You’re never judged just by your finished project. Clients frequently determine the value of your work by the entire experience they have interacting with you, which is why it is so critical to fail-safe the customer journey.
“We all know what it feels like to have this great work, do this really great project, and still the client’s upset, or they’re just not satisfied,” says Jenny Girard, director of operations for R.M. Landscape, Inc., based in Hilton, New York. “They’re not happy. They didn’t find the value. So you can deliver this beautiful property, finish a project well, have a strong season, but if you miss an interaction that mattered to the client, that can outweigh everything else.”
Girard will cover where in the client journey things are most likely to break down and how to build processes to protect against this during her session, “Designing a Fail-Safe Client Experience: Building Consistency, Trust and Long-Term Loyalty” on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 2:30 p.m. at ELEVATE.
She says this session will help attendees learn how to connect the client experience to the operational side of the business and show how entire teams can be more intentional to build a better client experience that works for their company.
How Client Expectations Are Formed
You may think it’s impossible to truly anticipate what your clients expect from you, but Girard argues it is driven by some key psychological elements, including experience, social norms, status, external pressures and promises.
“Experience is basically what they know from working with you or a previous contractor,” Girard says. “It could be another, even another trade. Social norms are what they believe to be what’s acceptable for a professional service.”
Meanwhile, status is your company’s reputation, reviews and what your business represents. External pressures are more complex because this could include multiple stakeholders as well as the client’s budget.
Girard says promises are the largest area you can influence when it comes to customer expectations.
“It’s the promises you make through sales, contracts, emails, websites, conversations,” she says. “So, when you go back to what’s driving these expectations, it’s consistently back to these core things: when people perceive value, that’s really what drives whether it was a good experience or a bad experience.”
An example of creating a sense of value is meeting the social norm of dressing professionally in a clean uniform versus showing up to meet a client in ripped pants.
Girard notes that making customers happy doesn’t mean having to say yes to their every desire.
“Disney doesn’t tell you yes to everything,” she says. “There are clear rules at Disney, right? There are clear rules to how you’re going to show up and how you’re going to experience it. They set that expectation for you.”
Similarly, companies should be consistent about what they can and cannot provide. It’s far better to say no to a service that is out of your wheelhouse rather than trying and failing when you can’t follow through with the customer’s request.
She says it’s also important to ensure that exceptions do not quietly become the new standard, because if you keep doing something outside of an agreement or scope, without addressing it, the client will naturally begin to expect it.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Girard says one of the biggest mistakes is assuming that quality automatically equals a good client experience.
“Obviously, you can’t promise quality work, and then you provide poor work, but the client’s also judging the communication, professionalism, reliability, and whether the experience matched what they expected,” Girard says.
While companies tend to focus on the service itself, clients are evaluating the estimate, the contract, the scheduling, the crew, the communication, the invoice and the follow-up. Each aspect of the journey has to carry value.
Some of the areas where this can fall apart are when the sales team makes lots of promises but doesn’t communicate this to the operations team. Likewise, operations may know how to execute what was promised, but they aren’t clear with the field team about a client’s preferences.
Another common failure point is when changes occur, whether that be the scope, schedule or people involved, but this is not communicated to the client.
“That’s where the client starts to fill in the blanks, and that we don’t want,” Girard says.
Creating Fail-Safes
One example Girard will delve into is how Wrigley Field has fail-safed baseball goers’ experience of visiting the ballpark. She says the first step is to map out the full journey from the client’s perspective, not the operator’s point of view.
“In our industry, that could be really that first sales interaction,” Girard says. “It could be onboarding, service delivery, communication, invoicing, renewal, and then into the next year. You’re going to map out that whole process, and then once you map out all those different interactions, you want to look at ‘Well, what does the client see? What are they doing? Who are they interacting with? What happens behind the scenes to support that experience?’”
This is when you can start building out consistent handoffs and clear ownership where information and expectations are most likely to get lost. Girard explains that while you can’t control everything, you can influence certain aspects to make the experience more enjoyable.
When missteps happen, Girard says acknowledging the client’s experience and responding quickly can get things back on track.
“You do not have to agree with everything they say, but they need to know that someone heard them, someone owns it, and there’s a clear next step,” Girard says. “Then you have to follow through. That’s the most important part.”
After resolving the issue, the company should evaluate if there is a gap in the process that should have a safeguard put in place to prevent a similar incident from occurring with other clients.
Want more actionable strategies for improving the customer experience across your organization? Register for ELEVATE, and we’ll see you in Tampa, Florida!
