Ingredients of Effective Client Communication

Hello everyone and welcome to the November webinar of Cleantelligence Software's 2016 webinar series. As 2016 draws to a close, I would like to thank all of you for watching our webinars and for helping to make them a success. Over the last year, our webinars have had hundreds of views and I encourage you to continue to watch our webinars, read our blog and share them with your colleagues. As with all of our webinars, this one is being recorded and will soon be available to view on our website and YouTube channel. For those of you who are lucky enough to be watching this session live, you will be able to ask questions through the chat feature in your viewer. I will leave some time at the very end to answer those questions, so please feel free to post them as they come to you during the webinar. I will also give my contact information at the end of this webinar in case you would like to reach out to me. The topic of my presentation today is something I hope will resonate with many of you. I expect that many of you are building service contractors or facility managers. You may work with many accounts in many facilities. You may regularly interact with your clients at these facilities, although not all of your interactions may be positive. I want to talk about effectively communicating with your clients and in the spirit of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday this month in the United States, I want to talk about some components or ingredients of that communication. Just like Thanksgiving dinner, you need all of the right ingredients to make it enjoyable and successful. My name is Bradley York and I am Director of Marketing at Clean Intelligence Software. My role is to oversee all of Clean telligence marketing projects, including our sales website, our social media efforts, and our advertising. I am grateful for this opportunity to share these insights with you today. This has been an exciting time of the year for marketing as cleantelligence Software and maybe some of you just attended the Issa Inter Clean convention in Chicago. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to take a minute and tell you some of our successful client communications efforts there. In case you've never heard of or never been to Issa Inter Clean, it is the cleaning industry's largest trade show. This year's North America show was held just a couple weeks ago on October 25th through October 28th. Regular listeners of our webinars may recall that Kaden Hutchins, our Vice president, devoted last month's webinar to strategies for successful appearance at Issa Inter Clean. If you haven't already seen IT and you would like to begin preparing for future trade shows, I highly recommend you watch this webinar. You can find it on our website. As you see here, here is a picture of Clean Intelligence booth at the show. I hope some of you listening now are able to see our booth and come talk to us. We at Clean Intelligent consider this show, this year's show, to be highly successful for a number of reasons such as this. While in years past we were focused very much so on sales goals, this year we also emphasized reaching out to our existing customers. Our intrepid public relations consultant, Adam Mears was able to interview 13 of our customers getting vital features feedback about our software and services. Here's a brief example of one of these interviews.

We're able to communicate right next to each other. So really it's going to help you as a company be able to differentiate yourself from your customers and help you be able to not just track your quality and improve your quality, but also track the quality of the training that you have for your employees and be able to take the data, look at it, say, okay, somebody needs more help in restroom cleaning. Be able to identify this is a person, this is what they need, and then be able to just go ahead and do it.

In case you couldn't hear the sound or see the video very well in that clip, it's from one of our customers, Alfava, who runs a cleaning company based in Boston. Mr. Feva said that CleanTeenelligent can help your company track your quality of service, but also the quality of the training of your employees. He said it can help you identify areas needing improvement. At Issa Inter Clean, our customers communicated to us what they thought of cleantelligent and we in turn used what they said to make our company better. Our efforts to talk to clients at the show really helped us as a company know where we are excelling and where we need to improve. It further strengthened our relationships with them. Just like it was helpful for us to communicate with our clients, so too would it be helpful for you to communicate with with your clients. Today I'd like to talk about effective client to service provider communication, including what it is and of course how to do it, how to improve. I'd also like to talk for a few minutes about Clean Intelligence software, which as you may know, was originally developed as a more efficient client communication tool. In describing what effective client communication is, let me first refer to a humorous example. You're probably familiar with the telephone game as it is called in the United States. It's the game you might have played when you were a kid or at a party. You start with a phrase such as I took my dog for a walk today and then I gave him some food and whisper it to the person next to you. The person then whispers the phrase to the next person, recreating it as best as he or she can. But as the phrase gets passed from person to person, it gets changed. Maybe it's hard to understand or hard to remember. Maybe some people add or remove details so by the time the last person hears the phrase, it could be something like I mistook Michael for an ARC today and I shaved him something good has anything like this ever happened to you in your communication with clients? Has a client tried to relay a message to you, perhaps verbally, only to cause a misunderstanding? Has a client sent you a text message or an email with one too many typos? Here are, according to an article on Forbes.com, the four Cs of effective client communication. These were also mentioned in a clean, intelligent blog post from a couple years ago. First, your communication must be clear. If you're sending a message to a client, don't muddle your message with unnecessary or irrelevant details, and don't use words your client won't understand. Whether you're sending a quarterly report or a Christmas card, be concise and get straight to the point. Second, your communication must be consistent in its time and frequency. For example, if you send your clients periodic reports, try to send them at about the same time of the week or month. Doing this regularly can increase your client's trust and satisfaction in you. Third, be convenient. Communicate in the way your clients prefer most, even if it's a good old fashioned phone call. Give your clients multiple ways to reach you, including through social media. Finally, make your communication compelling. If you have a good reason for each message, your clients will be less likely to ignore it. Make sure your communication fulfills a client need or adds value to your service. Tips I just gave you for improving client communication Apply to your interactions as a service provider to your client. What about the other way around? How can you encourage your clients to improve communication on their end, especially if it's negative? Here are a few suggestions for this based on the sources I've listed here below. First, address complaints and other urgent messages promptly. Even if you can't resolve an issue then and there, you should at least respond and acknowledge it. This should be a no brainer, but it's always important to remember. Don't let a lag in communication cause you to lose an account Also have a system in place that notifies managers if issues aren't attended to. Clean Intelligent has such a system, which I will describe in a few minutes. Second, listen, if your client is agitated or accuses you of something, don't get defensive. Your first responsibility, even before you set out to resolve an issue, is to empathize with your client. You may want to even apologize, which could relieve some of the tension, even if the situation is not your fault. And third, of course, make a plan to resolve the issue. You may not need to share the details with your client. Remember to be clear and concise. It's up to you to follow up, or it's up to you how you follow up with the client. Some clients, in some situations probably don't need more than a verbal commitment from you. In other cases, your contract with the client might stipulate how you're required to communicate the status of an issue. At this point, you might. You might be thinking that these suggestions for best practices are fine and good. But what's the best system to use for communicating with your clients? This is where cleantelligent software comes in. As I mentioned earlier, cleantelligent began as a client communications tool. It was first developed almost 20 years ago by a cleaning company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and this company experienced skyrocketing client satisfaction and retention as they used this program. Cleantelligent itself has existed as a software company since 2003 and now has over 31,000 users around the world. As you can see here, our software has won four consecutive Issa Innovation Awards, which no one else has been able to do. Our customer support team has also won two Issa Awards for Best Customer Service, which we are also very proud of. And of course, the main features of our software include quality inspections, work orders, bidding and estimating, and more. I assume many of you are familiar with cleantelligent, and some of you may be currently using it at your business. In case you haven't seen how this works, I'd like to do a brief demonstration of communication between a service provider and client. I'm going to show the Clean Intelligent login from the service provider and the client. Pull up a couple of windows here. Some of you may remember I did a demo similar to this a few months ago during my last webinar. So when you log onto the system as a service provider, which is this right here, Of course you'll see all the latest work orders of your clients and your service locations. When your clients log into cleantelligent like this they'll be redirected or directed to a new message page where they can enter their request to you. So the client is at this McDonald's service location. Let's do a cleaning request. Priority is urgent, Subject is spill in the kitchen. And message is simply clean this up. Due date will be today November 10th at 1pm or I guess 115 click submit. Of course if we go back to you the service provider we refresh, you'll see there is the request right there. I mentioned earlier that delay times can also be set through cleantelligent. Here's a screenshot of these settings in the mobile app. In this case, a job notification will go to a janitor first, but will also be sent or escalated to the manager if the job is not attended to after a certain time. This feature is great for additional employee accountability. This, of course, is only the beginning of what cleantelligent is capable of, and if you're not already familiar with the system, I encourage you to contact our sales team for a more comprehensive demo. I'd like to give you an example of a service provider who dramatically improved their employee communication by using CleanTeenelligent. Michelle Nagy, a quality assurance specialist at Skillskin, told us communication and corrective action is faster. Preventative action and catching things before they become a bigger issue make you more effective in the long term. Michelle also told us cleantelligent helps Skillskin identify ways to improve employee training. Much like Alfava, the gentleman in the video I showed you earlier also said to conclude this webinar, let me state a few takeaways. First, communication between service providers and clients should be clear, consistent, convenient and compelling. And when dealing with a client, an SP must be prompt, listen and make a plan. Also, follow up when appropriate. These are critical ingredients of effective client communication, and I hope you find them helpful. If you're interested in learning more about what I've said today, here's a list of helpful resources, including the references for my presentation. If you'd like to see more, let me know and I will send them to you. There is a lot available on this topic, and it so happens that cleantelligent has written a few blog posts about it as well. Feel free to check them out. Well, this brings us to the end of my presentation and here is the contact information for the sales team, the support team, and myself in case you have any questions for me. And again, thank you for listening to this month's webinar. It's been my pleasure to talk to you today. Please visit cleantelligent.comwebinars to view this and our other webinars. This will be available soon, hopefully today. And please follow us on our social media pages where we share the latest industry best practices and management tips. Good luck to all of you in your business and in all of your other endeavors. Thank you.