This week, I’ve been amazed at how many clients have reappeared from our distant past. As with many businesses, times change, and clients sort of go away. Life events or a bad economy may keep them quiet, not because they don’t like us anymore, but because they don’t have any work.
However, in the last month or so, we’ve had calls from clients we haven’t heard from in three or four years. In some cases, we still send them holiday cards and the occasional e-mail, but they are basically dormant.
For example, many years ago, James wrote a custom online shopping cart. It’s been quietly running a web site out there in cyberspace since about 2000 or so. Sometimes we check on the site, which apparently has been quietly chugging along, but we haven’t heard from the site owner in ages. He reappeared this week.
Similarly, about a month ago, we heard from another client who has some of our back end software that’s been behind the scenes of their site for about 4 years. They suddenly reappeared and wanted a new similar tool for another site.
All this activity made me feel pretty good about how we treat our clients. Our mantra has always been to treat our clients how we would like to be treated ourselves. Good customer service is memorable. And in our case, people seem to remember it for literally years 😉