Seven steps to stronger client relationships

Step 1: Understand how your clients view your practice

A logical first step is to gain a clear understanding of how your existing clients perceive their experience. This entails several actions.

Action Item 1: Walk in the client’s shoes

Literally take a walk through your practice as if you were the client, noting everything from the communication(s) you receive in advance of a meeting to arriving at the office for a meeting and the meeting itself. What was your impression, how were you greeted and what did you see as you walked through the front door? What happened prior to, during and after the meeting? At each stage, ask yourself these two simple questions:

• How did this make me feel?
• Are there opportunities to improve the client experience?

Action Item 2: Collect initial client feedback

Client feedback is essential to developing and nurturing strong relationships, so if it has been some time since you last asked your clients for feedback, you should ask all clients to respond to a survey that will identify their perceptions of factors such as communication, understanding of needs, integrity, trust, value for money, effort, satisfaction, retention and willingness to recommend.

Your clients will feel like they’ve been listened to and heard, and that their opinions count. They’ll feel that you care for them and are genuinely concerned about whether they’re satisfied with you. Just the act of collecting feedback through a simple survey can have a profound positive impact on the quality of each relationship.

STEP 2: Benchmark your client experience

Your clients live in a world comprised of multiple relationships and experiences that they are exposed to every day. So you, too, need to think outside your practice and industry to identify and understand what ‘great’ looks like because that is what consumers look for and expect. The best advisers understand this and rise to the challenge by redefining the experience they deliver to their clients based on ‘best in class’ standards others have achieved. Here are a few actions you can take.

Action Item 1: Answer this question

What is the single best service experience you have ever had? When you have identified that experience, analyse it deeply from end to end to understand what made it the best for you. This is a great team exercise to gain additional input covering others’ experiences. Also, you could consider the following questions:

• Why did you think of that experience?
• How did it make you feel?
• What happened when you contacted them for the first time?
• What happened during the process of using their product/service?
• What happened after?
• What words would you use to describe this business?

Action Item 2: Ask your clients the same question

Identify three or four clients who you are scheduled to meet in the next month and add this item to the agenda for each meeting. Ask them the same question you asked yourself (above). Each client can identify any organisation (other than yours) and, when they have that organisation in mind, ask a similar set of questions to those above and listen carefully to the words they use to describe the experience. Do their responses align to the same things you thought of when you analysed your one best experience?

STEP 3: Focus on the client journey

It’s really tempting to think about the client experience as what happens when you are meeting them face-to-face, but there is much more to consider and here are a few action items to take.

Action Item 1: Look at the entire client journey

A typical client journey contains a number of steps:

• Awareness, as a prospect;
• Initial contact and fact find;
• Onboarding, as a client;
• Development of plan/strategy;
• Review meetings;
• Education; and
• Appreciation.

It’s important that you consider and evaluate your performance across the entire journey, thinking about the distinct phases of the client experience. For each one, you need to understand what the client experience is today and how you can influence the experience at each phase based on what you learned from the previous steps.

Also, think about the experience in terms of multiple touchpoints. For instance, what is the experience of the prospect if they Google you, check your social media profiles, call you, go to your website or drive by your office?

STEP 4: Standardise critical client interactions

This is where you have to commit to improving the consistency with which you deliver on your client experience. We suggest you start with the client review meeting.

Action Item 1: Define/refine client review meetings

The most engaged clients (who are most satisfied and provide most of the referrals) are more likely to be actively involved in setting the agenda for their review meetings. The extent to which you can involve clients, thereby focusing your reviews on the issues that matter most to them, will drive deeper engagement.

STEP 5: Everyone takes responsibility for client experience

There needs to be a collective, ongoing commitment to deliver a great client experience. This means everyone who comes into contact with each client is responsible, but someone in particular is actually accountable. Here are some action items.

Action Item 1: Create a ‘wow budget’

Set up a budget that can be accessed by every team member to please clients in whatever way they see fit. This creates an expectation of delight and makes it possible to do the small things, from a gift before a big trip to a card to say thank-you for being a client. Set an expectation that the budget will be spent.

Action Item 2: Someone is in charge of client experience

Accountability for client experience should rest with the most senior person within the practice as this sends a very clear signal that client experience is critical. This puts someone in charge of thinking about the client experience, driving team discussions and setting expectations about expected outcomes.

STEP 6: Measure your performance

What gets measured gets managed and the best way to measure your performance is to continuously gather client feedback. What your clients think and feel about their experience has a direct impact on your bottom line. These are some action you can take to measure performance.

Action Item 1: Gather informal feedback

A good way to test the temperature of your client experience is to collect informal feedback at the conclusion of each review meeting. It might be a simple question such as asking what one area they think you could do better in meeting their needs in the future. Informal feedback demonstrates to clients that you care and can unearth vital issues that would otherwise have remained hidden to you.

Action Item 2: Use a formal survey

Set expectations with clients that you will be seeking their feedback after each review meeting and tell them why it is so important to you and them. Formal surveys should be used throughout the year after you complete review meetings so you can quickly gauge client sentiment and intentions. This will help you quickly ‘close the loop’ with clients on issues that may be concerning them and also validate where things are going well in each relationship. If you also collect qualitative feedback as part of the survey response, you can identify potential testimonials for use in marketing activities.

STEP 7: Refresh and update

The next logical step is to use the feedback you gather from clients to adjust your strategy and tactics for delivering a great client experience. This requires time to carefully analyse the results and identify the best ways of improving performance in order to build stronger client relationships over time. If you do this consistently, your bottom line will improve through client retention and growth through cross-sell, upsell and referrals.

Building strong client relationships can be likened to a journey so the magic will happen when you use a proven map that will take you from where you are today to where you want to be with your clients in the future. 

Ray McHale, founder and chief executive, Valuiza