Are you looking for ways to improve your customer service? Have you implemented a customer success strategy in your organization? Nils Vinje is an author and leadership coach who founded the first-ever customer success firm, Glide Consulting, to help organizations improve their leadership skills and teaches the tools you may be lacking to implement a proper customer success strategy, which he details in his new book 30 Day Leadership.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

5 keys to improving your clients' success.
Tracking where you stand with your agency's clients.
4 Pillars to becoming a better leader.

Sponsors and Resources

Agency Dad: Today's episode is sponsored by Agency Dad. Agency Dad is an accounting solution focused on helping marketing agencies make better decisions based on their financials. Check out agencydad.money/freeaudit to get a phone call with Nate to assess your agency's financial needs and how he can help you.

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We’ve all had a bad customer experience some time in our lives. Maybe we feel exasperated by a customer service team and has failed to solve a problem several times or is slow to provide answers. As agency owners, we need to be aware of the consequences of inefficient customer service and how it will affect brand loyalty. It often boils down to lack of onboarding and a clear, no real-time assistance, and mostly the absence of a clear strategy. So how are you getting success for your clients? How can you improve your customer service?

5 Keys to a Great Customer Success Strategy

According to Nils, it is very common for organizations to lump customer service with other areas like sales. It takes a village to serve a customer and there must be a team responsible for this task. “You have a product strategy,” he tells owners, “you have a sales strategy, what’s your customer strategy?” He often gets blank stares. Because of this, he prepared his own 5-Step framework for customer success:

Being Prescriptive
Let’s say you ask for lawyer referrals to do some kind of business deal. You get two referrals, one that confirms his experience in the area and asks you what he should include in the contract and one that gives you a list of things you should cover, a series of recommendations, offers a perspective of the best scenario for you and finally asks how you would like to proceed. You should strive to be like the second lawyer. Clients are not paying you to be asked what they want to do. Be the trusted advisor right from the beginning.
Transformation
Clients are usually expecting some kind of transformation from buying a service. They are at point A and want to get to point B. It is up to you to define what is the absolute best transformation for your clients before they ever go through your process. Ask yourself how you could provide the best possible value for them. That is the destination because then they will very likely renew and expand their relationship with your agency.
A Fresh Start.
This is the moment right after your client signs up to work with you. Their openness, willingness, enthusiasm, and ability to get things done will never be higher than at that point so this is the moment to set expectations regarding how you will continuously drive value to that customer over time.
Engaging Middle.
There is a sense that all the intense part of the process happens at the beginning and then we get into a rinse and repeat the cycle. This rhythm is important. However, we must not miss the opportunity to continue to add value to our clients and come to the table with recommendations on what to improve and what to change.
Crushing the Milestones.
According to Nils, businesses need to architect the right milestones for their customer strategy and build stepping stones to get there. This way, you can understand whether you are on track or off track with a customer.

If you answer each of these steps in a very detailed manner, then you now have a customer’s strategy.

Keeping Track of Where You Stand With Clients

Client churn is going to happen, and that’s ok. It will be an opportunity for you to upgrade. The key is to know when it’s going to happen because it’s the surprise that kills you. When you have a strategy in place for your customers, you can know how on track or off track they are, and that can give you a very good indicator of how likely they are to renew.

If your client retention rate is not as good as you hoped, what are you doing to fix this? Jason likes to recommend a system of monitoring client satisfaction with a stoplight approach: red, yellow, and green. Everyone starts out at yellow and hopefully moves to green once they start seeing results. Clients in the red are the ones in danger that need intervention because they're at risk. How can you communicate better with your red and yellow clients? How can you help them more? Or is there something they're not telling you? Intervention is the key.

Improving your customer retention rate by 5% would probably double your business and achieving that will require working on your communication with clients. It’s better to over-communicate with your clients than to under-communicate. As soon as there is a vacuum of information where there is not an answer to an issue, your customer will likely be thinking negatively and assume you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

4 Pillars of Becoming a Better Leader

A lot of agencies start by accident and you suddenly find yourself leading several teams that rely on you to point out how they can improve at their jobs. When thinking about the complex world of leadership, we can’t just pick some random tips and expect to get a better result. We have to take a long-term view and apply it to develop our leadership skills.

As a first step, Nils came up with four fundamental pillars to become a better leader:

Leading yourself. All about you and your psychology;
Leading others. The interactions with your team;
Leading with communication. The tools and techniques to communicate and send your message to the people that you work with and your clients as well;
Leading with metrics, which is all about how we measure our progress to identify how we can improve.

The Most Important Leadership Tool

If you really want to improve your leadership skills, Nils suggest you focus on Feedback. Learning how to give negative feedback in a way that will help people get better at their jobs will be one of your most important qualities as a leader. However, giving negative feedback is something that most people try to avoid because it is uncomfortable and they don’t have a system to do so. Here’s a 3-step process that you can implement:

Here’s what I observe. Start with these words and follow up with an objective and very specific instance. This is not the place for generalities but rather for a specific event or behavior you witnessed.
The impact that had. Your interpretation of the impact of that behavior you observed.
Help me understand what’s going on. Invite them to share their point of view. We never know where someone else is coming from. But, if you choose to just share your observations and the impact they had and then ask them to explain what is happening, you will get them to share their side of the story, which you would never get on your own.

This is a fairly simple framework that anybody could start using today. “I guarantee your employees want that feedback” Nils assures. It will improve their lives, their jobs, and your relationship with them and you can even implement it with clients too. For more insight on the tools to becoming a better leader, go get Nils’ new book 30 Day Leadership.

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