How can you make clients happy over the course of decades? Become a “lovemark.”

Recently @apriorit celebrated its 19th anniversary, and I celebrated my 15th anniversary with this company. 

To this day, I still work with some companies whose projects were my very first when I started as a QA at Apriorit. They’ve stayed with us over so many years.

The fact that many clients have stayed with us for over a decade makes me think that Apriorit is a “lovemark” in some sense.

I would define what a lovemark is. 

I would say it’s important to share your love FIRST. 

First and foremost, we are focused on caring for and being helpful to our clients.

To become loved, we have to gain our clients’ respect. Our customers respect us for multiple reasons.

First, we provide excellent services and develop exclusive products for our clients. Our guarantees are fixed in our agreements. And we highly value our reputation.

Second, we provide a stable service. We’ve established mature processes for management, development, and quality assurance, and we reflect our best practices in internal documents and standards. This makes us predictable, stable, and transparent to our clients.

Third, a respected company has to have a unique personality. We have that. Try to find other nerds like us who are so crazy about projects of "rocket science" complexity :) We also have our own corporate values that our employees broadcast to our clients.

Finally, we constantly work on our own development. We never stop learning. New areas, new technologies, new approaches — this is what’s on our minds every day.

Being respected is not easy, but being loved is much harder.

I would say that our clients love us because:

• We are honest and always admit our mistakes and learn from them.
• We hear our clients and speak their language.
• We are close to our clients and are always flexible to choose the method of work that is comfortable for them.
• We care about our clients. 

Being not only a quality software development company but also an advisor who demonstrates genuine interest, proactive management, and super-exclusive technical expertise makes us a lovemark to clients, many of whom have been with us for nearly two decades. I think this is the secret.