Many of you know that I work fulltime as well as freelance somewhere near fulltime. Currently at my fulltime job we are looking for a company to partner with us specifically for Information Architecture work.

As the in house guy it is my job to find evaluate and solicit quotes from web companies that provide the services we need. So I have sent out 25 emails and followed up with about 15 calls to various local and not local web companies to help us and do you know how many return emails or call I got? 2. Yes that is it only 2. Some companies I called 2 or 3 times and they all promised that they would return my call or email me but none of them did.

We are also looking for freelance PHP guys for some ongoing work and the results were almost exactly the same. Out of all the emails I sent I only heard back from 3 people and only one really followed up as we discussed my needs.

24 Hour Turn Around

I make it a habit to get back to clients within 24 hours max (even on weekends). Often I get back to clients in under 8 hours (I do have to sleep). This level of service (unfortunately) seems to be rare in the web industry in my area. I wonder if it is also rare in many other parts of the world? If it is simply responding to clients in a timely fashion can bring in tonnes of work.

Personal Contact

How about not just emailing back to ask some further questions of a client but actually making a personal call. Email is not always the most efficeint way to get a question answered so don’t always rely on it. Many times a 5 minute conversation can get all of the questions answered. This personal call also lets your client know that they are important enough to deal with directly.

If you can take the time to provide a great customer service experience you can gain many long term clients who will return even when rates go up just because your service is so great. They want to use you because they feel like to treat them as important no matter what the situation.