Your Clients Don’t Know What To Expect From You…
One of the keys to retaining clients is consistency in your customer service; if you communicate really well during some months and inconsistently during others, your clients won’t know what to expect from you and will move on. Show up, be consistent, and set your customer service standard at a level you can maintain. Do your clients know what to expect from you?
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Video Transcript:
This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
Now what I’m about to share with you over the next five, ten minutes here comes from my time as an account executive at an organization that I was with in Wisconsin, the Burke Walden Associates. Dan Burke Walt was one of my first mentors, but it was at Burke Walden Associates. I learned the true meaning of customer service and what it meant to have dialed in service expectations.
We had one process that we ran for every single client and it was dialed in. It was clear so that if we ever lost an account exec or account manager, it was next man up because we followed one process. So a lot of what I’m about to share comes directly from my time at Burke Walden Associates. Dan, if you’re listening, I owe you for this episode.
Do your clients know what to expect from you? I would argue for most agencies, the answer is no because your your service is inconsistent. Sometime throughout the year, you are over the top. You’re holding their hand and at other times they barely hear from you. There’s no consistency. The other challenge I see for a lot of agencies is there has there has been no delineation between what your clients get as service, depending on their size or the amount of revenue they generate for you.
I see a lot of agencies who give the same amount of time and hand-holding to a 20 life group as they do a 200 life group or a commercial agency, given the same amount of handling to a $10,000 revenue account as they do $100,000. And you should not be giving the level the same level of service to all clients.
You can challenge me on that, but I know it to be true, especially if you’re going to scale successful, profitable business. Because I’m here to tell you, if you believe you need to be hand-holding your smaller clients, you are losing money on them. And you have also set a very new expectation with them that you cannot maintain. If you’re doing too much hand-holding for your smaller groups, for your smaller clients, they have now come to expect it.
This was a challenge we often ran into at Procurement Associates. Sometimes we would set such a high bar, it became the new standard our clients had for us, so that if we didn’t maintain our own bar that we set to them, it looked like we had started to fall short, even though we were still giving them a level of service that was 3 or 4 times better than they’ve ever had.
We set our own standard. We became our own enemy. But you have to set clear expectations. What are your clients going to expect from you when it comes to service? Number one, you need to sit down and you need to figure out what your clients get based on their size. Yes, you need to tier out each client based on size, and you need to set a clear expectation of service that they’re going to get as a result of how big they are, small groups, they’re going to get a certain level of service, but they’re not going to get the same level of service as your big groups are.
At Berkel, if you had a more than a hundred lives, you were going to get four quarterly meetings from us. But if you were under 100 lives, you were not going to get four quarterly meetings, you were going to get two. And if you were under 50 lives or under 25, you were probably going you weren’t going to get one check in from us.
We set a very clear standard for what you could expect from us, and if you didn’t like it, you probably weren’t a fit for us. And that’s okay. But you have to have clear expectations too many agencies have inconsistent expectations. Therefore your clients do not know what to expect from you. So if you want to create a service that says I love you, make sure your clients know exactly what they can expect from you.
Business is no longer about who you know. Business is about who knows you. In a noisy industry like we’re in gang, you got to get people to know who you are.