The creative industry is becoming more and more competitive. With an abundance of alternatives, your company needs to have an edge.
Beyond delivering results, client satisfaction is vital in keeping existing clients and getting new ones if you want to receive good testimonials and referrals. This highlights the importance of ensuring that every person in your company puts out their 101%, one hundred precent of the time.
Let’s talk about how you can make client satisfaction part of your company's DNA.
9 Ways To Scale Customer Satisfaction For Your Agency
Manage Client Expectations
Customer expectations are “sets of ideas about a service, brand or product”. These can be shaped by rumors, advertising, hearsay, past experience, etc. And their validity? It doesn’t always matter. Customer expectations are based on perception, and they can work for you or against you.
High expectations can help you close deals However, they’ll also give you a high bar for your performance. Low expectations may make it challenging for you to bag customers. But once you get it, satisfaction will be easier to manage.
It’s very important to be aware of these expectations be ready to manage them.
- How To Manage Client Expectations
The ability to gauge the validity of your client’s expectations will all come down to how well you know your strengths and your weaknesses as a company.
As early as your pitching phase, find a way to ask about what your client has heard about you or the type of work that you do. This will give you a glimpse of how they see you. If you find that there’s a disconnect, address them try to achieve a comfortable footing where expectations are more or less balanced with what you can provide.
Generally, it’s good practice to underpromise and overdeliver.
Take Care Of Your Employees
It can be tempting to push employees to meet hard client requirements. Studies have shown that agencies, despite their best intentions, tend to do this without knowing.
However, if you want your clients to have a great experience with your brand, taking care of your employee experience is key.
Chick-fil-A makes more revenue per restaurant than Mc Donalds, Starbucks, and Subway combined —while being closed on Sundays. What accounts for this success? Hiring employees and taking care of them with the intention of keeping them for the long haul.
While the work schedule of Chick-fil-A may not work for you, the key idea is this: taking care of employees will inspire them to take better care of your business.
- How To Take Care Of Your Employees
Employee happiness can bear fruit in many ways. Happy employees increases your revenue, retention, and the quality of your teams’ performance.
Getting employee feedback is a good way to align with your employees’ values and current ordeals. Take the time to evaluate the culture, compensation, and growth opportunities you provide so you can offer benefits that are relevant to them.
Train For Communication Skills
Communication skills are vital in starting, building, and maintaining client relationships. It builds trust and it allows things to move forward.
When an account or project manager is a good communicator, he can smoothly navigate conflict and hurdles. He can also encourage collaboration and nurture relationships with his team and your clients.
Communication isn’t just about managing project information. It also includes effectively sharing and receiving feedback so that the members are inspired to do better and grow.
- How To Communicate Effectively
To foster communication skills in your company, highlight its importance and provide best practices you’ve learned along the way. In case there are communication errors, take the time to correct them with empathy.
Whenever you start working on a new project, align with your client on a communication plan: how often does your client want to be contacted? What channels do they prefer for regular updates and which ones do they prefer for emergencies?
When in doubt, it’s best to overcommunicate than under-communicate.
Finally, consider adding your contact details to your email signature so your clients know how to reach you in case there are urgent issues.
Provide Timely Support
Setbacks are inevitable. As an account or project manager, managing conflict is an immensely important skill. Whenever your client needs support, a sense of urgency and timeliness can help ease some tension.
Addressing issues as soon as possible and constantly updating on your progress will give clients the impression that their business is important to you. This will make them feel like you’re doing everything you can to fix issues as soon as possible.
- How To Provide Timely Support
Consider adopting a customer relationship management software to ensure that you’re on top of all your client interactions. With so many things happening in an agency, organizing client concerns and updates will be extremely handy when things have to move fast.
Give frequent incremental updates when the going is tough. And before more issues erupt, be sure you and your client are aligned on the risks that you’re taking and the most effective lines of communication for you to raise urgent concerns.
Give Loyal Customers Preferential Treatment
Allow me to drop a truth bomb: Companies can boost 100% of their profits by retaining 5% of their customers, studies have shown. Loyal customers are worth 10x their initial transaction.
While it sounds fair to treat all your customers in the same way, it would be in your best interest to give your loyal customers more perks, gifts, discounts, and attention.
- How To Pamper Your Loyal Customers
Making your loyal customers feel special can be done through small or big efforts. Little gestures can include remembering first names, and birthdays, treating them to restaurants they like whenever you meet face-to-face, etc.
Bigger gestures can be shortening onboarding whenever you start new projects. You can also provide discounts and throw in additional services, especially when they have requests.
Assess Customer Needs
As with any project, it’s important to know how your project helps them in their business goals and priorities. Grasping this will make you more capable to make challenging decisions, and putting things in perspective when things don’t go as planned.
Assessing your customer’s needs will also help you communicate and ideate better.
- How To Assess Customer Needs
Understanding what your customers’ needs can take a multi-pronged approach.
Part of it will involve taking your own initiative to research. Read up and ask around, especially if there are people in your office who have worked with them before.
Another part involves collaborating with your client. Raise questions that arrived at you as you were gathering information. Discuss relevant things in more detail.
You can also explore the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) Framework by Tony Ulwick, which is a template that helps you evaluate if you already have all the information you need.
Be Proactive
Your clients hire you because they trust your expertise. It’s implied that you’re expected to make their job easier. Being proactive —meaning, actively offering assistance and relevant information without having to be asked —will help you deliver that promise.
It’s important to be responsive and reactive, but that should not be enough. There’s a vital place for that in your client-agency relationship. But the initiative should not always come from your client. It should come from you as well. In fact, this should be the case most of the time.
Anticipating their needs and acting on them before they arrive will surely impress your clients.
- How To Be Proactive
To anticipate your clients’ needs, the first step is to get to know them.
Before the project starts, look into past projects that share similarities to what you’re about to work on. Ask members of your team who have experience with the client or with similar situations. This can enlighten you with situations you’ll likely encounter so you can secure measures to manage them if you do.
Once your project begins, actively listen to your customers. This will help you understand their key concerns, so you can prepare to address them whenever it applies.
Finally, check-in with your clients constantly. This will help ensure that you’re aligned in sentiment and information to make the project successful.
Make the first move. Sometimes, that’s all it takes for you to get ahead.
Streamline Your Process
Momentum is a vital factor for a project team’s workflow and productivity. Red tape and tedious processes can ruin that momentum.
Before and during production, actively identify hurdles and bottlenecks and take steps to resolve them. Be sensitive to processes that give friction. They may start small, but they tend to add up when left unattended.
- How To Streamline Your Process
Constantly review your process and try to resolve them immediately. Identify key people that can provide assistance and negotiate with them. State what you’re going through, why it’s important, and request for a compromise on what can be done.
If there are business and project processes that are tedious but necessary, consider automating.
Finally, look into using tools to facilitate communication and the management of different parts of your projects. Using a tool like Workamajig, for example, centralizes relevant project information in one place. This allows for smooth communication, task management, progress management, and more.
Get Customer Feedback
(And Act On Them)
Feedback—especially when negative —can be tricky to deal with. However, soliciting them after project milestones (or project completion) has two key benefits: first, they give you concrete direction on your opportunities for growth. And second, they make your clients feel like they matter.
Acting on feedback is just as important. Even when your project has ended, you can consider dropping a quick line to share how you adjusted things to as a response to their previous input. Who knows? This quick interaction might instantly put you on their radar for their next project.
- How To Get Customer Feedback
The most common ways to get feedback are through casual conversations or a survey. Focused discussions are also popular if your clients are willing to take the time.
Not all feedback has to be structured. In your conversations with your client, casually ask what they think and check on how they’re feeling. This can give you a quick understanding of their sentiments and what they wish could be improved in real time.
Surveys can be done through a survey tool, where you can ask 1-3 questions to know their thoughts on specific areas.
Over To You
Client satisfaction is important to retain clients in this competitive environment. As your team grows, it can be challenging to monitor every aspect of your business.
Instead of breathing down people’s necks, inject these tips into your training, policy, and culture. This way, they can eventually be habits that your teams barely have to think of when they work.
