*How do you define your client experience? What matters most from their perspective to drive repeat sales and referrals? Thinking about the point of checkout, delivery and when your customers use your product or service, where is there room to improve your client experience?
Latesha Lynch, the owner of Atelier Latesha and the Business Branding Academy, takes pride in helping female entrepreneurs hone authoritative branding, including their client experience, to sell at a premium price point.
Here, she shares her five steps to create a memorable client experience:*
Step 1: Security
Make sure that you have secured your transaction with your client. The first way to do that is through a contract, and the second is through your invoice. The contract lays out all the agreed-upon terms and expectations for both parties. For them to secure that spot in your lineup and your schedule, they need to submit a payment, whether it's a payment in full or a deposit.
Step 2: Personalization
The next step in creating a memorable client experience is adding some personality. You can do this by adding personalized welcome videos. You can add fun animated gifs to show your personality in your emails. You can do so many little things to add a personal touch to everything that you do. Even when you are sending out marketing emails, you want to use the option to add the person's first name—that's an easy and effective personalization tip.
Step 3: Client onboarding
You want to onboard them as a brand-new client, so once they submit that payment, you want to make sure that all of their next step questions are answered. We don't want people to have buyer's remorse, and the best way to prevent that is to lay out everything. Let them know the schedule and how they can book their calls. What homework do they have? Have something like a welcome packet that tells them exactly how everything goes in your program, with your offer or service.
If you are offering products, you can make sure that people know how to use the product. Tell them how to open it and how to assemble it. Sending them things like this will not only create a memorable experience, but it will ensure that people get the best use out of what you provided for them. It will also increase their excitement in anticipation of using your service or products.
Step 4: Add value
We want to add some value. The higher the price point, the more value you want to add. Some examples of things that you can do to add value if you have a service-based business are to provide templates and something that will help that person be more efficient when you are gone or to help make your process run more smoothly. The less we can have them do, and the less time they have to spend on the service you're providing, the better.
If you are a product-based business, some examples of a great value add, say you sent them some Moscow Mule mugs. Then you sent them a recipe on how to create five different Moscow Mules. You are probably thinking, well, that sounds a lot like the client onboarding. If I had a Moscow Mule company and did client onboarding, I would send them care instructions on how to clean it and wash it. The next level step would be for me to do some value adds by giving them multiple recipes and maybe even seasonal recipes.
Step 5: Offboarding
Now that you've had that excellent client and they are done with the service, you want to make sure that you are collecting three essential things.
Client survey. You want to have them tell you exactly how they felt throughout the process. Did they like it or dislike it, and why? What specific things would they enjoy if you did more of the next time? Having this survey will allow you to improve continuously because we all want to get better, right?
Invite them to do more business with you. Do you have a next-level program? Do you have another product that you have added to your store that would go very nicely with the other product that they've already purchased? Think about the things that would help them continue doing business with you to offer it.
Ask for a public review of your business—this will be helpful for two reasons. First of all, if you did a great job, or your product was exceptional, customers will want to shout from the rooftops how amazing your service or product was. Second is that people who are considering doing business with you now have a firsthand account of someone who's already been there. Think about it from this perspective. I don't buy anything from Amazon that doesn't have a client review. You have to think the same way, and I bet you do the same as well.
Recap:
The five ways to create a memorable client experience:
First, worry about your security.
Second, personalize it.
Third, have an actual client onboarding process.
Fourth, have some value adds.
The fifth and final thing, properly off-board them.
When you have all these things together, then you will have a seamless and memorable client experience. I hope you enjoyed this training today.
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