My fave apps for customer service in online service-based business

Staying customer / client-focused in your business is the whole point! Filtering your systems and marketing through the Cx lens makes for a better experience for everyone!

Transcript

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Hey Recovering Perfectionists, it's Claire Riley and you're listening to episode number 78 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. For this episode, you can head over to clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 78 and grab all the key takeaways and any links. And today we are I'm going to go through my favourite apps for customer service for online service-based businesses. Get asked this question quite often, and I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to my favorite apps. So I'm going to share them with you in just a sec. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, so as I mentioned on a previous uh episode, I think it was number 73 from memory, I talked about my favorite apps for planning and productivity. So today is my favorite apps for customer service delivery and for creating a really beautiful, seamless, and easy for you to deliver a beautiful customer journey to your clients as well. So back in the day when I first started my business, I had a freebie that was my top 25 apps or something. So I really feel like it's a bit of an iteration to come down to only four that I'm going to share with you today. Now, the ones that I'm sharing with you, some of them they all have their own functions, and there are more than one tool or software or app or whatever that does each of these functions. I'm just going to show you the ones that I use or talk through the ones that I use and what the functions are and what I love about them, and then you can make your own decision about what functions you need and what app you might like to choose as well. So the first one that I really love is Acuity. And Acuity is an online booking platform rather than having to go back and forth with when are you free? I'm free here, I'm not free there, what about this date? No, I can't do that one. What about this date? And so on and so forth, which gets very laborious, and most of the time people just float away because it just got too hard. Is you send them a booking link and you can have as many different types of appointments as you like with all the different rules, and they either pay now or they pay later, and it uh syncs with your calendar that you send them the link and they book in. You can ask them uh screening questions or anything like that as well, so that you've got all the information you need in order to get started on um working together or whatever it is. I really love with Acuity how personalized you can make the reminders and the confirmation emails as well. So they can be highly branded and they look like they came from you, not from Acuity, for example. So there are, as I mentioned, many, many other online tools that do the same sort of job. So you can have a look around and find one that's got the right elements and pricing structure for you. The second one that I love, and I'm always a bit scared to say this because I love it so passionately that I'm sure everyone's sick of me talking about it, but I absolutely love active campaign for email marketing. So I switched to active campaign from MailChimp probably about three years ago, and I've never looked back. Um there are some amazing things that you can do with Active Campaign, but no matter what you're using, whether it's Active Campaign, MailChimp, AWeber, um, gosh, there's millions of them. I don't even know what they're all called these days. But the things that I love that these platforms offer us is the ability in terms of a customer service delivery sort of area, is how we can onboard and offboard people into courses, memberships, VIP, any sort of freebie that we're putting out there and all of that sort of thing, that it's very automated, it's set and forget. So it's something that you can spend a bit of time putting the structure and the marketing and the content around, and then you set it up all the or you know, do all the things, and then you just have one job which is to drive traffic to that place and it does the job for you. So, you know, imagine how much um support and accountability people feel like they have when they're getting emails from you on a regular basis, depending on you know what the service or product is that they've come to you for, and they feel like they've they've got that one-on-one opportunity to engage with you and to understand what they're next what they need to do next and that sort of thing without having to ask questions. It saves you time, it saves them time. It's just a really easy and beautiful system to use. Um, I also really love any sort of templates. Templates make the world go round in online business systems, and it certainly takes the guesswork and the time and effort out of recreating the wheel every time we send something that gets sent to a lot of people quite regularly. So when you're sending newsletters or maybe workshop roundups or content roundups or whatever it is, there's really beautiful ways to set up easy templates that you can just rinse and repeat every week or every month, or however often you're doing your email communication that makes it look beautifully branded and it's got your voice and flavor on it, and they know what they're going to get every time. Awesome for the no like and trust factor. The third one is Asana. Now, I did actually mention Asana in the in the previous episode where I was talking about planning and productivity, because that is the main reason or the main function that we use Asana for. But often I set up for myself and also for a lot of my clients a almost like a CRM, which is client or customer relationship management tool, so we can see who's at what stage, who's paid for what, what do we need to do for all of these people so that we're moving everyone through the customer experience journey in a really succinct and uh supportive way. So you can also use Asana for that, whether it's just a checklist of what needs to be done for each new client, or it's a checklist for making sure that everyone's happy, or it's a checklist for what process people go through when they come into your business and then when they do the work, and then when they offboard out of the work, that sort of thing. And it's just a great tool for you to be able to keep your finger on the pulse with what's going on without having a big, fancy, expensive CRM because a lot of them are monsters. They are amazing, amazing tools, some of these big CRMs, the custom-built ones, but they're big, they're really big. So Asana is like the easy version, light version of how to do that. So I really love that. And last of all, there's a tool called Typeform, which is a really great tool to, it's like a survey tool where you can ask questions to onboard people, whether it's a health questionnaire or a current state of affairs questionnaire or something like that, as well as how to get some really in-depth feedback, which you can do anonymously or not anonymously, whatever that word is. Um, and it's a really beautiful, easy tool to use where people can literally just click, you can very easily customize it with your own branding, your colour, your feel, your icons, all of that sort of thing. Um, and as part of asking your audience for information, whether it's at the beginning or the end of their journey or both, it looks really tidy, it looks really schmick, and it means that the information that you're likely to get back from them is more easy to make it quantitative so that you can actually see who's answering what and is there a bit of a disconnect? Is there something that everyone really loves? Is there something that everyone doesn't seem to love so much? And you can then make decisions based on that information really effectively. So just to wrap up, those four things were acuity for online bookings, active campaign for email marketing, asana for CRM, and typeform for getting feedback and questions, questionnaires and that sort of thing. There are, of course, many, many others and lots others that I would love to talk about, but they are my top four that I use pretty much every day, if not every week, in terms of keeping my customers and clients super happy. So I hope that's helpful. Let me know if you have any questions about any of those. I'll put the links in the show notes, which is going to be at clairilly.co forward slash pod forward slash 78. And I will see you on the next episode. Bye everyone.