I've learned many lessons running all kinds of businesses over the last 30-odd years but by far the most vital is making sure that customers remain happy.

The logic for this is unassailable. Marketing people will tell you it costs anything from five to seven times more to gain a new customer than keep an existing one. According to some, reducing customer defections by as little as 5% can result in a profits increase of between 25% and 125%.

When times are booming and sales are buoyant, it's far easier to fill a gap left by a departing client. There's also less free time to find out why the former customer left or do anything to prevent it.

As ever, it takes a major downturn like this one to remind all businesses of the importance of caring for current relationships and keeping customers loyal. Difficult times are already probably forcing your customers to reduce expenditure and look at ways they can save. Creating a solid, trusting relationship with them can reduce the chances of your company being first on the list of cutbacks.

Keeping up a regular, well informed dialogue helps retain customers. Find out what they need and how the service could be bettered. To avoid being intrusive, it's always politic to ask them where and how they'd like to be approached and how often.

Once you have their attention, be willing to talk openly about everything that concerns them. Given the current crisis, this could cover anything from the thorny subject of a possible reduction in price to be alternative ways of working. But it could also flag up other areas of improvement unrelated to the downturn, such as how well your sales and marketing people are performing or another way in which the customer's account could be handled.

Offer ways you can co-operate to help the customer ride out the crisis, such as flexible payment options or adding value to your service. This is better than discounting the price of your main product or service, which is at best only a temporary solution and may damage your business long-term.

Businesses need to think differently if they are to emerge from this recession. Big or small, we're in this downturn together, so it makes sense to act in partnership with customers and suppliers to ensure survival.

At Regus, for instance, it's not just our direct clients that we consider as partners but also the property companies which supply us with office space. We might pass on any useful information to them on handling the effects of the downturn, for example, and they to us. The advantages of this are that we understand where they're coming from and what they're doing to reduce risk in a recession, and vice versa.

While all this is going on, your service delivery needs to be top-class so work hard to maintain an excellent customer experience with clients, new and old. Enhance and improve every aspect of your offering from how you operate to the quality of your products or services.

By pulling out the stops to serve old customers, you'll not only keep them on board but they'll also pass the word around and help you win new ones. And don't forget to reward them for their loyalty: smaller companies may not be able to stretch to the expense of a loyalty card scheme but there are many small gestures you can make to keep them happy.

Spending a little money on your current clients now will be worthwhile in the longer term when this recession reaches its end.

For more information please visit www.regus.co.uk [1]