What Every Agency Should Do to Create a Stellar Client Experience

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray MacKenzie, and I am joined again this week by Andrew Dimsky, my co founder here at zenpilot and also my co host, Andrew. Welcome aboard.

Thank you. Good to be aboard, Greg.

This is going to be a really good episode. We are going to talk about a topic that is going to take a little explanation, people. We're going to talk about what zenpilot's clients of our blueprint process take back and implement in their own businesses. This is a really fun topic because this is where we get to share the stuff that we've picked up by getting to work with thousands of different agencies that becomes, oh, this is really cool that they do this in their onboarding process, they do this in their discovery process. We should take this or how can we modify that? We're not actually talking about the outcome of the blueprint, which obviously goes and gets implemented. We'll explain what that looks like in a second. But we're talking about the side effects, what's the stuff that clients just experience and then take back. And I thought this would be a really good, kind of along the lines of we've gotten asked a couple different times to do a podcast episode on the art of client service or webinar on the art of client service. And this is kind of a little preview of some of that stuff. So I'm excited to dig into this topic and to grill you a little bit on some of the stuff that you hear from it. I obviously hear some that gets fed back to me, like, wow, I was not expecting this or this was so good. We're going to take it and put it in our process as well. First things though, can you explain kind of high level, our client journey and what the blueprint is just so we get those terms out of the way?

Yeah, absolutely. So when, when we sell and when the, the growth team at zenpilot sells a blueprint to a client, that's the first step in a journey. And the journey is to get to get greater visibility into how their business operates, to move from chaos to clarity. That's kind of our high level promise. And the blueprint is the first step in that journey. And in that we're getting an understanding of the pains, the frustrations, the challenges, as well as the goals and the wish list of what a team would like out of their PM platform, out of their internal reporting so that they can build what they want as like an end state for a business. That's the blueprint. It's kind of like understanding that, doing the discovery there and then laying out a blueprint in a Miro board of exactly how a ClickUp space would be configured to help them accomplish that from a hierarchy perspective. And then also speaking into any integrations that they may need, any other third party tools, stuff like that, to kind of round out the tech stack and some of the habits and changes and processes that they need to make all of that kind of come to life. That's the blueprint. That's our first step in our client journey. Once they get to the end of the blueprint process, agencies can determine which level of implementation they want to choose. With us, we've had a couple different packages there. They move from blueprint into implementation to actually build out a lot of that stuff inside the blueprint and get it set up. And then our third phase, we're focusing on optimizing what we've implemented and off of what we've designed. So they kind of build on each other right there. But today we just want to talk about that first phase of the process of delivering that. And this strings through all three phases because we use a lot of the same delivery mechanisms in each of these phases of the client journey. But these are the things that people kind of raise their hand around and say, hey, I want to bring that back to my business and try that inside of our flow.

So I think it's a great explanation. The blueprint is really your cohesive playbook for how the three core systems, you need to have excellence in three main areas to be successful in project management and operations. The technical side, obviously, what's our playbook from our project management tooling perspective? What tools need to talk to each other? What's our data schema to give us the reports and the visibility we need to make better decisions? Then you have the process side. How can we be excellent at the procedural side side of things? What are all the processes we need? What layer in the hierarchy are those laid out as templates and pre built so that the process lives where the work gets done? And then behaviorally, how does the team execute on this in the day to day? And what do we need from a management perspective? What do we need from an individual contributor layer so that blueprint by itself takes a couple weeks to complete with a team and that by itself, we've got an agency in the UK right now who looked at it and said, all right, I'm concerned, I'm going to go through the blueprint first. Then after we figure out what I truly need, then you're going to give me the price for what it's going to cost after that, the answer is yes, exactly. We're going to actually understand. We're going to do the diagnostic first and then we're going to write the prescription. And based on what the right prescription is for you, that's what the scope and also what support you actually need versus how much should you handle internally in that implementation, that's all going to get built out. And there's some hesitancy about that. That totally makes sense to me that there's some hesitancy. But this so went from being incredibly skeptical to, wow, that makes a ton of sense. Right now we run into so much pain where we're prescribing stuff for people and then we get in three months later and it's like, well, this was overkill in this area and we totally missed this area. And now we're trying to adjust scopes and come back and have hard conversations with clients and it's just creating all this friction. So before buying from us in the blueprint process, which we've now started, they went and changed their whole delivery model and now they are offering an inbound marketing game plan to then go into a retainer after that, or an implementation project or retainer after they do that. Mandatory discovery. You've heard us talk about this previously on the podcast. But that high level, the whole blueprint, the number of conversations I have where people wind up switching their, their model, like they'll just adopt the entire idea of that we'll do a discovery product. And that's not just our idea. There's tons of, you know, I'm sure you've heard that plenty of places before that, hey, this makes a lot of sense to get paid to do discovery and strategy and actually spend time on that stage instead of trying to skip through that as quickly as possible. Or have folks on the sales front building out, like the really technical integration plan for you. Like, you don't want free work to go build out the playbook. So you should be building that out in a paid environment for your clients, however you structure that. But once we get into the blueprint, there's a number of things that people take away. So what's one or two? What are some of the key things that you hear from agencies that they say, hey, we've taken this. We weren't expecting to take this and implement it in our business, but we have.

Yeah, I think there's a couple things that are quick things to implement, like things like our call scheduling Page is one where we use a tool called Savvy Cal and that lets our clients schedule their kickoff calls, schedule their blueprint calls through the process. We just have a landing page set up with a loom video on there that welcomes them, that explains what the process is going to look like as they move forward, and then a scheduling there so they can go and schedule their calls straight away, kind of drop them on the calendar. You always want to strike while the iron's hot in the onboarding process. And when a client pays you money, that's the point where they're most engaged. And so we like to give them homework straight away, like use that, use that energy that they've got built up there from making that purchase decision to then go and do some activities that are going to help set the implementation up. Well, so I think that that call scheduling page is a big one right there. And the, the form that, that lives behind is also one that, that we hear a lot of feedback around. We use ClickUp forms to collect information from CL enrolled. We've seen clients rollout typeforms, Google forms, different standardized intake mechanisms, which I think is huge. You always want to make sure that you're collecting the right information from your client. You never want to get three months into a project and see that you can't do something because you don't have something. So get that stuff out in front, collect and gather that information in a standardized format. And a form is a great way to make that happen. So when someone, someone like pays an invoice or completes a billing page with us, they then go to a form where they, they input information. That form redirects to a welcome page with a video that then gives them the link to schedule their kickoff call or their implementation calls right there. And that's kind of all automated. We get that knocked out. And our client coaches on the back end, our strategists, just verify that that stuff happened rather than having to go chase all that stuff down in the initial calls there.

Yeah, so our process, this, this probably looks a lot different for a lot of the agencies listening because we've got a standardized engagement on the front end with the blueprint. That's literally a product. There's a, there's a sales page. It's not even a sales page. It's an ugly HubSpot payments checkout page that people go to to sign up. And so if we're talking about it, we're going to sign up live, send them the link. Or if it's like, hey, we're going to get this taken care of today. Send them that link with clear instructions. They're going to go through that checkout page that's going to redirect them right to our very quick intake form. The whole process takes like 5 minutes to complete for them. So make payment. They go right to this checkout page. That checkout page includes a survey and an email prompt that they just copy and paste out to their team. So their entire team has homework to take off of it. And it's going to take them five to ten minutes to complete. But it is our team survey, so they're gathering real feedback, you know, minutes after they've signed up from their team. And then that intake form, aside from triggering, you know, setting up stuff inside of our ClickUp and being the automation trigger for a lot of things on our side that allow us to get information and value back to the client as soon as possible. Also then redirects them to the to the booking page and they get their kickoff call on the calendar. Now, I don't. I think there's a. If you're currently. Either way, you should have your kickoff call scheduled very easily. Don't wait and try and make an introduction to someone else to go schedule it. But I think the equally good way to do that would be if we were scheduling kickoff live from a call. So hey, we're going to take payment and let's get your kickoff call on the books. Now the way that it's set up right now, people actually have to sign up in order to go through and get that booked and then they can book the rest of those calls directly in the process with customized links. And SavvyCal is really nice for being able to overlay your Google Calendar on top of it and add all the participants you need at each of the calls based on the directions we've given you. So I think that intake process, the fact that it's quick and that it's easy and that it's self service, I can go do it without having to compare. You know, I can just overlay calendars and I can see who's available when with Zen pilots available to get those on the calendars, that sped up our process a lot. But it's also something that clients consistently appreciate and a number have taken back either that entire process or pieces of that process and push back into what they've got going on. Yeah, what happens from there and maybe not what happens from there on our side, this isn't like a walkthrough of our entire Process. Just what are some of the key things? What's. What comes next in the process that you consistently hear from people like, oh, we've taken that and we've run with that internally.

Yeah. One that comes to mind right away is the kickoff call deck that we use. So we've got a very structured kickoff call deck on the back end. A lot of people don't know this, but just the way it's spun up, this comes up in conversations sometimes, is we use Google presentations for our kickoff decks. And so when someone fills out that form, that indicates that we have a new customer on board. And so that triggers an automation that's going to go into our Google Drive. And we build all this through make. Just make.com and it's going to create a new Google folder. It's going to add. It's going to copy items from our template folder and place them in that folder with a customized name on it. So that way, when our strategists or our client coaches come to that presentation to customize it, the presentation is already there for them. It's already named the client. They just open it up, they add the client names into it based on the attendees of the kickoff call. And then on the call, the client gets to see this very structured kickoff presentation where we lay out clear expectations. I think that the feedback that we receive through the process is that people always know what's coming next. I think that's what anybody wants in an onboarding is, did I make the right decision here? Do I feel safe? Do I feel heard and known and like I'm on a good path? And the purpose of your kickoff call deck is to accomplish all of those things, to validate them, to be excited that they're there, to revisit why they're there. And like, what's the goal of the project? What's the pain that we're trying to solve for here? Introduce the people that are involved in the conversation, lay out a simple path that they're going to flow and follow ahead and let them know what they need to do next. And it's that simple. Some of our kickoff calls take 15 minutes. Some of them take a little longer when we bring in some survey reviews and stuff like that. But it doesn't have to be super complex. People just want to see a visual. Oh, they've got a plan, and that's enough to let them build trust in you. Doesn't have to be anything super crazy. So those kickoff call decks, again, just like the landing page, a lot of those Decks are just standard. They're cloned for each new client. They're customized with the name. But what is included on those slides is pretty standard on those slides. One of the things we hit on there is our slack channel for communication. We create shared slack channels with every client on most of our package levels. And so in that some people like that that there's a place where they can go and communicate with clients and so they'll take that and run with it. Another thing that we include in there is our feedback surveys. So we use NPS surveys through our process and in our kickoff call deck we have a slide dedicated to the NPS emails and letting them know that hey, through the process you're going to see these emails come through and we want you to engage in those. We want you to give us feedback on those. We expect, expect that of you as a partner here. And by setting the expectation up front, we have dramatically increased our participation rate on those NPS emails. It's not as high as I would like it from the, from the delivery lead seat, but it's definitely a lot higher than when we just sent them and didn't warn them it was coming. So that's something that, that other people have picked up on there as well as is adopting that into their process and also like previewing it inside their, their kickoff flow.

You think the new clients, we set the rules. In any service based business you get to tell people whatever you want, hey, we're going to do the monkey bars every time we get together and people do the monkey bars or we're all going to stand up and do ten jumping jacks together. That's just normal. We don't know any different. That's how humans work is whatever we get told in the behavioral standards that get set early on, that's what sticks. What's dangerous is that starts in your sales process as well. So if in the sales process you know, we're doing something totally different and then it looks different, it's gonna be hard to change behavior. But once somebody signs up, you have another chance to reset the frame and reset the conversation. So you're always going to have way better survey responses or whatever action you want. When you tell people, hey, here's just the way that we do business. Part of our process is you're going to fill out these NPS emails. It's going to take you one click. When you get them, make sure that you do it and your rate's going to go from like, you know, 5% of people filling those things out to 60, 70% of people filling out surveys. If you just set the expectation at the beginning and you're reminding them of, hey, this is just the way that we do business together. If you want to work with, work with Zenpilot, guess what, this is what it looks like. Or work with your agency, this is what it looks like. So that helps a lot. Slack is something that I talk to a lot of agencies on the front end who are really torn, like, oh, we've got some clients who forced us into Slack and other clients who haven't. Maybe we can just talk about that for a second. Yeah, we fully embrace Slack for client support as a service to our clients. Virtually every agency, 95 plus percent of agencies are running on Slack already. We run into the Microsoft Teams agencies and the folks who are still they're early stage and they're running on Google Chat or whatever and maybe that'll change over time. But the vast majority of the agencies we're talking to are running on Slack internally. And so that was a. We want to make this process well, it's going to be work. We don't need to add extra work and extra friction into the process. We want to serve them. But we're also committed to, we're going to standardize this in one place or another. It's either going to be no Slack or it's going to be all Slack. So everyone's on Slack. Everyone's got a Zenpilot dash, whatever is our naming mechanism. And we set that up that way as a service to them so that they see Zenpilot first when they're looking at it in Slack and then their name after that. But then we have to set expectations for people around what Slack looks like. What kind of response time can we expect? What are the things that we do? So we've got some documentation around that. It's been helpful as well. Any advice though that you'd have for agencies who are worried about I don't want to go to Slack, I don't want to go to. And then I talked to the agencies who are like, hey, we've got these clients who demand that we're in teams. These clients say we have to be on Google. These clients only want to do email, these clients only want to do phone calls and these people want to do Slack. Yeah, how would you like, what would you recommend to folks in that situation?

We only work with our clients in Slack. Like we have teams agencies, but they'll come into Slack though. We'll create, we'll bring them in as guests. So standardize how, how you want to communicate with your clients and the benefit, like you said earlier, that's to them, like, if you ask us to come into your platform, my team's never used your platform before. And so we're going to have a hard time like keeping on top of that amongst all the other things that we're going to, that we're doing. We bring you into our ecosystem here because we have a proven process to deliver and get you results. And so if you want that result, you've got to play by the process. Otherwise we're just, you know, we're at, we can't guarantee your success because you're breaking our process there. So lean on the strength of your process and teach the client how you want them to behave. And the, the sooner you do that in the process, like you said earlier, get it into your sales flow where you're, you're leaning on your process early and you're selling off of your process. And then when they come in, like they're just, they're blown away by it. They're ex, they're experiencing it. They can't ignore it. Like you're, you're one step ahead of them each step of the way, by the way you lay things out, that training them, rewiring them, like, that's really, really important there. So I would start early. I'd get everyone in Slack if you're going to do it. I'd have one channel dedicated for them. I would have documentation that supports when they can expect responses back. I'd give them some training on like how to ask questions. Questions. Like we've had people just like post paragraphs in there and that's super hard to engage with. So we teach them to ask one question at a time so we can answer in threads underneath it. We post recaps after all of our calls on the Slack channel. And that creates a great kind of breadcrumb of activity. Any, anytime that we have someone one on one message us, we repost it in the Slack channel as well. Just to bubble it up so there's full context there. We tell people at the beginning that everything should go into that shared channel so there is shared context there. Unless it's like some personal matter that they're asking advice for or something like that. We bubble it up so that everyone can see it. That's a small way to retrain behavior too. If you've got someone who's DMing you all the time, you want to bubble that up to the Public channel and get that up there. Another cool thing that we do is we use the channel descriptions and we kind of put in there the project date, the name of the agency, the name of the. The product or the project that they're working on. That's just a little personalization that goes a long way right at the beginning to help them feel like this is the place where some magic is going to happen.

Yep. That gets spun up through automation as well. If you've got other. We've got some people listening who are also absolute Slack Pro users. If you've got other tips, send them my way. We're always looking to learn from what other teams are doing. I'm going to hit on two more things. I want you to talk about how we use Miro, because you kind of mentioned that in the outcome of the blueprint. But a couple things that we do in that process as well. This is one that I think will be relatively common. You may have experienced this working with some service provider before, but boy, a personal welcome video from the person they're going to be meeting next. So let's say they talk to Kevin. An agency spoke with Kevin in our sales process and one of our account executives and they come on board and now Kevin is making a handoff. You bought from Kevin. Now, because of it being a product and leading on the process, they're not buying Kevin explicitly, but that's where all the trust in the relationship is. And now we're saying, hey, you're going to go talk to Derek in this case, or you're talking to Andrew, whoever you're getting transferred to. That handoff is really important to make as smooth as possible. And so having a process for Derek to make a quick video and to share with the client. So just a quick loom. Headshot video. Hey, I'm Derek. Introducing himself. Welcoming them with a customized video into the process and helping them to feel comfortable as quickly as possible. One just helps to ease the transition. And the first time they're meeting him isn't necessarily on the kickoff goal. They already feel like they've had a chance to meet and get to know him. But the other piece that it does is it helps kind of keep that fresh if they are going to be or there's something recorded there that they can go back to if. Yeah, hey, where I'm signing up today, but we're actually kicking this off in two weeks or working this off in three weeks. We're gonna do some of the homework at a time. But our kickoff call is a Couple weeks out, they've got that there. So that's one thing I would highly encourage. Any point that there's a transition in your business, add that in. And then. Actually, so I wanna throw the Miro thing to you. I wanna talk about this training course, too, and the idea of giving your clients homework, and there's good and bad that comes with that. So maybe some of the thoughts and some of the feedback that we've had about the training course, but let's start on the Miro side. Talk about that.

So Miro is a great visual collaboration tool, and we use this like our blueprints when we present them in that blueprint process. The end product is a Miro board, so it's kind of a graphic representation of what your workspace structure and outline should look like. We've used lucidchart in the past as well, another great process mapping tool there. We like Miro, though, because it's got some great collaborative features and it's a little bit more artistic in its layout and design. And so in our whole. In our blueprinting process, we've recently been testing collaborations in the discovery process on the board itself. So we've got some icebreaker exercises that we go through on our first call to kind of gather the. Kind of. What is the emotional impact of chaos in your agency right now? And we've got some exercises right on the board that we do live on the call. And it's really fun to see agencies like interacting with that and how that can spur conversation and the emotion that comes out of that process. And I wouldn't breeze over the pains as you're solving the problems that your agency solves. Make sure you spend time there to understand, but also to allow your clients to articulate the pain that they're feeling. Because you can be. You're the path out of that pain for them. And don't forget that. And don't let them forget that either. You don't want to be the person that's just doing what they're told, but you want to be the person who's paid to solve expensive problems for them. And so Miro does a great job of that, of collaborating with clients and making it an interactive experience. It's a nice blend. The way the Miro tool works is kind of a blend between Google Slides and lucidchart or a whiteboarding tool where it can bring those two things together. So we've got a couple different exercises that we run out of Miro, and then at the end of the project, they get to be added to the Miro board and kind of own that as their final deliverable. So they can track on the Miro board, kind of going back from the kickoff through the discovery exercises that we've walked them through, the survey results all the way up to the end blueprint that they're presented and they kind of have that trail that led to that blueprint all in one spot.

I think your point about pain is really important to pull out. And then I want to mention one other thing about Miro on the pain side. Until people are clear on the consequences of continuing to do what we have always done and clear on what they really want and the outcome associated with that, it's going to be really hard to get folks to take meaningful action on the backside of all of this. So that buy in really comes from us getting clear on, just like anything else people talk about, whether it's personal fitness or whether it's financial literacy or financial habits, all of that comes from putting the why behind it and understanding what are we really here for. Do I understand what the costs are if I keep doing it this way? And do I understand what the outcome that I desire truly is and what it's going to take to get there? I think that's a great point. I think at some point, maybe even by the time you're listening to this, these Miro boards could wind up as ClickUp whiteboards using the whiteboard feature. But right now, similar to the slack side, a ton of agencies are already working inside Miro. And so there's some comfort level. And again, it's a service to them to have it be inside a consistent platform that they've had experience with. Yeah. In that blueprint process, we're putting people into our blueprint training course and what we're trying to do is we're trying to set a vision for them of here's what gold standard agency operations looks like in these different areas. As part of that training. How has that training course been received and what's the feedback that you've heard around it?

Yeah, I was talking to one of our client coaches this morning and she said that we're, we're trying to, to change the way agencies think. I said that's exactly right. And every agency should try to change the way their clients think. You should be the leader that drives that conversation and give them a new way to think. And I think training courses are the absolute best, most underutilized asset that agencies have at their disposal to, to leverage the collective knowledge and experience that they have and to package it in a way that can be easily consumed by their clients. And I'm not talking about just building a course and selling it as a side to your services. I'm talking about integrating assignment training to your clients in the midst of your. Of your projects or in your products. It's transformed the way that we work. It's made our delivery team much more efficient, but it's also, it's helped our clients get better results because they can take ownership over the understanding. And the analogy we use in our kickoffs is this is a college environment. This isn't high school. You need to do the reading before you show up to class. Because in class, we're going to be talking about the concepts and applying the concepts, but we're going to assume you know what the concepts are. And so the training course lays out the foundation, and it teaches all the fundamental principles that people need to know. So that when we are spending time together on calls or we're doing things on their behalf, we know that they know why we're doing them. And if we're asking them to do stuff, we know that they know all the background and they've got the foundation laid. And then we can work together on the nuances and what's unique about you guys and kind of have that 201, 301 level conversation.

Yeah. Training courses, surveys, standardization, like three of the key. Three of the key pieces. Surveys come up all the time. If you can start doing that and create a benchmark, we all want to know kind of how do we stack up? And so I look at the survey in a couple different ways. At this point, we've got thousands and thousands of survey submissions. So we have this awesome database of kind of, hey, where were agencies when they started the process? Where do agencies wind up when they end the process? But we're able to take an agency and benchmark, hey, here's where you are versus other firms. Here's where you are versus firms who are where you're trying to get to. But we're also able to look at what's the internal alignment around these things. Where do you think we're strong, but this person on your team thinks this is the worst part of the business right now. And how do we solve those issues? Where a lot of good feedback around that. And that's something I would encourage. Every agency, there's a benchmark you can do, hey, benchmark the marketing dynamics, benchmark website performance. When people started with you and what the increase looked like, start gathering that data and create those benchmarks for folks and survey their team. And also if you're in a situation where you're trying to create internal alignment, using those can be a really powerful tool. So there's, there's a million other things that we could dig into here around that, around standardizing the process, around what the outcome of that looks like, around some of the, the reusable assets. But this is a really good overview of some of the things that we do that I think every agency could take and could replicate. And I realize it's easier to see it firsthand than to, than to hear it. So if you want, come buy a blueprint from us and we'll teach you these things. I'm just kidding. But seriously, if you're not running a world class agency operation, you absolutely should reach out and talk to us. Sendpilot.com call but I think all of these ideas are things agencies can take and start implementing right away in their process. So thanks for making time today, Andrew. Thank you for listening and spending your time listening to Andrew Nyjam on this. Anything else we need to add in here?

No, I think this can be overwhelming for some people. So start small. Start with that call booking page, start with that intake form after the invoice is paid, get them to fill out some information and just make some baby steps.

Yep. Awesome. All right. These ideas are things agencies can take and start implementing right away in their process. So thanks for making time today, Andrew. Thank you for listening and spending your time listening to Andrew Nyjam on this. Anything else we need to add in here?

No, I think this can be overwhelming for some people. So start small. Start with that call booking page, start with that intake form after the invoice is paid, get them to fill out some information and just make some baby steps.

Yep. Awesome. All right, thanks for being here on the Agency Journey podcast. Go crush it.