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EP 132 | How to go from Chaos to Excellence in Client Experience & Business Operations with Bella Hegarty

• Lauren Loreto

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When you’re scaling a service-based business, client experience and operations must be many things: highly optimized, functional, streamlined, and processed. Client experience: because retention is everything. Operations: because you want nothing to fall through the cracks. On this episode of She’s Busy AF, Bella Hegarty joins Lauren to talk about the importance of both of these things. With her background in travel, hospitality, and operations consulting, Bella shares challenges brands face – such as maintaining quality while scaling, and the need for standardized processes. Lauren and Bella chat about the significance of client feedback, tracking metrics, and creating predictable scaling strategies. Tune in for a deep dive!

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Timestamps:

  • Introduction to Client Experience and Operations (00:00:15)
  • Common Challenges in Quality Delivery and Scaling (00:07:05)
  • Standardized Processes for Service Delivery (00:08:55)
  • Creating Predictability in Scaling Process (00:15:53)
  • Smooth Onboarding of Clients and Team Members (00:17:56)
  • Tools for Streamlining Operations (00:20:07)
  • Time Tracking and Data Insights (00:21:42)
  • Measuring Client Experience Success (00:26:32)
  • Enhancing Customer Experience (00:31:16)
  • Importance of Client Feedback (00:36:20)
  • Strategic Partnerships and Exit Strategy (00:38:57)
  • Long-Term Client Support (00:41:56)
  • Understanding Client Expectations (00:42:08)
  • Challenges in Service-Based Businesses (00:43:12)
  • Closing Remarks (00:45:02)
Speaker 1:

Welcome back to another episode of she's Busy AF, a podcast geared at helping brands, entrepreneurs and creatives smash those barriers and scale. I'm your host, lauren Loretto. I'm the founder of Brand Good Time, a dynamic marketing agency where we focus on doing all things marketing. You can check out our website at brandgoodtimecom. But otherwise, today we are here to talk about client experience and operations. Client experience is more than just the gift that you give your clients when you launch a project, or throughout the process or on their birthday. Client experience drives so much within your business, and not just the happiness of your clients. It drives the success of your team, the growth of your brand. It's extremely crucial.

Speaker 1:

So in this episode, I wanted to bring on Bella. I've known Bella for a couple of years. She has a super interesting background. She was a ski instructor and she's worked in the hospitality industry before deciding to test out her concept for this client experience service and bring it to agencies and companies to help them grow and scale. So I wanted to have her on because, as service-based businesses, this is something we definitely need to know about and prioritize. Not many people out there specialize in doing what Bella does. She brings a lot to the table in terms of how to manage quality delivery when your business is getting busy and how alignment in your client experience and operations can make scaling easier. So this is a great episode to tune into if you are wondering what scaling can look like for your business and how operations and client experience can support that, or if you are in the thick of it and you're like wanting to pull your hair out, which I've been in both.

Speaker 1:

This is a great episode. We talk about her background and some common challenges that brands encounter and really how to maintain quality of services some strategies that you can start implementing right away. Overall, great listen. Bella is a great friend of mine. We had this conversation across the pond, if you will. So she's located over in Europe and obviously she's busy AF is based in Florida, so it was an awesome conversation. I really can't wait for you to hear from Bella herself and learn more about all things client experience and operations. Without further ado, let's dive in. Welcome back to another episode of she's Busy AF and welcome Bella.

Speaker 2:

I'm so excited you're here today. Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be such a juicy episode.

Speaker 1:

It's going to be so good. Okay, we've known each other for a hot minute Back when brand good time wasn't what it is today. It was mainly a mentorship consulting agency, and I think you attended one of my classes or joined one of my programs. I can't even remember at this point, but we've known each other a long time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it seems like I think I remember doing something around your marketing or positioning. There was something around that that we did and yeah, I think I still have some of the templates saved that I got from it.

Speaker 1:

That is so funny. That is so funny. Yeah, back like was it post pandemic or like do I know it was post pandemic? Well, I don't know. It depends on where you are in the world. Here in Florida, post pandemic was two months into the pandemic Everything lifted. So I have like a skewed perception of what is a pandemic in relation to you know, being at home. But okay, so tell us, tell us a little bit about you. You're not on this side of the world, you're not in the US. People could probably tell that by your accent. But tell us a little about you, your background and your experience in our obviously our topic today, which is client management.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I'm Bella Higate. If you don't know me, haven't heard of me, and you probably wouldn't have if you hadn't followed me on Instagram or connected to me on LinkedIn. However, I'm a client experience and operations consultant and most people go what on earth is that that could? It's quite vague, quite broad. You have no idea what it could be.

Speaker 2:

Well, my background, originally having been from the UK, I moved to the French apps when I was 18 and my I spent eight years working in private travel and hospitality between the Alps and the South of France before now where I live now settled in Andorra, so very Europe based. Didn't spend actually that much time in the UK, but this gave me a really insight into high levels of service, what clients with really high expectations, how they, how they expect to be service, but also what they're looking for in making an experience beyond five star. How does that become exceptional? What does it need, what does it take and what does it require from either the business or, from my case, managing clients with that really high expectation? Kind of fast forward to post COVID.

Speaker 2:

I lost my job as a skiing snowboard instructor, which meant I had to figure out what I was going to do with Brexit, loads of other complications which I won't dive into.

Speaker 2:

I worked for Brand and Marketing Consultancy in the UK where I managed to build my role in project management and client success and I started managing digital projects but started taking on more client management roles and looking after clients, managing their campaigns, and really saw a gap when working with other businesses that they had great services, great products, but as they grew to scale the operations behind managing everything as they were scaling, but also how they took care of their clients and consistently delivering an exceptional standard of work, just started to fall away and they didn't have the process in place to be able to manage that increased capacity, which meant often they lost a lot of clients. Clients gave pretty bad feedback and it's looking at how can we align the two together, and that's where operations comes in. For me is how can you align delivery and operations to make an exceptional experience that you can manage as you grow?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So obviously your background is really cool. I totally can relate to you know, like I think I've told you this like we manage Airbnb properties and my husband and I, like as a side business and I was talking to someone yesterday like there are totally lines to be drawn with like hospitality and the experience that you give your guests or the experience that you're you know you're that you're providing to the service-based world. It's so I mean even product. But, like you know, for the sake of this conversation, the service-based world, it's very similar. People just want to feel cared for and that you know like there's value in what you're, what you're doing for them. So, with that said, what are some of the common challenges that you find in your experience? The brands that brands encounter when they're trying to maintain that quality delivery but also scale their business.

Speaker 2:

So often it comes down to, they have a great product, a great service that they're offering, but they don't have a clear delivery process that they follow consistently. So as they scale and they bring in more clients, often they don't have the right touch points or that experience that they are used to delivering exceptionally to a small amount of clients. They can't maintain that. So what they say that they're going to deliver, they can't fulfill that promise. So they end up and I know a load of us that we're really achievers, we really care for our clients we can't we end up over delivering or we over promise and we can't then deliver that and that often ends in scope creep and issues with profitability.

Speaker 2:

So I see a lot of brands particularly I work with a lot of agencies but a lot of consultants that just want to be able to offer more for their clients as they're growing, but don't really know how to do that with the same capacity or the same team. And they don't know necessarily how to hire. They hire too fast and then that often means that they've got the wrong people in the wrong places for the type of roles. The clients then get frustrated because things change too quickly and it's just a period of as we go through major transition. It's looking at how can we make sure we have the right people in the right on the right touch points and the right processes in place so that we can maintain this.

Speaker 2:

or we look at how can we onboard our clients in the best way so we can know, exactly what their expectations are, so much so that we can always meet and deliver those expectations, as they stay on with us and they love us so much so that they shout about us to others.

Speaker 1:

So does this really look like having just a written process for how you onboard and how you execute a service, and is that, do you think that's possible, for all service based brands?

Speaker 2:

So it's really interesting.

Speaker 2:

I think you need to have a standardized process through how you bring clients in, how you onboard them into each of your services and the main fundamentals of how you deliver whatever service that might be.

Speaker 2:

It doesn't have to go down to the nitty gritty of how you go through a creative process, because I find that often I know that a lot of creatives shy away from that and they say we can't put processes around that thought process, and I completely understand that.

Speaker 2:

But there's got to be a process of how you quality control, check the different deliverables that might be going out, or how you check to make sure that you've met all the clients needs or the expectations at a certain point before either an asset or a campaign or a performance or whatever that might be. Whatever that service might be, you've got to make sure that you're delivered to the client's expectations. So I feel like you have to have a mapped journey and 99% of brands that I speak to they know what they're delivering, but they don't have any kind of formalized written process written out, even in a flow, even something that someone can refer to to be able to look back, continue to refine. So they're going off based off assumption and that's so hard to be able to scale when we don't have anything formalized that everyone knows where it is and can continue to use and refer to.

Speaker 1:

So it sounds like it becomes an internal and an external problem because internally, as you bring in team members, you want them to know what they should be doing and what the process is. It makes like it creates less friction. And then externally, it sounds like you you would suggest then communicating with clients. Hey, here's what you can expect. At what point and if that's true, at what point do you recommend introducing the process to a client?

Speaker 2:

So I think, if I refer back quickly, one of the real benefits, like you say, is when you bring on team members, it really speeds up the efficiency of bringing on new team members, bringing on new clients.

Speaker 2:

I was working with a marketing and branding agency in the UK and they look at, they do a lot of research projects but actually they were able to onboard their new team members so efficiently that their team member was able to jump in and save them so much time from doing that because she knew exactly where she was, where her role was best suited, where she needed to play in the entire process of delivery that it made it so much easier for them to get on and not have to spend so much time training.

Speaker 2:

I think in your, in your question, I think you have to understand what your services and who your client is before you bring in a process, before you understand what that delivery looks like. You have to know who the person is that you're delivering that service to, what their problems are, what their goals are, because if you don't know enough about your client, it's really hard to be able to map out a journey for them or a service for them, because you don't know where you're taking them to or what that deliverable might be or what they want or what they're struggling with. To know what those either accountability touch points are or where you need to make sure that you've got extra and that could be, I'm just thinking back. So where you need extra communication with them because that's a bit heavy, you need more assets from them. On their side, there's so many variables that could take into account, but if you don't know who that person is or what they're looking for, it's really hard to create that journey.

Speaker 1:

So do you think, all right, and I'm going to, I'm going to bring it down to earth for a second within and I'm just going to throw our business and as an example, to give everyone some context.

Speaker 1:

So you know, we offer web design and we also offer monthly marketing and we have very, very processed ways that we offer that because they're like the services within there are very scalable. But I would say, on the marketing, monthly marketing side of things, that's where scope changes per client and, honestly, like within clients, on a quarterly basis, scope can change with what we're doing for the client, and so what we've noticed is that some clients need different communication measures than others and it's really hard to silo and stick to a communication process that's that works for all clients as a result. So are you saying, like totally possible to have you know the way that you run something, but like, create flexibility and and and we open the flexibility for how you communicate with clients and like how does that fit in? Like how does that fit into scaling? Because that's usually like when you hear scaling and then when you hear flexibility, it's like that feels very contrasting because you like scaling needs to be predictable. I think in a lot of ways.

Speaker 2:

So it does. I think you've got to have and that's where having, like you've said, you guys have got a base level of a process that you follow which means it is scalable. But there has got to be and the more you have a good capacity to understand how you allocate resource to that, so how you know how much time it takes and how much effort it takes to deliver. You can add variances in there and you have to take this depending on the business depends on the type of service that you offer as well. Let's take brand of time, for example, as if you bring someone in on a retainer basis and the scope changes monthly. Well, that would need to have a touch point monthly to have a look at what that's going to take, and that would be my recommendation and the communication around that has to go on a client by client basis. I've done a lot on and this just comes through my snowboarding career generally is something that I do on the side.

Speaker 2:

Living in a mountain country is that we have so many people have different communication styles.

Speaker 2:

Some people have to think about it, some people need to know all the information, some people just want to get on with it and do it. Some people don't really care how you do it, as long as you get them the results. So when you know who you're working with, it actually becomes a lot and you find that out and you understand the client individually, as a person, not just by delivering a service. It makes it so much easier to be able to communicate with them in a way that is easy for them to understand, easy for you to get the information that you need. But also you can set clear boundaries or understand when things might become a bit more challenging or when you might need to spend a bit more time one month to a certain project, or some months that you can reallocate that time that you've got for them on another month, because a project might need a bit more communication, a bit more time and might need a bit more effort from yourself and your team.

Speaker 1:

So how can brands create predictability in the scaling process? You know like, if, okay, so let's just say, like you're onboarding team members and there's always a messy middle with that. There's always a way you have to communicate with clients. But if you can keep your processes good and keep them happy, okay, that's one thing. How do you create, like that, predictability in the scaling process and keep everyone moving in the same direction?

Speaker 2:

I think open communication and two-way communication is really really vital with this so I talk a lot about just transparency makes a huge difference. So if you are going for a big period of change where you're bringing on new team members, let your clients know and say you know we're going to go for a big period of change Doesn't mean anything is necessarily going to change with the work that we're going to do. It means that we're going to be able to potentially offer you more. We have bringing on some new team members. I'd love to be able to introduce those to you.

Speaker 2:

These are their special skills and it seems as if, depending on how you introduce that, it can give you the opportunity to actually, as a founder or as a person that's usually probably doing a bit more work. If you introduce your team members in the right way at the right time, you can take a bit more of a step back and actually start to bring them in, which frees up your time to actually focus on more new business, while your team members can take on some of that responsibility. But the clients still feel that they're a part of the process. They still feel like you're not dropping them or leaving them. There will be a transition period where it will probably be a take a bit more time and you might have to be a bit more involved. But if you have the right training, the right kind of team onboarding processes in place, it can make the whole thing a lot easier and then can settle that relationship and grow that relationship with your existing clients.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So with that, scaling is such an interesting place to be, and we're in the thick of it right now too, where it's like sometimes you have to guarantee the business before you can guarantee the team or bring on the team, and so then it becomes this messy middle of onboarding team members and onboarding clients at the same time. What are your tips for how to make that as smooth as possible, both on the client side and team onboarding training side?

Speaker 2:

I would probably say one of the biggest. The first things is to understand your capacity as a team, with what you've got existing and what you can bring on, because those periods you're bringing on multiple things. So it just means that workload, that effort is going to increase but also means you've got so many things to juggle and think about that. If you're trying to bring on team members, you might have to look at, okay, who can support you in this process, who can support your other team members with the work that they're on whether it's the new team members can support them but also it's making sure that the team members that are more senior, that know the process, might be able to jump on other areas of onboarding new client activity while the new team members come in. So it's just looking at, okay, what's our capacity here, what are those priorities, and be really clear and organized with planning.

Speaker 2:

I always say to everyone, if you can give yourself half an hour extra a week to make sure that you have visibility over everything that's going on, versus being stuck down in the weeds, that's what really stable operations and good client processes, good team processes is going to be really vital at this stage to be able to make sure that you have that headspace to see everything clearly, and that would be amazing. I think I would say there's probably like if I could say two tips. It's just understanding your capacity and making sure that you've got clear roles and responsibilities for existing team members and seeing if there's any extra responsibility that they can take on at that time with client work or client communication. But also, is there any immediate areas or skills in the new team members that you can see that could help support those existing team members as you go through that transitional period Totally?

Speaker 1:

Totally Okay. So, kind of in line with that, I'm hearing a lot of like here's what you do and I know how valuable tools can be in this process. So like there's countless software out there and it can be hard to know which one to bite into, or even if the ones you're using are the best. So what tools do you recommend for streamlining operations and making this like scaling, onboarding of both client and team more efficient?

Speaker 2:

So definitely if you aren't already using some kind of CRM and I know 80% of brands that I know are using one but making sure that set up and working efficiently to both onboard clients, make sure that your resourcing and projects are planned in there efficiently, and especially if you're an agency, for example, there's so many tools I know out there that do some great things. Forecast, scoro are two. I know a lot of people that if your project management system as well is set up effectively and is integrated with your CRM, and I think automations are a great thing to help connect systems. But my one biggest advice is actually less is more when coming to doing this easily.

Speaker 2:

There's never going to be one system that does it all and I don't think there should be, because not one system can do everything in its best possible way but it's looking at how can we integrate our systems to make sure we're not using too many things to make the process really complicated and having to go to multiple different locations. So let's say we have one CRM, that we use our project management system and they feed into each other to set up projects smoothly and connected by automations. Tools like Zapier are fantastic for that, and actually more so now. I know with tools like Mondaycom, clickup and HubSpot have in-house integrations that connect with loads of different CRMs, which makes the process so much easier. It's actually being able to take the time and get the support honestly with someone that is in firstly in operations but also in tech that can help you connect those up in a smooth way so that it works for you.

Speaker 1:

So true, yeah, we use a couple of different tools, like we use Monday and Honeybook and we have those integrate from like a sales and CRM point of view and it's it saves a lot of time but also keeps everyone in the loop when things are happening, when you're not always around it on top of it all. So, especially if you're like a smaller team that you got you all managed. You all kind of wear a couple different positional hats, so, like some are doing sales and strategies, some are doing marketing and sales.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, that's I totally see that Interestingly and I'd love to ask you the question do you in in in brand good time? Do you time track the different activities that you do internally?

Speaker 1:

Yes, so our team is hourly W2 hourly which in the United States just means like it's an employer. They're considered employees, not contractors. But there's different ways in the US that you can do that and, yeah, so ours is W2. And when it's hourly, you have to have time sheets, and the way we have time sheets is we use a time tracking tool called toggle, and I always say like, that tool for us is more than just payroll, it's it's data and insights into where time's being spent. It helps us actually scope for projects because we take averages and and really scope based on, like, what's been done, if we can draw lines to scenarios, which is also part of, like our scaling process. So, yeah, to answer your question, yes, we do time track and I highly recommend it for a lot of businesses.

Speaker 2:

And I was gonna. I was gonna say, if you're looking to scale and you're looking to find out where your time's going and how you can increase, not just find opportunities within your existing process, but looking to scale, if you're not time tracking different areas and where your team's time is being spent, how that allocates to the cost, so understanding your utilization rate, you're wasting so much opportunity there and there's so much insight, like you're saying, that you can gain from that to be able to identify how can we scale, how can we increase capacity without necessarily bringing on new team members. That's your ultimate way of finding more time.

Speaker 1:

Totally. Yeah. We even break it down to like on our P&L statements, like we work with our finance team to see like what is cost of goods wages versus what is expense to wages. So like what can what, like what's within the business versus what goes to clients. So it's it's really interesting to see that that split and break out in the fluctuations and like using that to plan really.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it will be different depending on clients that we have on retainer versus clients that we do project work for. And it's a lot easier to understand for retainer work because often retainer works worked on a time basis or smaller projects within a standardized delivery process and that's where actually having that process is so beneficial. I know I worked with a founder who now does this quite regularly and they track time. But often they struggled with it because they went so granular that it meant that when it came to their managing their client experience and actually managing the time spent over each different area, they looked like they spent so much time because they couldn't see the overall process, because they just track time, versus actually having that process mapped to know what that was first. So it's really interesting to see like, if we map that out and then we track our time as we're delivering it, we can start to allocate time spent to each different area and how long a task or a service could take versus how long it should take.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it all comes back to profitability too.

Speaker 1:

I mean that's like a big reason we track as well is like, okay, like that tells us, like, right, then, and there, where is our most profitable service and how can we allocate funds from those profits to grow and do other things? Yeah, 100%, there's so many benefits to it, so okay. So I wanna switch over and talk about client experience. Okay, so we've got you know, hypothetically speaking, you've got a client and you've been working with them for a while let's call it a monthly retainer, not necessarily a project and you have the different ways that you serve them that they're expecting.

Speaker 1:

How can service-based brands really measure the success of their client experience strategies? You know you live in the silo as a brand where you like maybe you experience other service-based businesses where you can see what their client experience measures are, and you're like, oh, I wanna try that, but then also I just feel like you live in a vacuum, so you don't know what you could be doing, and I really think it all comes back to the data. You know I'm like psycho about data. So how can brands measure and are there any KPIs or metrics that they should focus on in their client experience strategies?

Speaker 2:

100%. So I think, dependent on your industry and what your services are. So there's a couple within that could be custom to you and your business. So it depends on what your client results could be. So and I often look at it on transformations in terms of clients, in terms of your client experience strategy, but also their client success. So I often see you have your internal metrics and then the client's metrics and depending on who you're targeting is what's important.

Speaker 2:

So if you're looking at client metrics and let's take your business, for example, that you're looking at increased leads through websites, that could be since adapting or updating their website. Actually the increased amount of leads their leads before versus leads after those are in terms of client experience metrics to show that you've actually improved your client experience is they've got more results. It's not just you've improved your product, you've improved your speed of results internally, but it's also meant that they've got a 10 times return on investment versus a five times return on investment because you're more efficient, because you've adapted and refined it. But also in terms of measuring that testimonials are great ones, both looking at if we can get an NPS score, and then you're measuring that against your referrals how many clients. You get through referrals, because I see so many brands, so many that say we have a great NPS score about 9.8, and then you ask them where'd you get your business from, where we got our business through ads? Well, where's the referrals then?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so talk to us about net promoter scores. So what is NPS and how do you track it?

Speaker 2:

So when you see on a survey and it's really simple to do how likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend or a colleague? And if you say eight or nine, well that means you're really likely to. But then I think, consequentially from that and it's really fantastic to keep your NPS score super high. But for me personally and this is more of a personal opinion is you've got to have the data to back up your NPS score. Even though it's a point, of data is to go okay, where is our business coming from? If most of our business is coming from referrals and we can actually allocate, we've got a higher NPS score and we're improving on that every year then we're getting more business through referrals. Actually, that quantifies both the NPS score, the net promoter score that you're getting, but also how you're getting your business. That shows an increase in business. There's things like client satisfaction, but I prefer to track things like client loyalty. So their lifetime value increasing client lifetime value and how much they spend with you is a really good one to look at when you're tracking your client experience. Clients that stay with you for a long time also means that they're loving the experience that they have with you. I would say those are probably my two things.

Speaker 2:

I think for someone that is looking to measure their client experience and make sure that they're improving on it is finding base metrics around how long your clients stay with you. So you've got your LV, is your CLV, which is your client lifetime value, but you can also have your client lifetime duration so what is that? And measure those two against each other and how they go up. And often it's interesting because, depending on the client, sometimes it's not great to have a client lifetime value of 15, 20 years because actually our business transforms.

Speaker 2:

I think a really good average lifetime value is about five years maximum and it gives you an opportunity to then readjust and refresh because your clients aren't always gonna be the same, they're not always going to have the same needs. But if you stay with a client for five years, there's so much you can do in that time, there's so much value that they can get and their success. And if you measure their success, and what could that be to them? Whether that's a revenue indicator, whether that's a profitability indicator, how much time you've saved them, how much you've improved their mindset this could be so many different factors, but it also depends on what's important to them and what their, what success looks like to them and that's a really good measure of their client experience or their success throughout your client experience, should I say.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's awesome. So what are some recommendations or best practices you have for service-based businesses who are looking to enhance their customer experience while navigating the growth?

Speaker 2:

Okay. So my first one is map out your customer experience journey. If you haven't already, if you haven't got it, re-look at it and have a look, as put yourself in the client shoes. You have to do that to go okay. Who are they and what are they likely to go through? How would I experience going through, let's say, a website rebrand with BrandoTime, and we used to do it when I was in hospitality, so we used to get our team to clean a bathroom and then we'd used to get them to go in the bathroom and pretend to be a client and sit on the toilet and check to see if all the spots were clean. And it's a really good one because you can look under the hood of your own journey and see, sometimes, some of the areas or we actually missed that or we could do this to. For example, we could add in an extra touch point just here, because if we add in this touch point, we can extract all that information upfront, versus sending five different emails to the client to get the same information. So it could save a lot of time.

Speaker 2:

The other way is get feedback from clients. Get feedback from your clients, whether that's both a client interview, so asking them through surveys as they go through the process, but also jumping on a call with them and being really specific about what you're looking for, about what phase of the experience. So, if it's the structure, if it's the accountability, if it's the communication, if there's any areas within the team that went really, really well, any team members that stood out and advice that they got any really key takeaways, those are some fantastic ways to ask, because you can get so much data and so much understanding of what the client's saying and how they communicate and their body language that you probably wouldn't necessarily get from a survey. But surveys also give people the opportunity to give you feedback more anonymously. The other way is looking at your data in the backend. So making sure that you have you're looking at tracking certain things across your client experience. So if it's upfront in acquisition or how you bring in clients, you've got your website, your social media, the conversations, the sales cause, your conversion rates, that are great indicators of that.

Speaker 2:

But then, as you go through kind of your service itself and the delivery of it, there's so many touch points that you can do is okay, are we completing? Are we meeting scope on time? So tracking your time throughout. That's a really good indicator. Tracking results that the client gets, tracking their satisfaction, energy levels, communication, responsiveness to emails, support tickets these are all things that you can track on going. If they're more engaged with you, then chances are that actually they're having a greater experience. If they're not engaged at all, then there's a red flag there and there's a sign that something needs to change from your side to be able to reach out and communicate with them. And then, as you off-board and retain them, it's look at what are those metrics there that we can track? And as you go through that journey with a client, you can look so holistically to go that was really good for that client, but this one not so much and you can start to find patterns and similarities and overall services as to where those improvements might need to be.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love what you said about the surveys and not just like sending surveys but talking with your clients about them. That's something we actually.

Speaker 1:

It was funny, we had a call this morning with a client and one of the line items on our agenda was hey, you gave us four stars instead of five. You know, like, four out of five like help us understand, like, where we can do better. And the client it's so funny. You know, like this is why it's good to have the conversation, because you could take that and beat yourself up about it. And also, like that metric is tied directly to one of our team members. And so I then have to have the conversation like, hey, you didn't get five out of five stars, so, and like, your average is supposed to be four, point, five out of five. So you know, like that deans performance and so, but then going back to the client and saying that to her, you know saying like, hey, where did we miss the mark? Why are we, why aren't we five out of five?

Speaker 1:

The client said to us oh, I don't give anything. Five out of five. Nothing's ever five out of five. Like there's always room for improvement for everyone. I had to sit and digest that with her and say, yeah, well, you know, from our point of view, that means we're missing something. And like we like tell us where that room for improvement is. And she was like, oh Well, like I don't think there's room for improvement. I just don't give five stars. And so I was like oh, okay, she's like do you want me to go back and adjust it? And I'm like kind of, but it's okay, like the next survey you can give five stars. So it's yeah, you have to the conversation, because we're sitting here mulling on it like what did we do wrong?

Speaker 1:

Like what where was the drop-off and communication? Where, like we weren't worthy of five stars? She felt like if she gave us five stars it would mean that we would start slacking in our performance, which is probably, like you know, a mindset thing on their end. But again, I think that's just reinforces why it's important to have conversations alongside surveys.

Speaker 2:

I was speaking to an operations coach the other day and she gets five stars and fantastic feedback and from her perspective she says this is great.

Speaker 2:

But how do I then ask when to improve if they're not giving me, how do I know how to adapt and develop if they're not giving me anything that I can do to it, like any recommendations? They're not giving me that validation that there is an area that needs to be improved. And that's where, to be honest, a lot of the work I do for clients is actually Ask those clients the hard questions and actually dig deep. And often it's quite a scary thing to be able to hand that process over to someone else, because there's often clients that we don't want Someone to speak to. We don't want them to ask those questions. But actually having an objective party come in and do that for you, it's game-changing because it then gives the client the opportunity to really feel connected to the business, that the business really values their opinion and wants to improve, and that often Improves the client experience by default, just by getting them more involved in that. You actually want to hear their feedback on how they can do better how the?

Speaker 2:

business can do better for them as a client.

Speaker 1:

Right, and this is your. So transitioning here. This is your secret sauce. You know how to ask the questions that are gonna get the clients who give five stars and great feedback to think a little bit deeper. And you know, provide recommendations and things that they like, desires that they have. Right yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's identifying opportunities as well. I did some client interviews in the last quarter for a client here, a consultant, and he has a fantastic experience and his clients actually get a hell of a lot of results. But we identified a new service that he could offer a client that wanted retain its support that would have. That gave him at least another 1215 thousand in retain revenue that he didn't have already over six months and he then knew that he would have been able to sign that client on for a good four years.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's what, and that just goes to show as to how much money you're potentially leaving on the table by not getting the right Information or the right opportunities from there, from your clients, because often they they don't feel comfortable asking the questions. It has to come from you. They're not often going to ask for ongoing support. It's for you as a business or you as a service provider to be able to go in and dig deep to see how you can make sure they have continued success and they love to Feel that you're their strategic partner and identify those opportunities for them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, this is where and I don't know if this is something you work on your clients with, but we're real big on the exit strategy. So in every single project we have an even retainer service. So if it's a retainer service, like within the last two months of the service, we are already internally planning about an exit strategy to present to them. And that usually goes one of two ways we're not working with you anymore, goodbye, or you know if it's not a good fit any longer, or it's it's. Here's some like we are doing the research to identify further opportunities to help them continue to grow.

Speaker 1:

And it's same on the projects, like with our website service, we always kick off the project in this from from the point of sale, from the like from that sales call.

Speaker 1:

We're saying like we come to that call with research and we kind of give them a glimpse into continuation at that point where we're like, hey, we're gonna do this for you, but here's, by the way, here's the potential for your brand based on like typically this looks like SEO keywords or just how Important and valuable it is to keep your website updated. You know, like, once you launch it, like it's not set and forget. And we always like the table, like we always set the table at the very beginning with that information so that they're not shocked when we come back at the end with hey, all right. So we did some further research and we identified that like these keywords that we didn't actually work into your site because we were really focused on these core keywords. These secondary keywords can actually drive upwards of two to three thousand more visits to your website per month If we focus on them and like here's how we see that happening. And so exit strategy is so big for us as part of our client experience.

Speaker 2:

I am so glad you said as well that you actually bring that up at the start, or you you find that from the start of that first sales call, because Actually most people when they go looking for certain types of support and this is not this can't be generalized to everyone, but I know now from a lot of clients that I work with most of their clients want a longer term strategy. They're just finding the right person to support them with that and Usually it's that case of they know already by as soon as they sign on that when they come into that sales Called they're looking for what can this business do for me long term versus just getting me quick wins? And If you can identify that and that's where you'll find Most people ask the questions is to go how, how can you support me long term or what does that look like on going. And I get so Many questions as when I speak to people they say what does that look like after this project?

Speaker 2:

So, it's having that already in place when you speak to that client, or already, ways that you can identify as to go. Well, depending on the first initial phase of this project, we'll be able to get a better scope of that, but there are definitely a hundred percent ways that we can support you, whether that's through SEO or, for me, whether that's going through ongoing advisory and refinement of your client experience for the next 12 months, with client interviews annually, and that Support or that partnership is something that a lot of people are looking for totally, totally.

Speaker 1:

I love that. That's awesome. Are there any other final insights or actual advice that you can give our listeners about client experience or operational alignment?

Speaker 2:

I Think if it comes to trying to meet and exceed your client expectations. My biggest thing alongside the points I've mentioned around clearly mapping that process, understanding where those roles of your team can support that and making sure that process is in place first, using that client feedback is Understand your client's base level of expectations. So one of the biggest things as we scale is we have such high clients, then have such high expectations because we end up we always over deliver for them. As we scale we can't offer the same service because we don't have the time or the capacity. So understand your clients, really understand that in that scoping phase of your project right at the start, is what is their base level of expectations? And ensure that your service can meet that If it their expectations are beyond what that base level is anyway and you don't feel that you can meet it. Be completely transparent about what that service is and what they should expect from going through it.

Speaker 2:

Because the one of the some of the biggest challenges that I often find the service based businesses go into is they say, yes, we can do this, yes, we'll be able to provide X, y and Z and, like I said before, it's that over promising and undivided delivering and as you're scaling, we need to make sure that we can deliver the basic of what they're expecting. If anything and that's still not ideal but at least if we can deliver that we know that we've given enough of a service that's not going to damage our reputation. Awesome, awesome. How can our listeners find you and learn?

Speaker 1:

more about how they can work with you.

Speaker 2:

So you can definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. It's better to have a link to the service. It's better Hegatee on LinkedIn and Instagram. I'm probably more active on LinkedIn than I am on Instagram, but you can find me on both platforms or on YouTube. I do have my own YouTube channel, which is a big focus for me personally this year, so you can find so much information. I hosted a live series at the end of last year on there and you can find all the episodes on there and just jump on a call book, a consultation with me, have a chat. I'm so open to meeting so many founders and just ways that they want to improve their client experience and any insight I can give.

Speaker 1:

Yes, your series last year was amazing. I attended a few of those, so I highly recommend that and we'll make sure that all of that is linked in the show notes. And if you are at all interested in client experience this year which you should be, because if you listen to this whole episode and you get here right now, you understand what a massive ripple effect prioritizing that can have on your entire business Definitely book a call with Bella, but thank you so much, bella, for coming on the podcast today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me. It was amazing to chat to you and your entire audience about this topic.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, thank you, alright. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of she's Busy AF. We will see you on the next one.

People on this episode

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Aurrie Hicks

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Lauren Loreto

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