Refreshing the Client Experience

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I recently read Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella and the following is one of several passages that stood out:

Richard didn’t give me an engineering problem to solve on the whiteboard or a complex coding scenario to talk through. He didn’t grill me on my prior experiences or educational pedigree. He had one simple question.

“Imagine you see a baby laying in the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?” he asked.

“You call 911,” I replied without much forethought.

Richard walked me out of his office, put his arm around me and said, “You need some empathy, man. If a baby is laying in the street crying, pick up the baby.”

Between now and year-end, it’s common to re-evaluate your business and see what’s working well, what’s not and what could be tweaked as you prepare for 2020.

From financial tracking to branding, from systems/processes to social media and marketing.

Something that rarely gets a glance however is the client experience, or lack thereof, you’re creating through Extreme Client Care™. It’s the human experience, the empathy of your business.

What if you were to take a couple hours and go through every client-facing system and process in your business with one question in mind “How would I feel if this was my experience with a company?”

And, from that place, redesign each client interaction to ensure an optimal experience:

• onboarding
• fulfillment and follow-up
• customer service
• scheduling — we love Calendly
• exiting
• marketing and sales: your website, shopping cart, etc.

This is a process we go through each year for our Get It Done Right and Escalate Communities.

The result? Get It Done Right has a client retention rate of over 8.4 years and Escalate’s is 4.5 years (that program has had 2 people leave since it started).

How will your business be different if clients stayed year after year?

  • Increased referrals
  • Decreased marketing costs
  • Happier clients
  • Increased revenue
  • Increased profits

The above to name a few. A lot better than spending hours on social media praying someone responds to your posts or messages. Agreed?

Updated on 6 January 2020.