Girl Means Business

246: Crafting an Irresistible Client Experience

• Kendra Swalls • Episode 244

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A great client experience can be the catalyst for exponential growth in your business. When your clients are happy, they talk about it to their friends and family. Join me as we walk through the client experience key elements that will have your client list growing faster than a weed in springtime. 

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Speaker 1:

Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast, the show where we're all about helping you feel confident, both as a mom and a business owner. I'm your host, kendra Swalls, mom of two, former teacher and full-time photographer and business coach. Each week we'll discuss the challenges, success and secrets that make you say I can do this, because you absolutely can. So pop in those earbuds, grab your favorite snack and let's get ready, because this girl means business. Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast. I am super excited you're here for this episode. We are going to be talking all about how to create a client experience that your clients are going to love, that they're going to want to talk about. They're going to want to share with their friends, with their family, and that is a key piece of getting your business to grow is having people talk about it. But before we get into all of that, I don't typically share a lot about the personal stuff in my life. I don't really start every episode with a long, boring intro of what's going on in my world. I know a lot of people do that. It's not my favorite thing about podcasts and so I don't typically do that, but I wanted to share with you two quick things, because I find them really helpful and also kind of entertaining. One is that I actually previously recorded this episode. We went on spring break last week. We went on a trip and while I was gone I was like I or before we left actually, I was like I want to have all my stuff done. I want to be able to come home and not have to jump right back into work. I want to be able to kind of have a little bit of time to unpack and do laundry and you know all the things that come with being gone for a week. And so I recorded. I thought I had uploaded. I got home last night, late last night, and realized the episode did not get uploaded. It actually got recorded, but I can't find it anywhere in my files, anywhere on my computer. It is vanished, it has disappeared into the ether. I don't know what happened to it. So I am rerecording this episode the day before it goes live, which I very rarely, if ever, do. So you're getting a rare glimpse into my world as it is, as it's happening, when you're listening to this.

Speaker 1:

The second thing I want to mention is something that of an experiment, I guess you would call it that I have done recently that I wanted to share a little bit about, because it has helped me greatly with just sort of my mental health, with spending less time on my phone, and that is about a week and a half ago. I completely removed Facebook from my phone. So, and specifically, just Facebook. Now I still have Instagram and threads on my phone, primarily because those are phone based apps. They are not great on the desktop, but I don't find myself scrolling through them as much as I do. It's not as much of a habit as Facebook was.

Speaker 1:

Facebook for me was my mindless scroll. The problem with Facebook for me is that it becomes this trap of comparison, of feeling less than of wanting to know, like, oh well, why am I not accomplishing these things? Why am I not involved in that thing? Why am I not a part of this? You know, why are these people being so much more successful than I am? Like, there's a lot of things that go on mentally when I scroll Facebook. It's also an election year and I just I hate election years, especially the last couple of elections. They stressed me out. I don't want to get involved in all that. So I just thought you know what. It's probably better that I don't spend time on Facebook.

Speaker 1:

But what I found was I was picking up my phone and just mindlessly like, without even thinking about it, opening the app and scrolling. So I decided to remove it from my phone, so that the only way I really access Facebook is via my computer, and I typically will now check it maybe once a day, sometimes every other day. When we were on vacation I did not check it at all and it's been great. It has been so interesting, I guess, as a way to put it, because the experiment was if I remove this from my phone, one, am I going to miss it? Like, how much am I going to miss it? And two, will I just replace that addiction with another, with Instagram or with something else?

Speaker 1:

What I found is one I don't miss it as much as I thought I would. In fact, when I do get on Facebook on my computer, I am really not as sucked in as I thought it would be, and maybe it's because it's not on my phone. It's not like a quick little scroll. I don't know, the user experience is different when I'm on the computer versus my app, but I just I find that I don't miss the content. I don't miss being on there hardly as much as I thought it would In fact, hardly at all Like I just don't miss it that much. Now there are times when I'm like, oh, I want to go see what this person's up to, or what I haven't seen this person post about their kids in a while, like I want to go check out and see what their kids are up to, or family members, things like that. But for the most part, like I really have not missed it. And then the second part was am I going to replace this with just another kind of addiction? Because that's really what it was. It's an addiction.

Speaker 1:

Social media is an addiction and I really thought that without having Facebook on my phone, I would turn to Instagram, I would turn to threads or something else. And yeah, I do find myself maybe scrolling a little bit more on there, but not nearly as much as I did on Facebook. It was really interesting to see that, since taking Facebook off of my phone, my screen time you know the Apple phone or iPhones give you like that screen time summary each week my screen time has gone down. It started off. It went down by 25%. Now the last week's screen time report is a little bit skewed and I'll tell you why in a second, but it went down like 65%. So I don't spend as much time on my phone now that I don't have Facebook on there.

Speaker 1:

So my point of all of this is it's okay if you need to take things off of your phone. It's okay if you need to put up some walls and say, hey, I'm not going to spend as much time here because it's doing this X, y and Z to my mental health as a business owner. I struggled with this for a while because I thought if I remove Facebook from my phone or if I don't get on Instagram for a while, I'm going to lose parts of my business. I'm not going to be able to advertise or talk about my business. I'm going to lose momentum in my business. But really that's not necessarily true, because I can still talk about my business on Facebook. I don't have to do it on my phone, and the time that I was spending on that app was not about business, it was personal, it was just me scrolling. So I can still do what I need to do for my business on those platforms without spending as much time on those platforms. So when you hear people say like, oh, you need to be spending all this time doing X, y or Z, please know that is not necessarily true. You have to do what's best for you and for me. Currently, what's best for me is to stay off of Facebook as much as possible. Taking the app off my phone has been amazing, really, really helpful.

Speaker 1:

Now back to the other thing I said about my screen time. You know went down extra this last week and that is because while we were on our spring break vacation we left on Wednesday. We came back late Sunday night. I actually turned my phone off for a while, like completely shut it down, because we were one going to a national park where there was no cell service. So I didn't really need my phone other than like for taking pictures. But I can use my husband's phone for that.

Speaker 1:

I can do other things and I knew that I would get distracted by notifications and text messages and emails and all the things that come through, even though I'd set like an out of office email notification. I knew that myself well enough to know that when we were driving to and from places, if I got cell service and I had notifications coming in, I was going to want to check them. I was going to feel like I needed to be available in that moment and I did not want that. I wanted to fully enjoy the time we had with our friends, the time we had with our family, the beautiful location that we were in, and so I turned my phone off and anytime that my phone was on, it was on do not disturb, and I think that for me, I plan to leave my phone in a do not disturb mode 95% of the time. Well, ok, let me change that 75% of the time. And I have the setting set to where the people that might need me my mom, my husband, my kids, like they are allowed their messages and texts and calls will come through on that setting, but the rest of my notifications are silenced so that I can have focused time, whether it's doing podcasts, whether it's working on other things in my business, whether it's just driving and not wanting to be distracted by notifications.

Speaker 1:

Because if you're like me, you get sucked into those notifications. When you hear that ding, it's like a Pab's love Pavlov, is that how you say it? Pavlov, pavlovian response. We'll go with that. When you hear that notification, you immediately want to grab your phone and go oh, what's happening, who's texting me? What email came through? What call am I getting, which 90% are spam calls, so don't even worry about it. But I was having that Pavlovian response to my phone and I want to not have that.

Speaker 1:

I'm trying to break that. I'm trying to have a better relationship with my phone. That sounds really strange, but I want to have a good relationship with my phone, and these are some of the things I'm doing to help me get there. So I wanted to share that, just because I know a lot of people that I've talked to have the same exact feelings. So, yes, I feel like I am addicted to this thing. I care around with me all day long, but I don't know how to break that, and so these are some things that I have been working on, kind of experiments I've been putting into place that I wanted to share with you. That might be helpful.

Speaker 1:

Maybe the do not disturb setting needs to be something that you can set up. You can change the settings so that if you need to get messages from certain people, you can, but all the other noise gets silenced until you're ready to focus on it, until you are ready to actively look at it and dive into it or reply to it or whatever you want to do, and then just the removing the apps that are taking up that space in your day and that space in your brain and maybe are not always the most beneficial to our mental health can be really helpful. So again, I'm not saying this as any kind of weird, like I just want you to be part of my world, which I do, but mostly I just was like this has actually been working really well and I want to share it with you Because I care about you and I want you to enjoy your time and I want you to be productive and I want us to all have a really good, healthy relationships with our phone, with social media, with all the things. Ok, let's get into, finally, today's topic we are talking about, like I said, the client experience.

Speaker 1:

A good client experience can be the catalyst for incredible business growth, because when people talk about your business, it will have such a larger impact on the other person when they hear it from someone that's a trusted friend or family or source. Then, if they just come across your business randomly on social media or if they just hear about you through some other outlet or a Google search. This is why so many companies right now are leaning into user-generated content Because they recognize the power in you being sold a product by someone you trust versus a company you may never have heard of or that you vaguely recognize the name from. User-generated content is the same thing as your clients having a great experience with you and going out and talking about it. The only difference is that, well, a lot of times that user-generated content is being paid for by a company. You know there's a huge market out there for these companies that will go and say I'm going to hire these small creators or these medium creators, size-wise, to talk about our products, to sell our products for us, so they're being paid to do that, but your clients can do it for you for free.

Speaker 1:

So I want to walk through today, in this episode, some things that you can do before, during and after a client works with you that will help create this great client experience that will have them wanting to tell their friends about it. So let's talk about what you can do before they ever work with you, so before they've actually hired you, before they've purchased from you, the number. One thing that you're going to find is kind of a running thread throughout all of these is communication. The more information that you give to your clients, the more information that they feel like they are armed with before coming to work with you, the more comfortable they're going to be in the entire process. So the first thing I always say when it comes to a client experience is make sure that they have plenty of information up front. Let them know exactly what they can expect from working with you or buying from you. What is the process? How do they actually get in touch with you? How do they actually find the product they need? How do they sign up for your service? What are the steps? Do they need to click on something? Do they need to actually have a conversation with you? Is there a meeting?

Speaker 1:

At the beginning, this is going to look different whether you sell a service or a product and what type of service or product you offer. So if you're selling a product, then your upfront process might look a little different because you don't have as much necessarily information to give. You might talk about the shipping process. You might talk about the purchasing process what different payment options are available, those kinds of things, whereas with a service there might be a little bit more involved because they're going to want to know about is there a refund policy? What happens if one of both of us can't complete the service, or what if I'm not happy with my service, or what are the steps leading up to this? Do we have to have a call? Those kinds of things.

Speaker 1:

The more of that type of information that you can put out into your content, whether it's on your website, on your social media, in maybe a packet, they can download a welcome guide, all of that stuff. This is something that I see a lot of people struggling with is because they feel like they want to gatekeep a lot of this information. They're like well, I want to get them on a call with me and then we can discuss it. The problem is, people want information In order to sign up for a discovery call or a sales call, or to even send you an email and ask you a question. They need to feel comfortable going into that, knowing that they're A going to get their question answered and not just be sold to, and. B. They want to know that you're not going to bait and switch them, that you're not trying to hook them in and then you're going to sell them some hugely expensive service or product or whatever. The more information you can give them, the better.

Speaker 1:

One thing I always tell people when they ask me A what information do you need to have on your website? And? B what type of content should I be putting out on social media? Go to your frequently asked questions. That is a gold mind of information To get your frequently asked questions. Those are what they sound like questions that you are commonly asked about your products or service. These don't necessarily have to be questions that are asked directly to you. They could be questions that other clients and other people in your industry are asking online. There are so many places and I talk about it in the episode where I talk about how to come up with content ideas. There's tons of places where you can go and figure out what it is your audience wants information on, and those are become your frequently asked questions. Turn those into content on your website and on your socials. Anywhere you put out content that will help A your clients will know, or your potential clients will know, that someone else has already asked this question and. B you're providing the answer. Make sure those are included. The last thing before they ever work with you make it super easy for them to contact you.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I do inside of my focus photographer membership is I do audit. I will audit people's websites or social things. One of the things that I look for specifically and I find this often is that it is not always easy to find the contact page. It might be in your menu bar, which is great. It might be in a drop-down menu, which is great, but I want it on every single page. When I'm scrolling through someone's website, if I have to go all the way back to the top of the page to get to the main menu and click contact or email or whatever, it's frustrating. I know that sounds really simple but again, if people have to go through too many steps, they aren't going to do those steps.

Speaker 1:

If you have a contact me button on every single page, if someone is scrolling through your about me page and they get to the bottom of your section where you talk about who you are and what you do, have a contact me button. If you're a photographer and you have a portfolio page where you're sharing photos of all of your great favorite sessions. In the middle or at the bottom, have a contact me button. If you are selling a product on each page, have a contact me button. In case they want to reach out to you with questions. Let them know that you are readily available to contact so they can contact you and have a conversation with you. That's going to make them feel way more comfortable than they would if it was like you can have to go to the very bottom of the page, this tiny little corner, and it says contact you. I'm not saying you have to share, like your phone number or even put your email address out there. The contact button is great because then it's kind of keeping your information hidden a little bit. But they can fill out the form to send to you and then you can reach out to them.

Speaker 1:

Okay, the next one is while they're actually working with you. So they've come across your business, your brand, they like what they see. They say, yes, I'm excited, I want to work with you, I want to hire you for this service or I want to purchase this product from you. Again, going back to that common thread lots of communication, clear communication. I always say over communicate. Give them more information than they actually probably need at the time. Don't overwhelm them, but you want to make sure that they have everything figured out, because we are in our business. We know the steps, we know the process, but they don't, and so sometimes we assume that they know things or that they will understand things that they actually don't, and that leads to confusion, that leads to frustration and that leads to a bad experience. So lots of communication, whether that's through emails, phone calls, zoom chats, whatever it is that you need to do to make sure your audience, your clients now sorry, your clients feel like they have everything they need.

Speaker 1:

The next one is to anticipate the questions that they might ask. So if you're going to hop on a call with a client, you need to already have in your mind these are probably the questions again, those frequently asked questions that they are going to ask, and have your responses ready to go, so that you're not fumbling around, going well, I mean, I don't know. Have it figured out, know what your policy is on things, know how things are going to go. If there are areas where your client gets to choose their own path or, like I, want to create my own package for this thing, then you need to have the information easily available for them to know what their options are, because nothing is more frustrating than going into a situation and having a conversation where you're like I need you to explain it to me like I'm five, because I have no idea what you're talking about.

Speaker 1:

A quick little funny story is while we were on and this is a promise that ties into this while we were on our vacation last week, one of the families that we were traveling with we were out in the park and they were driving around and they ended up with a giant screw in their tire, so we had to put the spare on. And then the next day we're like well, we'll go into town and we'll get a replacement tire. So we were kind of calling around to these places to figure out which one has a tire that's the one he needs. And we called this one place and we were asking like hey, we're looking for this specific tire. Do you have that? And he came back to us with this question. He was like well, is it a? I'm just going to make up something here. He was like well, is it a PRTC seven or a PRT T12? And I was like I don't know what that means. He's like well, is it at this or that? And he rattled off some other thing and I was like I literally said I need you to explain this to me like I'm five, because I'm not in the tire industry and I don't know what those words mean. And then he was like, oh sorry. And he broke it down on like a much simpler thing.

Speaker 1:

A lot of times we tend to do that same thing with our clients because we don't recognize that, again, they're not in our business, they're not in our industry. So we want to simplify things as much as possible. Obviously, we don't want to talk to them like they're babies, but we want to make it as simple and clear and concise as possible so that there is no confusion, that they're not misunderstanding something or that they're not hearing a phrase and going. Well, I'm going to pretend like I know what that means, but I really have no clue what that means. So just make sure we keep it as simple as possible. Give them clear timelines. So if you are working on a project with them and you say, okay, we're gonna start on this date, then the next phase is about four days in. I'm gonna send you this for you to look over and review. If that's all good, we'll move on to the next thing, so letting them know when they can expect things from you, or when they can expect to hear from you.

Speaker 1:

And then the last one, for while they're working with you, is give them an easy way to communicate with you. Obviously, they probably started off with emails, but if they are now a client of yours and you want them to have another way to communicate with you, then you can offer that. I'm not saying again you have to give them your phone number. I don't recommend that, but if you have, maybe it's a hey. If you need to get a hold of me faster, here's send me a DM on Instagram, because those notifications come through more than my emails do. Or have a secondary phone number or a WhatsApp app or whatever for people to text you through, and that way they can get a hold of you. But giving them a way to communicate with kind of a direct line to you lets them feel like they are again special and that you are going to want to put them ahead of everything else.

Speaker 1:

Okay, last but not least, is what to do after they actually work with you, so whether they have purchased something from you or they have worked with you through a service. You don't want to just kind of drop them off after it's done. Nobody wants to feel like they've just been discarded. After you've worked with somebody who's spent all this time and money with them, you want to feel like that you are now part of kind of their family, so you want to follow up to make sure that they're happy with the product or the service. I love it when I shop at like a little local place and I buy something and I end up on their email list or they get my number or whatever and I get like a little text or I get an email. It's not annoying to me when they'll follow up a couple of days later and be like hey, thanks so much for stopping in. We love that you supported our small business.

Speaker 1:

I'm just, you know I would love to know what your thoughts were if you liked your product. You know you can leave a review here. I've had places like where I'll go and get a massage or a facial and they'll do that. They'll send like a follow up and a lot of times they're asking for me to leave a review and that's fine. I'm happy to do that, but the follow up is nice. Even if it's automated, it's still nice. So you want to follow up, you want to kind of just touch base with them after you have delivered their final product or service and then let them know what other ways they can work with you. So let them know, like, if this is not the final thing, like hey, if you ever are interested in these other things that offer, here's this, you know you're available to that and give them an easy way to leave a review or share a business with others.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I've done and I talked about this when I talked about how to get better, you know, more reviews for your business is I make it super simple for them to share my business with other people, and the way I do that is in my photography business. When I deliver their final images, it's in a digital gallery, so they get sent a link to a gallery where they can see all their images and they can download them. Inside of that gallery, I add an additional image, which is a graphic that I create in Canva, and I add one of my favorite images from their session to that graphic and I will have it be. It's not so much a like, thank you type graphic. It's more of a graphic that they can share on their social media. They can send it to a friend in a text and it says hey, or says I just had an amazing session with Paisley in photography. I think you would love working with her as well. Here's her information. Make sure you tell her that I sent you to get 10% off of your session and that works as their kind of referral card.

Speaker 1:

You know, a lot of times in the past businesses would give you like a couple of business cards to hand out to your friends. This is a digital business card, essentially, only I'm using one of their photos in it, and so it makes it a little bit more personal, and so that way, if they had a great experience, they can throw that photo up on their Facebook page or they can text it to their best friend and say, hey, you know, here's one of our family photos, or here's a photo from my session that we did, and it shares it. And so finding little creative ways to ask them for a review or to make it super easy for them to share with other people is going to make it that much easier for your business to grow. So, again, it doesn't have to be anything crazy, it doesn't have to be anything that costs a lot of time or money, but it needs to be something. Keep it simple. It has to be something that's going to be easy for them.

Speaker 1:

And so, again, that digital card. You can go into Canva and you can just create a basic like referral card with your business information on it. But these days it needs to be digital If you decide to do something physical. So if you have a storefront and you actually, you know, have products that you're selling at your storefront or you're going to, you know, one of those like events or you're going to vendor shows, you can have physical versions too that you can drop into a bag or hand out to people. But if you have a digital version that you can email to them or that you can send to them in some way, that's going to make it even easier for them to like, throw it up on a social page. So all of that combined, having again that through line of the clear communication, staying in touch with them throughout the entire process, giving them all the information they need, making sure that they are clearly informed on timelines, deliverables, answering their questions before they even ask them. Those are all things that give a really great client experience. Anything else on top of that is just bonus. It's icing on the cake. It is going to you know what.

Speaker 1:

Let me back up. I hear some people that say well, I give all of my clients a little extra gift, or I provide this or that for them. That can be really nice and I've had that happen when I've worked with somebody and they send me like a really nice little thank you gift, or they send me something in the mail or they bring it to our meeting at some point. That's always really nice and helpful. But that is not going to be enough to get me to talk about your product or service to my friends. It has to be the entire package. It has to go from start to finish.

Speaker 1:

So if you are focusing on your client experience and you want to get an experience that really sets the stage for them to be excited to share, you need to start at the very beginning. How can I create an experience for my clients that starts the minute they land on my website? The minute they hear about my brand, they go to my social page. What experience are they going to have? And then walk the rest of the way through. And then, last but not least, I want to talk really, really quickly about how to up your experience.

Speaker 1:

So if you feel like you already have a great client experience, but you're like I don't know, I just feel like I can either make some tweaks or changes or I need to be doing something else, then there's two things you can do. One is reach out to past clients and ask them, say hey, I'm really kind of revamping and fine tuning my client experience. I would love to know if there were any areas where you felt like I did really well, any areas I felt like I needed improvement on. You could send out like a survey, monkey, or even just create a form and Google and send it out. You have to be willing to listen to what they have to say. Some people are going to skim right over the what can I fix part and just tell you the good stuff, but that's where you really need to get the information is what is it that your past clients can tell you that might help you to improve your client experience?

Speaker 1:

The other thing is, if you're like well, I don't haven't had a lot of clients yet or I don't feel like my client experience has really been top notch yet. I really need to work on that before I get feedback is ask people what experiences have they had with other businesses that really stood out in their mind as being a great experience. You could put this out as a poll on social media, you could put it out as a Facebook post. You could just send it out to your family and friends. But getting feedback on what are other businesses doing that created a really great experience and it might be something as simple as they sent me a text reminder to let me know that my appointment was coming up or that we were meeting for this call at this time. It doesn't again have to be anything really grand, but I think you'll find some really helpful information in asking other people what their great experiences have been, taking that and figuring out how to apply it.

Speaker 1:

I want you to also think about the fact that if someone says, well, I had a great experience with this local store, that was actually like go in and shop in the store and you sell a digital service or a digital product, I don't want you to think that means that the same concept can apply. They absolutely can, and that's one of the things that I have found to be super helpful is to look outside of my own niche, outside of my own industry. What are other people doing in other niches and industries that have been really successful, and how can that translate into my business, into what I'm doing? So hopefully this helps give you a good picture, a clear kind of plan, of how to create this ongoing client experience that makes your clients feel appreciated, that makes them feel valued, makes them feel like they're not just another name or number or face, but they are someone who is important to your business, and that will make them definitely want to go out and share their experience with other people, getting you even more clients, which is always a great goal to have. All right, I hope this episode was helpful.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for being here for listening. I would love for you to leave a review for this podcast If you have not already, you can do that on iTunes or Spotify and let me know what you think of the show. It's always helpful for not only letting me know what your feedback is, but for letting other people who come across the podcast know why they need to be listening to this as well as always. Thank you so much for being here and I will see you next week. Same time, same place. Thanks again for tuning in to this week's episode. Don't forget to leave a review and follow us on socials at Girl Meets Business. See you next week.

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Kendra Swalls

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