Small Business Savvy | Web Design, Systems, and Marketing

182. What's Actually Happening in Your Client Experience (And How Do You Fix It)?

• Kristen Doyle, web design and business strategy

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In this episode, I break down how to improve your client experience and how that supports smarter decisions and sustainable small business growth.

We all want our business systems and customer journeys to run smoother, but most of us don’t stop to map out what’s really going on. I’m walking you through why it matters to see the gaps between what you think should happen and what your clients are actually experiencing. Those small friction points aren’t just annoying, they can quietly cost you time and erode trust with your clients and customers. 

You’ll get simple steps for mapping out your real customer journey and identifying exactly where things break down. I’ll share how I’ve streamlined my own processes, plus the low-hanging fruit you can automate today using website strategy and smart tools. And because I don’t believe in massive overhauls or random changes, I’ll help you decide what to fix first for the biggest impact with the least effort. If you want a client experience that builds trust (and maybe frees you from those repetitive emails), this episode is for you.

01:34 - Why you need to map out your real client journey (not the idealized version)

03:54 - Three common gaps eroding client trust and how to spot them

05:53 -  Real-life example: Catching and fixing communication breakdowns

09:52 - Simple automation wins for smoother customer experiences

11:53 - How to prioritize what to fix first in your client process

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode182 

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Kristen Doyle:

Here's a question for you. When was the last time you actually mapped out what happens when someone works with you or buys from you? Not what you want to happen, not what you think should happen, but what actually happens? Because whether you're working one on one with clients or someone is walking into your shop, there is a customer experience happening, and in almost every business I've seen, that experience could use some improvement. It usually has the same handful of gaps that are quietly costing you time and eroding trust in your clients or your customers. So today, we are going to talk about slowing down enough to map out what's actually happening in your customer experience so that you know exactly what to fix and in what order. That way, you can stop randomly changing things and start making changes that actually matter. I've noticed something about small businesses. Most established business owners have figured out what they're selling. What they haven't figured out is what to focus on to actually grow. That's what we're here for. Welcome to Small Business Savvy. I'm Kristin Doyle, and around here, we talk about business systems, website strategy, simplified marketing, and the strategic decisions that grow your business. If you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and start building smarter, let's go. So here's the thing about streamlining in your business. We all want to do it. We want to make things run better and smoother and make things feel easier for us and our clients or our customers. But before we can streamline anything, you have to know what's actually happening. Most of us try to jump in and start fixing things before we know what's broken. Now, before I dive into what we're doing, I do want to point out that whether I say the word client or customer, this applies to both. Whether you work with clients or customers, there is a customer journey, a client experience that your people have when they work with you or when they purchase from you. So the same types of gaps show up regardless of which kind of business you run. Just roll with it if I switch back and forth between calling it clients or customers today. All right, so the first thing that I want you to do is map out the current customer journey. So to do that, just take a little time to write down what is actually happening right now when someone works with you or purchases from you, not what you wish was happening, but what's really going on. So if you're a service provider, maybe this looks like the customer finds you. They reach out. Maybe they book a discovery call, or you respond over email, depending on your process. They purchase or sign up. There's some sort of onboarding, hopefully. You deliver, and either they're done or they come back for more. Now, if you're a product seller, this looks a little different. So someone finds your product or lands on your website, they buy, they receive it, and they either come back or they don't. As you're jotting these down, note which things happen automatically versus which ones you're manually doing every single time, because this can give you some important spots where you might make some improvements down the road. Look at things like what emails you're sending, what customers have to figure out on their own, where you are doing the same thing over and over and over. Kind of make notes of those types of things as you're writing down what happens in your current customer experience. Now, once you have it on paper, I want you to look for three things that show up in almost every single business. The first one is unclear expectations, and we talked about this some in the last episode. But when customers don't know what's happening next, what they'll receive, how long things take, or what you need from them, this creates worry, and they start sending follow up emails are checking in to see if they need to do anything. Maybe they're calling customer service about an order, or they're no showing for appointments, or they ghost you, and that's even worse. But every time that something like this happens, it's a sign that there's something in your process that wasn't clear to them up front. The second one is missing information, those spots where your customer has to stop and ask you a question that you feel like they should already know the answer to. Every time that happens, that gives you a clue that you have something you can fix or improve. These are things that probably should have been answered up front or made clear in your FAQs or emails or emails that you send after purchase, things like that. And every one of these questions slows things down for the customer and also creates more work for you. It creates these little friction points in your work, and it turns into a poor client experience for them. The third thing that we see pretty often is these communication gaps where there's kind of this awkward silence between when they buy and when they get the thing they paid for. That gap, that silence, is where the doubt can really creep in. And I talked about this a little bit recently in another episode too. For customer facing businesses, we're talking about that gap between purchase and delivery, or between checking out and getting that email that your order has shipped with the tracking number. Those sorts of things. For service businesses, it's all the time that goes between when they book and when you start the project. One of the best ways, really, to find these friction points, all three types, is to pay attention to what your actual clients are saying and doing. I actually had this happen to me recently with my new Clear View Sites offer. So if you're not familiar, Clear View Sites is a brand new offer I have out there where I build websites specifically for home inspectors. And since it's brand new, my processes there aren't quite as streamlined as the things that I've been doing for years and years that I've already spent a lot of time refining. And one of my first clients for clear review sites texted me a couple weeks ago and basically just asked, Hey, is there something I should be doing right now? And of course, I answered the question in the text, but that also reminded me that, hey, if he's asking, then I haven't been clear enough. And, you know, obviously I answered his questions in the moment. But I also started building out some things to make this more clear and to provide a little more guidance for the next client that comes on board. And it's not that I don't want to answer the one off questions. I don't mind them at all, but the reality is, this client probably sat around for several days, maybe a week, wondering what was going on, thinking, shouldn't she be emailing me something by now, before he ever reached out. And a lot of clients would just keep wondering and never ask, and maybe even start feeling like, Man, I just paid her this money, and she's not even doing anything. And that starts to erode trust, and kicks off our project on the wrong foot. So I'm fixing that gap so that we have a much better client experience the next time. And you can do the same thing in your processes in your business as well. Every time someone asks a question that you feel like they should already know, or just seems lost and is asking for direction, that's a point where you can make things more All right, let's talk about some specifics, what to look for and clear. what to fix. So we're not trying to just eliminate all the friction that there is. Some of it is just part of business and it's going to be there. But look for spots that are costing you time or they are diminishing customer confidence in the product, in you, in what they've purchased. Take a look back at that map that you made of the customer journey and put a star or circle around anything you're doing manually every single time. If you're writing welcome emails from scratch when someone signs up, that's a great opportunity to create a template so that you don't have to think through it every time, because chances are, you're saying basically the same things to people each time they sign up with you. If you're sending the exact same template, and the only thing you're changing in it is maybe their first name, that's an opportunity to fully automate this part of the process. If you are answering the same three questions before every single purchase, then you need to put these on your FAQ page, on the sales page itself, in an automated post purchase email. If you are manually sending reminders before due dates for the content that you need to collect and things like that, there are tools that can automate those reminders for you, and can make collecting content from your clients a lot easier. If you're a product seller, are your customers getting a confirmation email immediately when they purchase. Do they also get an email with tracking numbers and shipping information? Or are they buying and then just waiting around and wondering until magically, a box shows up at their house? These repeat tasks that we're doing, those are low hanging fruit, and they are really easy for you to automate or templatize, because you've already proven that they need to happen, and you already probably have essentially a template in your mind that you're using. You just haven't automated it yet. Now, some of my favorite tools for automating things, and I don't want to turn this into a long tools focused episode, but you can automate in your email marketing platform. Personally, I use Kit and absolutely love them. Highly recommend them. Most other email marketing platforms also have automation capabilities, though, so that you can send out sequences of emails triggered by certain actions. Your checkout process, whatever tool you're using for online checkouts should have automated confirmations and shipping emails if that applies. I use WooCommerce for products, and I use Thrive cart for things like coaching and courses and maintenance plans. Both of those have automated confirmation emails, and even can add people to those email sequences in my Kit account, so we can connect those things with some automations as well. For custom web design work, I use a platform called Content Snare, and that is really flexible and allows me to collect content for custom projects, but it sends out custom reminder emails based on the due dates that I've created. Now my Clear View Sites offer is a little different, and so it has its own custom platform that I've built, but that's a whole different process. So we won't go into that one too much. Another tool that I really love to use is Make for creating more complex automation workflows. This is where you can trigger automations that touch multiple different things in your business. So when someone purchases this on Thrivecart, I want them to get this tag on Kit, and I want them to get put into this Notion database, and I want them to get this task created in my CRM tool that I use, those sorts of things where we're having multiple things across multiple platforms. I personally use Make for this. I switched to them about a year ago. Really love it. I know Zapier is another option that people like. That's actually who I switched away from. Either one of them can work really well. All right, so let's talk about how to decide what you need to fix first, because obviously you can't just stop everything else in your business to fix all of your customer experience. So there are two things that I would suggest you prioritize based on. The first one is the time cost for you, how much time per week or per transaction are you spending fixing these things or doing these manual tasks? And then the second is the customer impact. How much does it affect your client experience or their confidence in purchasing from you? So those things that have the highest time cost and highest customer impact, fix those first, because those are draining your time and they're eroding trust with your clients. And then kind of work down to the other things, the ones that are high time cost, low customer impact, high impact, low time cost, work down into those after you fix the ones that are really heavily impacting both areas. All right, so let's talk about action steps. I've kind of dripped those out to you throughout this episode, but let's just recap what I want you to do this week. The first thing is to write out your customer journey, the real version of what's actually happening right now, whether you love it or you don't. Give yourself 20 minutes tops to do this. Don't overthink it, just jot down what's going on. Highlight anywhere a customer is waiting or wondering or asking questions or anything like that. And then pick one thing, the one that is showing up most often, the one that is taking the most of your time, the one that is causing the most confusion. And decide how to fix it now. Whether it's a template, an automated email, you send out, better explanations on your website, more info and some existing emails, whatever it is, decide how to fix it, and then fix that one thing this week, and then you can tackle the rest of them over time. Keep in mind that creating a good client experience, one that runs itself and builds trust with your clients, is not something that happens overnight, but it also doesn't require a massive overhaul all at one time. It really just starts with knowing what you currently have and then making one smart fix at a time. If this episode helped you see some gaps in your own process, I would love to hear about it. Come find me on instagram@kristendoyle.co and let me know what you're fixing first. While you're there, share this episode with a friend, a fellow entrepreneur who might have some of the same problems and could benefit from listening. I'll talk to you soon.