How to Improve Your Client Experience as a Coach Using Dubsado
As a coach, spending the most time perfecting your client experience is what’s going to take you such a long way. You could even say it’s the basis for what will allow you to scale to and past 6-figures and more. Creating a VIP experience allows you to raise your rates, charging prices that you didn’t even think were possible before.
Clients pay for the experience more than they do the actual results. Any other coach in your niche can provide the same results, but your quality of service and the experience is what will make you stand out from the rest.
Our roots are tied in services, and even though that’s ebbed and flowed over the years, we’ve always upheld the same value in experience, and Dubsado has been our go-to CRM to allow us to systematize that. We now teach it to our clients, and we’re so excited to share it with you, too!
Understanding the Client Experience
Before we dive into how to develop a luxury client experience, we first want to clear the air on what it actually is and where it starts. Your client experience begins from the very first touchpoint someone has with you. That could be your Instagram account, scrolling upon a Pin you posted, finding your website on Google, etc. The journey from that first point of contact all the way to offboarding them is what encompasses the client experience; it doesn’t only start from the moment they sign their contract.
CREATING A CERTAIN FEELING
After all, client experience is about how you make them feel. Do they have all of the information about your coaching business that they need to get a clear (and great) impression of you during that first touchpoint? Do they understand what your services are and the results that follow? If you already have team members that are client-facing, are they accurately conveying your brand voice and values to provide great interactions? With everything you do and put out, think about how it will make your prospects and clients feel.
How to Craft a VIP Client Experience
What we don’t want the term “VIP” to invoke for you is a feeling of dread, like you’re going to have to completely renovate your current client experience– You’re not. There are small, low-energy actions you can take that won’t be draining for you but will have a lasting impact on your clients.
Communication is Key
Without focusing on systems or tools, without setting up automations, and without creating fancy pitch decks or proposals, communication is the single thing that will massively improve your client experience. Heck, that’s why we have an entire communication questionnaire that we send to our clients as soon as they sign, so we can have a clear understanding of how they like to communicate, how often they want to be in contact, how to reach out in emergencies, etc. But aside from just preferences, the ways in which you communicate are what you should be mindful of.
BECOME A MIND READER
Not literally, but basically– You should answer questions before your prospects or clients even ask them. If you already know that a client is probably going to ask about something, answer it before they have the chance to. Any time you can do this, it’s going to make their experience much more smooth. FAQs will also be your friend. We know it seems people hardly read them, but make them! Besides just putting FAQs on your website, you can add them to your proposal, dedicate a whole post on social media to them, post them on your Instagram Story then add them to a Highlight on your profile.
CLIENTS SHOULD ALWAYS KNOW WHAT’S NEXT
You should never leave a client or prospect wondering what to expect, what’s going to happen next, when to reach out to you, etc. This is what creates a disconnect between the two of you. Be crystal clear on when they can expect you to check-in with them, when you’ll have their proposal ready after a discovery call, what deliverables they’re going to receive, anything that will eliminate as much confusion as possible about what’s happening all while elevating their experience.
We always send our new clients an onboarding guide after they sign that introduces Team Boss Project, shares a bit more about our mission and values, lists our contact information and office hours, and has all the homework we need from them. If we need additional information from them to get started on their project, we send that over ASAP with a clear date when we need it back so that we can have a kick-off call. This is a crucial period when working with a new client that allows you to set the tone for what the rest of the working relationship is going to be like (which is ah-mazing).
ALWAYS HAVE NEEDED INFORMATION AVAILABLE
Clients shouldn’t need to read your website and read all of your Instagram posts just to find out what services you offer and what problems you solve. That information should be the first thing they read and understand as soon as they visit a page or profile. If they sign up for your email list, the first email (if not delivering a freebie) should be an introduction to yourself and your business. Leads should be clear on what the process is like to start working with you. If they need to fill out a form, send you an email, or book a call to get started, they should know that immediately. They also shouldn’t need to hunt for testimonials– scatter those throughout all of your mediums to be readily available.
Master Surprise & Delight
This means taking opportunities to go above and beyond for your clients to, well, surprise and delight them. Usually this consists of sending gifts for different occasions like onboarding, offboarding, check-ins after the project has ended, birthdays, celebrations, or condolences. However, it can be as simple as giving your client a sneak peek at their project (perfect for designers or photographers), delivering something before the deadline or before they expect it, and over delivering if possible.
Create a System for Your Client Experience Using Dubsado
We know those two terms “systems” and “client experience” don’t seem like they should be used in the same sentence, but creating systems around your client experience is a vital step in removing yourself from the experience where it makes sense. You don’t have to, nor should you, hold your clients’ hands throughout the whole process.
Here are some things that you don’t have to do manually:
Schedule recurring check-ins and other appointments
Ask for feedback and testimonials
Check your clients’ statuses to see who needs a gift or to book a call
Create new forms, contracts, or invoice items for every client and then remember to send those out
Customize every email that you send
Go through the process of onboarding and offboarding
These things can be done automatically or a heckuvalot more easily using automated workflows and templates. We’re firm believers that pretty much everything can be templated, and we’ve managed to figure out ways to automate so much of our client experience. With a few edits to a template, we’re able to send out contracts and invoices quickly. We don’t need to manually send out onboarding information because that’s done for us as soon as a client signs and pays. We don’t have to remember to send gifts because we have automatic tasks that tell us.
When you lay out your client journey and what your client experience looks like, you can then go in and fill in the pieces for what can be automated, or as close as you can get to it. Our killer combo for automating our client experience is using workflows in Dubsado with some added assistance by Zapier to pick up where Dubsado may lack.
SCHEDULING APPOINTMENTS WITH DUBSADO
Dubsado’s native scheduling tool allows you to create multiple schedulers for different purposes. You can have a discovery call scheduler to vet new leads once they submit your lead capture form, periodic appointments for your clients, etc. To take the organization a step further, you can set schedulers to be able to only be booked on certain days or certain times of the day. There’s also the option to require payment when someone books an appointment, which is awesome for offering one-off coaching sessions.
Dubsado has a calendar built in, which you can sync with another calendar like Google Calendar or Apple iCalendar. The integration works both ways, so appointments that are scheduled in Dubsado will reflect on the other calendar, and slots that are booked on the other calendar will show as busy times on your Dubsado Calendar. They make it super difficult to accidentally book appointments during unavailable times.
EMAIL COMMUNICATION MADE EASIER
Dubsado makes sure communication with your clients is easy and organized. You’re able to connect an email account with your Dubsado account to send and receive emails right within Dubsado. They even have read tracking which will let you know when an email has been viewed, so you can follow up appropriately.
Canned emails make this even easier (if that’s even possible at this point) by allowing you to create templates that you can select from when sending emails one-off, or you can add them to a workflow to be sent automatically. With either method, you’re able to edit it before it gets sent to make it more personalized to the client you’re speaking to.
Speaking of personalization, there’s also a thing called “smart fields”. When you insert a smart field into an email or form, that information will populate based on the client or project you’re sending it to. For example, the Client First Name smart field will populate the client’s first name.
SIGNING CLIENTS & GETTING PAID
You can also create proposals and contracts inside Dubsado. The drag-and-drop form builder makes it easy to create beautiful and branded forms. There’s even a Packages feature that allows you to create packages, which you can then add to your proposal for clients to select. You can add multiple packages and even optional add-ons.
Did we mention that Dubsado directly integrates with the most popular payment processors? You can connect your Stripe, PayPal, or Square account to get paid immediately once an invoice is paid, and Dubsado takes no additional fees. You can even integrate with Quickbooks or Xero for a seamless bookkeeping experience (that is, if you don’t want to use Dubsado’s native bookkeeping tools… because, yep, they have those, too).
With Dubsado, you’re able to attach the contract and invoice directly to the proposal, which means your clients can select a package, sign the contract, and pay their invoice in three streamlined steps. You can also add a payment plan to the invoice for larger packages that you may want to split up for your clients with automated reminders for each payment.
COLLECT OR SHARE INFORMATION WITH QUESTIONNAIRES
Questionnaires are yet another form that you can build inside Dubsado the same way you’d build proposals, contracts, and lead capture forms. You can have questionnaires for post-consultation feedback, testimonials, client homework, etc. Although they’re called questionnaires, they don’t have to include questions either! They can serve as informational sheets to share more about your process, as resources, whatever the need may be.
KEEP CLIENTS ORGANIZED WITH THE CLIENT PORTAL
The client portal is essentially their hub for all things related to their project. It’s optional to activate and utilize it for your clients, but it can really amplify their experience working with you. Inside the portal, your clients can view:
Unread emails
Outstanding invoices
Incomplete forms
Email communication between you
Documents (including Dubsado forms, PDFs, and links)
Appointment schedulers (if sent to the client)
Appointment dates and times (if applied to the portal)
Your business information
The business and contact info you have on file for them, including the ability to edit it
Task boards or (if shared with them)
USE AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS
Once you’ve mastered your process manually, you can put it all together in a neat workflow! Workflows trigger either from a lead capture form or public proposal being completed, they can trigger based on certain responses to a question in a lead capture form, or they can just be added manually to a client’s project. For example, you can add a workflow-tied drop down question asking which package they’re interested in. You can then apply a specific workflow to each response.
This means that you can keep your processes even more streamlined, plus cut lots of time out of your vetting process because you’ll already know what they’re specifically interested in, and then base the rest of the onboarding process on that response inside of that specific workflow.
If we lost you amongst all this automation talk, that’s alright because we have a more in-depth blog post on creating workflows and how they function right over here.
The Art & Architecture of Your Client Experience
To ensure you’re crafting a VIP experience for your unique coaching business and processes, we encourage you to apply to the Incubator. We have lessons dedicated to helping you develop the art and architecture of your client experience with systems, so you can be sure that you’re growing a sustainable business. It takes about 10 minutes to apply, and if accepted you’ll receive instant access to a private training all about streamlining with systems.
So let us know as soon as you apply by sending us a DM over on Instagram. We’d love to learn more about your business and help you sort out what your VIP client experience can look like!
