The Art of Tweaking & Repeating Your Client Experience
Episode 687: Show Notes
Developing consistent client delivery is a surefire way to set up your business for success and today, we break down how best to do so. There are stages to this, especially if you’re a solopreneur offering a broad variety of services. The most important phase, for the purposes of today’s episode, is phase one. It’s important to spend time improving your processes and developing efficiencies from the get-go, as tedious as it may feel. The question we get asked the most in our trainings is about efficiency. The answer is uncomfortably obvious and it’s merely a matter of prioritization. Tune in to learn the simple art of tweaking and repeating and discover how best to create efficiencies for yourself while simultaneously optimizing the client experience!
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The Best Approach to Developing Efficient Systems
You need to grant yourself the time to make tweaking possible; especially if you’re currently offering a variety of services. While you’re working with your first client on a particular project, you need to be developing the process for future clients. Working with clients illuminates the gaps. Although it may be laborious initially, it’s important to spend time tweaking the process in order to ease and accelerate the process with future clients. We once spent 20+ hours working on making the delivery process of a service more efficient, but it ultimately enabled us to reduce the delivery time to three hours! Taking that time can feel excruciating, but creating those efficiencies is so worth it in the long run.
Practical Tips For Creating Efficiencies
First of all, it’s always beneficial to place your focus on project-based work rather than hourly work, as it enables you to develop efficiencies, deliver faster, and make the same amount of money. Secondly, regardless of what you’re ultimately presenting a client with, you can use the same template for different services with individualized tweaks for the client’s specific needs. You don’t have to start from scratch every time! We have the same onboarding form in our Dubsado account containing every possible project’s needs, and simply remove the irrelevant sections for specific clients. This allows for a simple editing process to cater to different clients, without starting afresh each time. Instead of duplicating old forms from old clients, we advise you to take the extra time to develop an all-encompassing template that will accelerate your process in the future.
Optimizing the Client Experience
As well as being a huge benefit for you as a service provider, developing process efficiencies ultimately impacts your delivery, thus benefiting the client. However, if you’re making tweaks without contractual clarification, that’s a problem. In order to save time and wow your clients, you need to have an ethical sales process from the very beginning. Your contracts need to back up all of the promises you made during the sales process. If the scope of the delivery is beyond your expectations, you need to ensure you keep things amicable with your current client and tweak the process when you offer the same service to future clients to protect yourself going forward.
The Art of Tweaking and Repeating
The art of tweaking and repeating involves analyzing your process; doing a post-mortem and evaluating what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to be improved. You then tweak what needs to be tweaked and repeat what worked, then reassess again! People tend to make too many drastic changes because they aren’t certain what it was exactly that didn’t work so they change everything about everything every time! You need to be making small edits to the same container, instead of creating an entirely new product each time.
Identifying An Ongoing Problem Versus A One-Time Problem
For those of you who are looking to scale, we recommend that you read Built To Sell. From there, we’d love for you to eventually settle on a high-touch signature service, creating systems and efficiencies on the backend so you can deliver it over and over again. We understand the temptation to have multiple offers to sell to the same client without having to worry about lead acquisition, but at this point, you may be creating roadblocks for yourself by offering too many services. We find it preferable to identify an ongoing problem that you can continuously solve, rather than a one-time problem. Otherwise, you’re going to have to continuously come up with a new problem to solve and a new offer, versus rolling out a retainer service and keeping a client consistently working with you.
Why You Need to Evaluate Your Systems During the Delivery Process, Not After
As annoying as it may be to stop and evaluate mid-stream, and as weird as it feels to change the process while the client is going through it, you need to swallow your resistance and get on with it. If you wait, you won’t remember what needs to be addressed and if you care about the customer experience, you need to pay attention to these pieces of the puzzle sooner rather than later! If you address the structural issues on the front end and during instead of the back end, it will only make it easier for you going forward! Any changes you make are ultimately for the sake of getting your clients a better result. If you need help with optimizing your systems, set up a call with our team today!
Quote This
Do something and then analyze it– look at what worked, what didn’t, what needs to be improved, and what you’re going to do again.
Highlights
The Best Approach to Developing Efficient Systems. [0:08:47]
Practical Tips For Creating Efficiencies. [0:12:23]
Optimizing the Client Experience. [0:15:10]
The Art of Tweaking and Repeating. [0:18:50]
Identifying An Ongoing Problem Versus A One-Time Problem. [0:21:32]
Why You Need to Evaluate Your Systems During the Delivery Process, Not After. [0:23:50]
Today’s Guest:
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
Key Topics:
Customer experience, Tweaking and repeating, Scaling, Evaluating systems, Signature service
