Wed, 16 March 2022
Are you looking for ways to improve your customer service? Have you implemented a customer success strategy in your organization? Nils Vinje is an author and leadership coach who founded the first-ever customer success firm, Glide Consulting, to help organizations improve their leadership skills and teaches the tools you may be lacking to implement a proper customer success strategy, which he details in his new book 30 Day Leadership. In this episode, we’ll discuss:
Sponsors and ResourcesAgency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you. SubscribeApple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM We’ve all had a bad customer experience some time in our lives. Maybe we feel exasperated by a customer service team and has failed to solve a problem several times or is slow to provide answers. As agency owners, we need to be aware of the consequences of inefficient customer service and how it will affect brand loyalty. It often boils down to lack of onboarding and a clear, no real-time assistance, and mostly the absence of a clear strategy. So how are you getting success for your clients? How can you improve your customer service? 5 Keys to a Great Customer Success StrategyAccording to Nils, it is very common for organizations to lump customer service with other areas like sales. It takes a village to serve a customer and there must be a team responsible for this task. “You have a product strategy,” he tells owners, “you have a sales strategy, what’s your customer strategy?” He often gets blank stares. Because of this, he prepared his own 5-Step framework for customer success:
If you answer each of these steps in a very detailed manner, then you now have a customer’s strategy. Keeping Track of Where You Stand With ClientsClient churn is going to happen, and that’s ok. It will be an opportunity for you to upgrade. The key is to know when it’s going to happen because it’s the surprise that kills you. When you have a strategy in place for your customers, you can know how on track or off track they are, and that can give you a very good indicator of how likely they are to renew. If your client retention rate is not as good as you hoped, what are you doing to fix this? Jason likes to recommend a system of monitoring client satisfaction with a stoplight approach: red, yellow, and green. Everyone starts out at yellow and hopefully moves to green once they start seeing results. Clients in the red are the ones in danger that need intervention because they're at risk. How can you communicate better with your red and yellow clients? How can you help them more? Or is there something they're not telling you? Intervention is the key. Improving your customer retention rate by 5% would probably double your business and achieving that will require working on your communication with clients. It’s better to over-communicate with your clients than to under-communicate. As soon as there is a vacuum of information where there is not an answer to an issue, your customer will likely be thinking negatively and assume you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. 4 Pillars of Becoming a Better LeaderA lot of agencies start by accident and you suddenly find yourself leading several teams that rely on you to point out how they can improve at their jobs. When thinking about the complex world of leadership, we can’t just pick some random tips and expect to get a better result. We have to take a long-term view and apply it to develop our leadership skills. As a first step, Nils came up with four fundamental pillars to become a better leader:
The Most Important Leadership ToolIf you really want to improve your leadership skills, Nils suggest you focus on Feedback. Learning how to give negative feedback in a way that will help people get better at their jobs will be one of your most important qualities as a leader. However, giving negative feedback is something that most people try to avoid because it is uncomfortable and they don’t have a system to do so. Here’s a 3-step process that you can implement:
This is a fairly simple framework that anybody could start using today. “I guarantee your employees want that feedback” Nils assures. It will improve their lives, their jobs, and your relationship with them and you can even implement it with clients too. For more insight on the tools to becoming a better leader, go get Nils’ new book 30 Day Leadership. Want the Support of Amazing Digital Agency Owners?If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to the Digital Agency Elite to learn all about our exclusive mastermind.
Direct download: 5_Keys_To_a_Great_Customer_Success_Strategy_to_Retain_More_Clients.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am MST |