record of successful candidate placements for highly coveted candidates will promote you from being desirable to potentially indispensable to clients.
4. Highlight your achievements.
Did you place one of the best performing employees for one of your clients? Do you consistently make successful placements in a short amount of time? Is your recruitment brand highly attractive to candidates?
These are the hallmarks of a great staffing firm, and your clients must be aware of the caliber of your recruitment services. There’s no better way to do this than presenting social proof—through your candidate and client testimonials. Capture the reviews of the people you serve and let them do the talking for you. You can include this in your newsletters, reports, websites, or social media profiles. The important thing is they know that their recruitment needs are being handled by great recruiters.
5. Automate your process.
Automation is a good indicator that your staffing firm is gearing itself for growth. Because recruitment technology can effectively help streamline your talent pipeline, improve your recruitment process, and enhance your candidate experience, you can more easily attract quality candidates because you have a great system in place. For your clients, this is a good thing as it means that you can make placements easily and efficiently, which can equate to quality hires minus the added cost of prolonged sourcing—an attractive benefit that can increase your customer retention rate.
Leveraging the benefits of recruitment technology will also help free your recruiters from repetitive administrative tasks and allow them to put more of their focus on building relationships with your clients and candidates.
Improve Customer Retention Through Positive Online Reputation
Repeat business is important, and we, at Great Recruiters, know this. Having a roster of loyal clients will contribute to your staffing firm’s long-term success, but you need to have a strong recruitment brand online reputation, so they know just how excellent your recruitment services are.
Maintaining a positive online reputation can effectively help you increase your customer retention rate and earn a constant influx of clients, and we can help you with that. Our online reputation management software can automate your feedback management so you can capture testimonials consistently and highlight them easily for maximum exposure.
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