You Ask, I Answer: Doing a Good Job For Clients?

In this episode, Jill asks, how do you know you're doing a good job for your clients? Yeah, ask them. That's the easiest way to do it. Ask your clients, how are we doing? One of the things that good client services managers do is ask their clients, hey, how are things going?

And there are no shortage of systems available that can automate parts of this, sending out routine surveys, asking people simple questions like, how satisfied are you with the services you receive? Do you feel like you're getting your money's worth? Um, and of course, the most famous ones, the net promoter's uh score of questions, how likely are you to recommend your company? You know, how likely are you to recommend Trust Insights to a friend or a colleague in the next 90 days? Those questions and those scores all help you understand and triangulate whether you're doing a good job for your clients or not.

Just like using something uh like an NPS score, like a survey, uh email surveys and things, polls, questions, all those should be collecting data about your client relationships. And that's the the best way to gather that data so that you can analyze it on a regular and frequent basis and say, okay, here's the the scoring methodology we use to determine whether a client is happy with us or not. Likewise, your CRM system should be collecting this information. Your CRM system should be logging your interfaces with your clients, your email interactions and things. And this is a case where you can use some basic automation to help determine whether a client uh account is in trouble or not.

Let's say on any given week you interact with the client by email 25 times. Suppose for maybe a week or two weeks or three weeks, that drops to 10. Right? At that point, anomaly detection software within your system, uh, either built in or third party, should raise its hand and say, hey, you know, communication has dropped off here at 66%. Somebody go check this out.

Somebody go see what's going on. Maybe the client, you know, the your point of contact took off for a month to go backpack around Europe. Then that would be it would be understandable if that changed. Maybe you have a new point of contact, and that new point of contact just isn't as responsive. You'd want to know that.

Likewise, if you'd have normally 25 contacts with a client a week, and that spikes to 50 or to 75, you can ask and say, hey, what's going on here? If you're managing the overall relationship, you know, is there something new happening? Is it a new point of contact? Is there a crisis at the client that we need to be paying closer attention to? Or are we out of scope?

Are we doing stuff that is is not within the responsibilities that we've agreed to? All of those numerical anomaly detection mechanisms are really important for good client management. And the unfortunate part is that for a lot of software and a lot of systems, they are not really programmed to tell you that. And if you don't ask people how you are doing, now is a good time to start. Now is a good time to adopt that practice because it will help you detect and repair a problem sooner rather than later.

At the old agency that I used to work at, um client requires were sent out once a year. And when I asked about why aren't we collecting more data than this, uh, I was told that there were some people on the team who didn't want to hear bad news from the clients. I'm like, well, you can either hear the bad news sooner when it's less bad, or you can hear the really bad news when the client just fires you. And it's no surprise that um certain folks on the team, their clients churned faster because they didn't want to hear the bad news. So part of client management and client feedback is also having a culture where feedback is encouraged, where feedback is not penalized, and where you have a solutions-oriented culture to say, hey, this client's unhappy, what can we do to make them happier within the boundaries of the scope?

Uh at a different place I used to work at, there was a an unfortunate tendency to do a lot of scope creep. So if a client was unhappy, you would go well above and beyond what was defined in the scope of work to try and keep that client happy. Now there is a time and a place for that, but it comes at the expense of your team. And as we all know from the past few years, replacing your team is a lot harder than replacing a client. For good or ill, clients come and go all the time.

Uh, retaining good team members is uh a substantially more difficult challenge. So you do want to make sure that you're balancing doing a good job for your clients and doing a good job for your team. I would say if you wanted to clarify that statement, how do you know you're doing a good job for your good clients? How do you know that you're serving the clients that um adhere to the the scope of work that are equal partners in your business relationship that are respectful, that are uh professional things, uh they pay their bills on time, for example. All those would go into that definition of a good client.

So that's my answer. Numbers to look for activity changes, and then the qualitative feedback that you get that says, yes, this client relationship is in good condition, or this client relationship is not in good condition. And if you have clients, well, let's just put it this way: you should think about grading your clients, right? Just as you get feedback from your clients, you should be giving feedback to your management team, to your executive team, to your your key stakeholders to say, you know what? This client here, they suck.

They are not worth it. They are they are the juice is not worth the squeeze for that one. As soon as we can, let's replace that revenue and throw them overboard. This client is awesome. They pay their bills on time, they're polite, their meetings run on time, um, they take action on the stuff that we give them, they're clear in their direction.

Let's make sure that they get treated well, right? That they are first in line for new features, they are first in line for news from the company, they are first in line for any kind of discount. Feedback in general is essential. So do a good job for your good clients, do a good job for your good team members, and balance all of that carefully by looking at the numbers, by looking at the metrics, and that's why things like time tracking systems, when you use them properly, are a really good idea and a really good management tool for keeping a client and your team on the rails. But good question.

It's a very, very tough question. I mean, it's an entire profession of uh client service management. But that's those are the measures that I look at. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.