Seven Strategies for Enhancing Customer Loyalty

We can turn those detractors into promoters fairly quickly by addressing it, acknowledging that their feelings are valid, acknowledging them, telling them that this will be the outcome in the future and you're committed to making it better will change the relationship. We can't eliminate the customization. If we're on a mission to empower all entrepreneurs, we need to be able to support more than one category of people. Ask for feedback, listen, but take action on it. Foreign. Welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. My name is Bob Goverow. I will be your host today. The Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast, if you haven't been here before, is a place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success, from mindset and leadership to profits and revenue. This episode is focused on the seven ways to improve customer loyalty in your business. Now, client satisfaction overall is a topic that I love to spend time in. And you know what, guys? None of us are perfect. We're never going to be perfect. Every solution if we have multiple customers. And the more customers or clients that you serve, the more challenging it's going to be to continue to make sure that everybody is happy in every moment, especially because there's life circumstances going on beyond that interaction between you and your business. But the more that we can take feedback, interpret it, and say, we've got two choices. One, we either say, all the heck with that client. Yeah, that's on them. Or we go, how can we learn? How can we improve? How can we make this experience better so that we avoid any sort of miscommunication or challenges with client satisfaction in the future? And of course, as any business owner, we want to focus on the latter versus just saying, well, yeah, you know, it's. It's their problem, not our problem. It's always going to end up being our problem. It's just how we deal with it. And you know, it's funny, I talk about this with my kids all the time. They have a challenging moment in life and they essentially have two options. They have one, to feel sorry for themselves and to not do anything and just say the world's unfair. Or. Or you take that information and you prove them wrong, or you fix it and you make it better and you learn from it. And in most circumstances, for my kids, you know, that's a learning message that I want to portray to them. The exact same thing goes into client satisfaction. So, you know, we think about client satisfaction. What is the number one way to get feedback related to client satisfaction? And for us, what we do is we throw to an annual survey. Sometimes we do it more than annually, but an annual survey, typically at a high volume time of year, and we say, what is it or how likely are you to recommend our firm to someone you know? And this follows the Net Promoter Score methodology. So the Net Promoter Score client Satisfaction essentially finds out how likely people would be to recommend you net to a friend, a colleague or someone that they know and what this does. And we use this every single year and we actually use a third party to do it so that we're not involved at all. And we're essentially just collecting good feedback. And listen, it's not, it doesn't always feel good, you know, there isn't always a feel good moment involved in this because typically it identifies client frustrations. And I know in the past for us, you know, turnaround time, I know in 2023, we had a turnaround time extension, things were taking too long. And for sure, when we sent out our client satisfaction survey, that was the feedback we were getting. Which was good, right? For a couple reasons. One, we already knew that it was a challenge and we were in the midst of fixing it. So when we got that feedback, we essentially were able to say, we hear you, we're in the process of correcting this. Thank you. We appreciate your feedback and we're committed to improving. And this is powerful. And I'll walk you through that in a second. But let me just walk you through the Net Promoter Score essentially process. Right? So again, we set out a survey, but really what we want to try and get is how likely are you to recommend us to a colleague, a friend, someone who you think needs us? Now, the promoters of those people who would essentially shout from the mountaintops and say, Bob and his team are the most incredible, you know, accountants, professional services firm in the entire world. Everybody should use them. And we have a number of them. Our number of promoters is actually quite high. But those promoters are the people, if we're thinking about growth strategy and different ways that we can introduce new clients to our business, those promoters are the people that you want to ask for referrals from. Typically those promoters are also your A plus clients, which is fantastic, right? And you know what's, they'll, they'll give you feedback about what they love and we want to just keep doing that. Right? So reinforce the positive and also thank them for being such great clients. And this is an opportunity, right, where they're giving you feedback and they're promoting and you know, thank you very much. And if there is anyone that you know that we can support, we're happy to jump on a call. We're happy to make you look amazing for making that introduction. And we'll go above and beyond to. To make sure that anyone that you send to us gets a good experience because likely that promoter is going to send another promoter like candidate to us as well. And then you've got the passive. So the people, again, would. How likely would you be to recommend our firm or our business to a friend or colleague? The passives are like seven or eight. Yeah, we're kind of indifferent. You know, we're not going to show up from the mountaintops. We're happy, but we're not going to go out of our way to say, these guys are the best, they're great, they're good, we're happy, but we're not going to go promoting them anywhere. And really, in this case, we have an opportunity as well. And guys, if you'll. You'll hear my language related to this, Everything in client satisfaction is going to be an opportunity to do better. So our passives, our passives are one step away from being promoters. And our goal when we get our passives is to say, what is it that we can do that would make you a promoter? What is it that we could do to better serve you? And typically in our surveys, you know, we have categories. One is proactiveness, one is quality, One is like turnaround time, efficiency, and I can't remember the other one. But essentially we look at those factors and we say, okay, of these, where are those individuals ranking us and could we turn this around faster? If that was a, essentially a value that they were looking into, could we be more proactive? You know, we've got proactive solutions that aren't necessarily top of mind for clients. So when we get a lower rating on proactiveness to say, you know, your team isn't very proactive, we go, oh, well, if you want proactive, you know, we could offer this to you. We just didn't want to be overbearing when it comes to offerings so we can make that relationship better. And our goal with the passives is to go from 7 and 8 all the way up to a 9, 10 so that they are promoters for us. And then the last category, again, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? And those are our detractors. So those are people who would rate that 0 to 6. Now, the greatest opportunity exists in our detractors. And you would say, that seems weird, Bob. You know, maybe those people are the lost leaders. They're likely Already gone. And sometimes they are, you know, sometimes they are already moved on. However, the opportunity to correct the language or to make a situation, if a client or a customer has already left to make a situation better so that you leave in their mind a lasting impression of these guys really went out of their way to handle this in a positive way. They might actually, even though they've already left, they might still promote you and recommend you if you handle it properly. And I can tell you, in the past, we have had detractors show up. Not that there's very many detractors that show up in our experience, but when they do, we want to address them. Because typically there's one thing that has set them, set them apart and frustrated them. So it's like, how do we identify the one thing? How do we say that we hear them? How do we say that we're addressing the problem and that we appreciate essentially their time and support and know that we're committed to resolving this and making it a better experience. And in my experience, we've been able to convert many of those detractors who are sitting in that zero to six all the way up to promoters because they immediately go, you know what? Yeah, I was frustrated in the moment, maybe something took longer. However, they reached out, they addressed the problem head on, they came up with a solution and they followed through. And the next time they did exactly what they said they were going to do. And yes, you may not go from, you know, a zero to a 10 overnight, but within a year, you have the greatest opportunity. And these individuals who are writing detractors or writing responses that are detractors, they're essentially vocalizing this to you. There are other detractors that aren't going to say anything, although we're more likely to get negative feedback than positive feedback. But in this particular case, we can turn those detractors into passives or promoters fairly quickly by addressing it, acknowledging that their feelings are valid, which they are. Feelings are always valid. Whether falls into the parameters of whether they're right or they're wrong, acknowledging them, telling them that this will be the outcome in the future and you're committed to making it better will change the relationship. And even more importantly, sometimes those detractors might be saying negative things about you and your brand out in public. And if you address it properly, at a minimum, they may still not recommend you. At a minimum, they're likely going to stop the tarnishing of your reputation because you resolved a situation. So, and it's not always going to be the case, you know, people have bad days, people have good days. It might influence how the client satisfaction survey comes out, but you have the opportunity to address these things head on, make them better, push everybody into promoters. Because, hey, if we can get more people into promoters, those are our referral sources. Those are our A plus clients. Those are, those are the people who are going to stay with us a long time. Those are the people who are going to actively promote us to other people. So what better growth strategy than to get your promoters referring you new business? Okay, what I want to talk about is seven ways that we can increase our client satisfaction. So one, addressing. And this was sort of outside of it, but outside of addressing those issues head on as part of a survey. Seven ways that you can improve customer loyalty. Number one, make it easy to do business with you. Make it quick, convenient, and make sure that you do it with empathy. So I actually had a client, a really great client, and we had, they had sent us a bunch of referrals and we went from being a very high promoter to passive. And he essentially at one point challenged the, the ease of working with us. And sometimes the ease of working with us gets complicated because everybody's got specialized needs. And his sort of comment was, you need to make this more standardized. And maybe people, maybe don't take on all of the people, you take on the people who are the standardized way. So you make it super easy for customers. And, you know, it definitely made me think. And of course, we can't eliminate the customization. If we're on a mission to empower all entrepreneurs, we need to be able to support more than one category of people. But the ease of which we make it for customers to do business with us was definitely a focal point, something I took away and something that we continuously work on. So to improve customer loyalty, make it easy to do business. Number two, ask for feedback. Listen to the feedback, and then take action on that feedback. So like I'm talking about with the client satisfaction surveys, this is a way for us to ask for feedback. So point number one, people are already engaged to say, okay, we appreciate that they're asking for feedback in how they can do better. Then all of a sudden their, their challenges or their issues are slightly softened because of the idea that we're looking to make the experience better for them. It likely increases the longevity of client relationship. And if there are clients who are thinking about going somewhere else, this will likely give you the opportunity to solve that before they leave. So ask for feedback, listen, but take action on it. Don't put the client satisfaction survey out and just say, well, you know, I don't actually care what anybody says. I just want to send out the feedback. No, we take the feedback. We have two options. One, to feel sorry for ourselves and blame everybody else, or two, understand where they're coming from, figure out how we can do better. And that's if you want a world class client satisfaction and world class referral network and promoters, you need to be looking at how you can constantly make it better and how you can listen to that feedback and take action on that feedback. Number three, reinforce your values and mission. And this is something that we try and do as far as our marketing goes and our recruitment. We always want to talk about our core values and what mission we're on. Again, I've even said it on this podcast. We're on a mission to empower all entrepreneurs with the confidence of good financial information so that they can grow, scale their business and change the world and exponentially reach more people and multiply their impact. And we do this based on being all in by owning our responsibility and being accountable by choosing opportunity to continue to evolve, learn, introduce new technology and continue to grow. And four, be better together. We're better together with our team, we're better together with our clients and we try and encourage the use of that in all of our marketing language on our website and our recruitment and we reinforce that because when people buy in, they understand where we're coming from, that we do own it. You know, if mistakes happen, we will own it. Mistakes being delayed emails, miscommunication, things like that. We will own that and we will make that right. And when you share your core values, people have more of a buy in of how you work and they'll, they'll understand maybe a little bit more about how you're going to improve this situation. Number four, express high standards for excellence and innovation. So if you are going to take this sort of feedback and you're going to say we're not doing anything, we've done the exact same thing for the last 15 years in our business. We're not going to change a thing that's really not going to give clients the confidence that you're going to solve a problem. You want to definitely express high standards for excellence and you want to be able to share that you're innovative and finding solutions to solve problems. If the clients feel like that's where you're going, they'll understand that everything's not going to be perfect. But you're always constantly Looking at ways you can improve. Number five, set clear expectations and deliver. Now this has been something that we've been working on a lot lately. We onboard a lot of new clients, there's a lot of entrepreneurs and high growth minded business owners who do need our support. And so what we're trying to do is streamline an onboarding process, but also that is including setting clear expectations. And you know, one of the expectations is everything is not going to be perfect. Especially when we're talking about bookkeeping. Everything is not going to be perfect right out of the gates. And what I mean by perfect, I don't mean our numbers. Our numbers are always going to be right. You know, that's our foundation is in good quality. But when I say everything's not going to be perfect, I mean, you know, the communication cadence. If expectations from a client perspective are that, you know, we should hear from you by the second week of the month. If that hasn't been clearly outlined and we reach out the third week of the month, there could potentially be a miscommunication element there. So setting that up and the expectations of the relationship, what we need in exchange for the service that we're providing. One of the challenges that we maybe have with client satisfaction from a deliverable standpoint is when we get all of our work completed. Typically at the end there's a list of questions that say these are the items that we weren't really certain of and instead of just making a wild guess, we want to make sure that it's done with 100% accuracy. So if we're going to do that, we would like your guidance on where those should be allocated. Now, business owners are busy. Sometimes people don't respond to that. So we can't complete our work until those are responded to. So there needs to be an expectation on the other side where we communicate and say, listen, we expect that you as a business owner will dedicate time to, to ensure that we're able to get those answers so that we can complete your information, make it accurate and keep it up to date and be timely. So setting clear expectations and then staying to that will be very important. Reward customers for their loyalty. So you know, this is interesting, giving them access to a free bonus, making sure that they get front of the line treatment or VIP treatment as being a return customer. That just gives them a sense of appreciation for what it is that you're doing for them, but that their business really means something to you. So rewarding customers for loyalty and then seven share progress. So we go back to our client satisfaction survey. We identify issues, share out progress. We definitely on those individuals who we would have had come back last year saying, you know, things weren't getting turned around as quickly as possible. We 100% reached out and said, listen, we completely understand what you're saying. We agree the turnaround time was longer than is acceptable for our standards. We want to have it within this parameter. And we're happy to tell you that since the period of time that we were doing this work for you and it took a long time, we've now got our time frame down to here through increased staffing, better predictability of workflow, and these will help make sure that your client experience in the future is corrected and enjoyable. And people were responding, going great. We totally get it. Every business felt staffing shortages during this period of time. We totally understand. Thanks for your feedback. We look forward to continuing to do business with you. So and again, that's not always going to be the 100% perfect response that we get. But in this particular case, that was a lot of the feedback that we got. So sharing your progress and sharing how you've listened and took action on it and the results you're getting will continue to increase your client satisfaction. You know what, client satisfaction for me is one of those areas of focus where I like to spend a fair bit of time. How do we constantly improve the process? How do we constantly improve the output? How do we add more value than anyone else? If you talk to Tony Robbins, those who give the most will win. Find a way to add more value than anyone else inside a transaction and you will always be perceived as the the winner and you will always have raving fans. And it's very true. So continuing to find a way to add value in those relationships is going to be extremely important. Guys, this was an entire focus on client satisfaction for sure. If you're not doing a net promoter score survey out to your clients at least annually to get their feedback so that you can listen, that you can appreciate their feedback, you can identify where they stand from a promoter passive or detractor stance. But also look at taking that feedback and continuously making your business better. You're missing out on a great opportunity. So your takeaway is look at your client satisfaction. Opportunities for survey very easy. You know, again we use a third party company called Clearly Rated. They do all of the external collection of data so that we're not being involved in manipulating anything. I want all the raw data from all of the customers and that works really well for us. SurveyMonkey which could be a free application depending on how many surveys you're sending out. You could send out a surveymonkey free questionnaire related to the Net Promoter Score. You likely could research it online, find something that's a little bit tailored to your industry, and then have that Net Promoter Score question. How likely are you to recommend our our business or our firm to your friends and colleagues or someone similar to you? And that really gives us a definition of where our customers stand. Take those promoters, get them referring, take those passives and detractors and turn them into promoters and you've got yourself a strategy for success, for client satisfaction. If you like this episode, please drop a like in here. Give us a follow. We want to make sure that you get access to any of the value add that we can contribute to you and your business. An episode is dropped every single week. We've had some fantastic guests. We've got some incredible guests lined up coming up soon. This has been related to client satisfaction. If you know someone who's in business and you feel they would benefit from understanding client satisfaction or how they could improve it, guys, we all can. You know, when you think of a growth strategy, client satisfaction is making sure that all the holes in the bucket are filled. If all the holes in the bucket are filled, you can bring in as much business as you want. But if there's too much water going out the bottom of the bucket because there's too many holes, because your client satisfaction is no good, you'll never grow. So client satisfaction is an integral part of a growth strategy inside your business. If you know someone who's going through growth or is going through drastic change and they need to learn more about client satisfaction, drop them a note in here. Share this out. We want to help empower all entrepreneurs to have the good information and have the confidence to make informed decisions. And this is a factor that I know makes a huge impact inside our coaching program that we have called Million Dollar Year Million Dollar Year ca. We have tools and frameworks inside there to improve the client satisfaction. We will continue to evolve that add elements in here including referral strategies and worksheets that you can implement to get those promoters actively referring you business. So if you're interested in being part of a group of people who are just like you and I and you want to be part of that group, learn from each other, but also have resources, multiple years of resources and training and tools. We in there, we meet every Tuesday if people are available. Every Tuesday we do a training and a recording and we give you all the tools and tactics to grow your business and to essentially hit that million dollar year. So if you're interested in learning more than million dollar year CA otherwise, this has been the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. Give us a like, give us a share. I definitely look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks for spending some time with me and let's get started on improving our client satisfaction in our business.