Getting off the Client Service Hamster Wheel Of Doom!

Hey everyone, it's Rob here from the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Now, do you want to avoid Koshwad in your agency? Well, it's my new favorite term, so if you want to find out more about that and how you can avoid it, then listen on in today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast, accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. Now, before I jump into today's episode, I just want to let you know that the next cohort of the self Running Agency Implementation Group is kicking off very shortly. Now this is a combination of bi monthly group coaching calls, lots of online resources, a separate training library of courses that you can use to train your staff, one to one coaching calls with me, plus a discussion forum. And you also get to network with a really lively, supportive community group of other agency owners. So if you want to find out more about it, go to dacostacoaching.co.uk the SelfRunningAgency and the self running agency all have hyphens between them and you can learn more there. And if you scroll to the bottom of that page, you can book a call with me to discuss more about your current situation, your suitability for the program, and anything else that you have. Just click on the link to book that call with me. Okay, so let's get on with today's show. Many agencies tell me that they just don't have enough hours in the day because they are so run ragged serving the demands of their clients, jumping as high as the client asks them to jump because they fear that if they say no, then they will lose the client. And especially in this challenging time at the moment they feel that's more important than ever. But let's just consider for a moment just how crazy that is. Because when you are saying yes to a client demand, especially when it's one that is outside of the scope of the work that you're doing or outside the kind of scope of your service levels, when you're saying yes to another client demand, you're saying no to something else. And that leads you to feel like you don't have enough hours in the day to do things like take a breath and see the woods for the trees, to work on the future of your agency, to focus on new business so you avoid the feast and famine cycle that many of us find ourselves in to invest enough time in mentoring and developing your staff and to building more robust client management systems and other systems in your agencies. So when we're saying yes to those crazy client demands. We're saying no to all of these things. And of course, if you are the agency owner and you're so busy that you don't have enough hours in the day to do any of those examples that I just cited, then you are stuck on the client servicing hamster wheel of doom, which is the kosh wad. And there's no way of getting off that yet. If you want to make a change, then it starts with you doing something different, putting the brakes on that wheel and finding a way to step off. And there's two kinds of changes that you need to make. One of them is a change in your mindset, and then the second one is a change in your behavior. So a lot of us, like I said, believe this thing, that if we don't keep saying yes to our clients, that they will not be happy with our service and they will leave us. And that is completely counterintuitive because actually when we keep saying yes to our clients, they just start seeing the new additional things as standard services. And if we keep saying yes to our clients, then they kind of lose respect for us. Whereas if we can find a way of professionally pushing back on our clients so that we have more of a consultative relationship and actually sometimes questioning why asking us to do something, is it really driving towards those bigger goals that we have for our campaign and those bigger goals that they have in their business, then if we push back, we actually end up having more respect for our clients. So of course, a lot of this starts by getting super clear about what's included in a project fee or retainer, and also being super clear with our clients about what your service levels are. So for example, if you say to a client, I will get back to you within six hours, but you always jump the minute that they send you an email or call you or send you an instant message, then they will very quickly forget about the six hour service level. So we need to remind our clients about what's included and therefore what isn't included in a retainer or a project fee. And second of all, we need to be really clear with them about our service levels. And sometimes we need to really reinforce that by perhaps not getting back so immediately all the time. And certainly if you've got staff in your agency, you want to make sure that they understand what those service levels are and that they understand that they don't always have to be responding to their clients. I've spoken many times that I think everybody should be turning off their outlook dialog box and they should have preset times in their day when they respond to emails. But what happens is people don't do that and they've got this mindset. Yeah, but Rob, you don't understand. I've got to respond to my clients and all the rest of it. But let's face it, if a client has a really urgent thing that they need to talk to you about, are they going to send you an email? You would hope they would pick up the phone and indeed, you need to sort of train them to pick up the phone. And so actually the mindset thing of realizing that we don't need to be looking at our emails constantly and we don't need to be distracted from that piece of work because we've seen that dialogue box pinging up in the corner. I've spoken about this before in previous podcasts where I've talked about productivity. But in the context of mindset, we just need to realize that we don't always need to respond to a client straightaway, especially via email, because if there is something that's truly urgent, then we want them to pick up the phone to us. So that's the mindset part of these two changes that we need to make if we want to get off the client servicing hamster wheel of doom cosh wad. And the second one I mentioned is all about changing behavior. So there's a few thoughts that I just wanted to share with you about how to go about doing this. So first of all, you need to make sure that you are ring fencing time in your diary every week to work on your agency, and you need to see this time as sacrifice. It's not time that is the first thing that gets deleted out your diary, but it should be time that is one of the last things that gets deleted out of your diary and don't make it okay for other members of your team to overwrite those appointments. I once had a client who worked for the Open University and she had people constantly putting appointments in her diary. Her time was never her own. So one of the things I asked her to do in the end was to put appointments in her diary and that were kind of fake appointments, things that other people wouldn't know what they were, so they wouldn't just overwrite them. Because when she put things like work on Project X, which was an internal project, people would just see that as an internal project and they would overwrite it. Whereas if she said meeting with John Smith, then people wouldn't overwrite that meeting, even though it was Actually time that she was ring fencing to work on a particular project. So you need to ring fence time every week in your diary to work on your agency and you need to be clear exactly what those tasks are. That's a whole other topic. But keep a list of working on your agency things which will look like business development, they will look like marketing, they will look like people, they will look like systems and processes. The second thing you need to do if you want to change your behavior and get off the client servicing Hamster Wheel of doom is you need to get stronger boundaries with your clients so that, as I've already said, they are a bit more respectful. They understand that you have other clients as well. Well, and they also have a reasonable expectation about response times because they understand the service level that they're paying for. After all, at the end of the day, if a client is buying first class mail equivalent to you, then it should take as long as it takes for that mail to be delivered. Now, if they want expedited recorded delivery, overnight delivery, then they have to pay more for it. Now, we understand that in the postal service, but we don't necessarily apply the same thinking in our agency. So we need to get stronger boundaries with our clients about when we communicate with them, when we respond to them and how quickly we respond. And similarly, we need to have that same kind of respectful behavior with our staff as well. So they're not always just constantly walking up to your desk and deferring decisions to you. And to that end, one of the things I always tell my clients is when staff start doing that, you just need to respond with questions rather than telling them. So questions like what do you think you should do? Or what would you do if I wasn't here? What decision would you make? Is always a good way of pushing back on staff. And of course, if you do that consistently, then after a while that member of team is going to realise there's very little point just walking up to your desk asking you a question, because it's just going to get a response with you asking them a question back. So they need to think for themselves, which is all about that process of questioning. So that's the second point about changing your behaviour and getting off the client service hamster Wheel of Doom by getting stronger boundaries with your clients and with your team. Now we all have those clients that we absolutely love and we all will have had that experience over our time of running our agency of clients that are just a pain in the backside. So one of the ways you're going to manage this whole client servicing issue is by making sure that you are really clear on who your ideal target customer is and you have the right sales and marketing processes to win them. This is a topic that we talk about a lot in the self running agency implementation group and actually there is some free workbooks on my website and I'll put links in the show notes to do with how to go about niching your agency so that you can then identify who your ideal target customer is. So there'll be two links in the show notes, one all about niching and one about winning ideal target clients. Because if we win ideal target clients, they are usually going to be the ones that are more respectful of your time, respect the work that you're doing and you can have a fun and respectful relationship with them as well. Now the next point kind of harkens back to the second point about boundaries. And whilst you want to allocate time to work on your agency every week, you also want to make sure you're allocating time to support your team so that you can provide them that mentoring that they need and that support on the work that they need. But on the flip side, you also have time when your office door is metaphorically shut and you're not available because you want to get your head down and do some meaningful work, which often means working on your agency. So there's many other things that I could talk about that would help you get off the client servicing hamster wheel of doom. But the two broad categories are getting your mindset right and changing some of your behaviors. And they really go in tangent because sometimes we convince ourselves we can't change our behaviors because we don't have the right mindset. So we, we think I can't possibly turn my Outlook dialog box off. I can't possibly tell my clients I'm only going to check emails four times a day. Well actually you know what? You can. But you've got to start by changing your mindset. Now you can constantly be realigning your relationship and your clients expectations by having these conversations in your monthly review meetings with your clients or how often you meet your clients to talk about service levels, to talk about expectations, to talk about success, and to understand how the work you're doing is tying back into their bigger business goals. I think right now this is more important than ever. Now I appreciate some people might be listening to this podcast and I'm recording this in September 2020 when we are hopefully coming out the other side of the COVID 19 pandemic and of course people are doing whatever they can to hang on to their clients and that often leads to over servicing and all the rest of it. But. But actually the best way of hanging onto a client is by having a respectful relationship, by ensuring that they value what you do, and by making sure that you are having conversations with your clients that tie back the marketing work that you're doing for them into their bigger business goals. And if you don't have those conversations with your clients about how your work ties back into their biggest business goals, then you guys might think you're doing an amazing job for your client. But the client will turn around to you one day and say, look, we're disappointed because we're just don't see that we're getting much return on investment. So you should always be brave and make sure you're having those conversations with your clients on a regular basis. And then reviewing your strategy if you're working on a retainer, for example, in PR or SEO or whatever, that you are reviewing your strategy to make sure it's tying back into those bigger business goals. So this is a really short podcast today. I just wanted to talk about the client service Hamster Wheel of Doom, because many of us have been stuck on that and we feel like there is no way to get off. In fact, the wheel wheel is just spinning faster and faster and faster. But you need to put the brakes on and you need to recognize that it starts with your mindset and then use change in mindset to start changing your behaviors and training your clients to have a reasonable expectation and your staff to understand what the service levels are for your clients and exactly what they're paying for. So what's included in a retainer and then what's not included in a retainer that enables you to either ask the client for more money or, or to have a conversation where you say, yes, we can do that additional service, but we'll need to drop something in the agreed scope of work that we currently have with you. So I hope that's a useful episode. I'm sure a lot of you feel right now that you are stuck on the client service Hamster Wheel of Doom and would love to find a way of getting off of it. And now is a really good time to start tackling this. So don't convince yourself that you agree with what I'm saying, but it's not the right time to tackle this because now is a really great time to start tackling this. So a couple of things before I go. As ever, if you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a review. Share with your colleagues and make sure you've subscribed. Other than that, have a great Thursday and Friday and I will see you next week.