Elevating your client experience journey
This post is part of the client experience series. Before you can start to elevate your client experience journey, make sure you read the below articles first.
Read about the Power of Exceptional Client Experience if you’re wondering… how can I create an exceptional client experience for my service-based business? It covers why it is important to shape an exceptional client experience and how to approach this task in order to seamlessly guide your audience from not knowing who you are to confirming a booking.
Read about Understanding your client experience journey. In order to shape an exceptional client experience, you first need to have a CRYSTAL clear understanding of the whole journey that your (potential) clients go through. Discover the 7-step blueprint for understanding a client experience journey that you can use as your guide to map out your own client journey and work on improving all its touch points.
Read about Shaping your client experience journey. Exceptional client experience starts at the foundations. Discover the 4 fundamental building blocks for shaping an exceptional client experience as a whole. Do you have all of these in order?
No matter how good your client experience is, there’s always room for improvement. In this blog post let’s look at some of the key strategies to elevate your client experience and make it exceptional. There’s 5 fundamental elements to consider.
1 Improve communication
Clear and transparent communication
It is your job to provide your clients with all the information that they need in order to make informed decisions. Aim to provide clear and transparent information about your products and services, your pricing, the process of working with you, your terms and conditions and anything else that’s relevant to them. You also need to make sure that you present all this information in a clear and understandable way. Provide all information in a clear and crisp form and present it in a consistent manner across all touch points such as your website, your emails, your social media etc. Aim for simplicity in all your communications, keep sentences and paragraphs short, avoid any professional jargon and remember that less really is more.
Be responsive and easily reachable
At all times, you need to make sure that you are easily reachable and responsive but this can be true in many different ways.
Firstly, make sure you always respond to inquiries or any incoming communication promptly and professionally. And what’s equally if not more important, make sure you set a clear expectation from the beginning about your responsiveness. Are there any factors influencing your responsiveness? Are you only responding to emails within 48 hours? Are you off on Wednesdays and Fridays? Are you in a different timezone than your clients? Make sure you communicate that upfront and set a clear expectation for them.
Secondly, it’s always a good idea to be reachable on various communication channels, such as social media, email, phone etc. BUT you should direct your leads towards ONE clear & easy communication method that works well for you and your offering. Don’t try to give them every possible option under the sun for contacting you. I know you’re trying to be accommodating but this will make your life harder and also overwhelm and stress them, which we want to avoid. Try to strike a good balance between accommodating your client’s preferred method for communication and your own. From their perspective, think about what most of your clients prefer - do they prefer to book things online themselves? Do they prefer to call you instead? And from your own perspective, what makes the most sense for you and your offering? Good to note that selling high-value services will never be a fully offline experience, meaning, you will need to speak to them face to face to be able to convert them, so take that into account. At the end of the day, you set the rules for how to reach you, so pick and choose wisely.
Thirdly, to be responsive or to give the appearance of being responsive, you can use technology to your advantage. Being responsible and easily reachable doesn't always mean that you need to be present 24/7 and constantly monitor all your communication channels. Being responsive means that you acknowledge their outreach or their action taken, and you commit to responding to it in the appropriate manner ASAP. For example, you can set up automated responses for confirming a call that’s been scheduled. Or you can create an automated flow for welcoming new clients once they’ve made a purchase. There’s endless opportunities and that’s the good news. Whatever makes sense for your offer, your process and your client experience, there’s ways to improve your responsiveness through automations.
At the end of the day, being responsive and easily reachable communicates your professionalism and your dedication towards your clients, builds trust and rapport with your clients and it’s one more piece of the puzzle towards building an exceptional client experience.
Proactiveness
One step further than just being responsive and reachable is being proactive. If you're able to anticipate your clients needs, concerns or questions before they raise them then you can further impress them, and provide an exceptional client experience.
In the most basic form, this means that you need to keep them updated at all times. If they order a product, you need to keep them updated on the status of their order. Let them know once the order has been received, once the payment has been received, once the order has been shipped, provide them the status of the shipment, provide them all the information that they need such as the tracking number and when can they expect the delivery, things like that. If we're delivering services, there are likely parts of the process or elements of the services that they don't have ownership of or oversight over. In that case, you need to keep them updated on the status and the progress of these steps. You also need to keep them informed on the next steps and expected timelines.
The goal here is to really think about how your client experiences their interaction with you and to provide them all the necessary information before they need to ask for it, as that’s already too late. Always think about ways to improve, think what would make the experience more enjoyable and more exceptional for your clients?
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2 Reduce friction
Reduce friction by streamlining your processes and making your client experience seamless. Put simply, you should always aim to have the simplest and the least steps in a process. So eliminate any unnecessary steps in your client journey to make the process smoother and more efficient. Also make sure that you create user friendly guidance and navigation so that your audience can always find what they need quickly and without any friction, whether that's on your website, your client portal or your emailing list. You always want to enable your clients to find all the information that they need themselves, to make any changes themselves or to resolve any conflicts or issues without needing your support or extensive interaction.
Conversion path
Streamlining your conversion path and all touch points that form part of it is very important. It makes the difference between clients making an inquiry (and eventually booking you) or getting frustrated and simply leaving before you even get a chance to impress them.
The beginning of the process is the most important. You should minimize the amount of effort needed in the initial steps like booking, inquiry or reach out as that will be the first hurdle on your conversion path. That means that you need to create optimized contact forms, automated call bookings and otherwise a seamless inquiry process. Well-designed and easy-to-use communication and inquiry routes will encourage your potential clients to take that step. Off your website (i.e. offline touchpoints or other online touchpoints like social media etc.) you need to make sure that you seamlessly guide them towards inquiry, whether that means directing them to your website or adding more inquiry channels.
From then onwards, your onboarding process for taking on new clients also needs to be intuitive and user-friendly. You need to guide your clients through the process so it runs smoothly and you need to provide them step-by-step guidance. Remember that you are the only person who has full knowledge of your business and processes. Always operate under the assumption that you need to guide your clients every step of the way in order to reduce friction and create an exceptional user experience.
Reducing friction is equally important in the later parts of the process because you want to remove any unnecessary barriers that might lead your audience to get frustrated and eventually leave. Simplify your purchasing process as much as possible and add automations where possible. One very pragmatic example could be to think about your payment process. How can your clients make a payment in order to purchase your products or services? Do they need to make a manual transfer themselves, meaning they need to log into their internet bank, manually type in the banking details themselves, cross check and make sure that they haven't made any errors, note down a specific invoice number or purchase order number etc? That's a major obstacle to one of your most important parts of the client cycle - getting paid. Instead you could be using an automated payment processor that handles all of those cumbersome details for you and all your client needs to do is to enter their credit card details like they’re shopping on Amazon.
Consistency
Another important point that I want to mention on reducing friction is something that goes beyond your processes, it’s consistency in your visual identity and in your messaging and how the lack thereof will create friction. What I mean is… if different brand touch points or different elements of the same process have inconsistent visual appearance, or inconsistent messaging, that’s friction. While it doesn't physically prohibit or create more steps in the process of a client experience, inconsistency in your visual elements and messaging create mental friction that might not even be consciously acknowledged by your audience. Why is this friction? Because it requires more information processing and more mental effort to process different visuals and messaging every time you see a new touch point or part of a process. Instead, you should always ensure consistency in your visual identity and your messaging across every single touch part of your business. Besides creating a better client experience, it also fosters memorability and trust. To make it work in practice, you need to have that clarity and structure in place for your strategy, your messaging and your branding.
While ensuring timely responses, streamlining your payment process or getting professional branding alone will not create an exceptional client experience, all of these efforts work together to create a seamless experience and your efforts are compounding. So the more individual elements you optimize and improve, the better your whole client experience will become.
But wait, there’s more! Continue reading about more strategies to create an exceptional client experience HERE>
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