Does Your Client Intake Create Raving Fans?

Happy businesspeople, or businesswoman and clientWhat makes you love a business from the get-go? My guess is that it has to do with how easy they make it for you to work with them. It shows you they respect you, and aren’t going to leave you hanging with unanswered questions.

How can you do that for your clients or customers? Let’s look at two examples I’ve recently experienced:

  • A live online course that meets 3 times a month on Wednesdays at 11 am. Anyone else notice what’s missing? I did, as soon as I had a client who wanted to schedule an appointment with me Wednesday afternoon. I had no idea how long each class was. The information was not available until 2 days before the course began. Evidently I was supposed to put my business on hold until then. I’m sure the provider didn’t think that’s what they were doing, but it’s what I felt when I had to postpone scheduling my client. Make sure you provide all the information a prospective customer or client needs as part of your intake process. This can be as simple as a FAQ page on your website.
  • It is possible to overwhelm with too much info. I experienced this with a new email marketing product I tested. As part of the ‘training’, I was sent no less than 10 separate emails in one day, most with multiple links. On top of the overwhelm, there was the added frustration that many of the links no longer worked because the company had revamped its website , but never thought to check the ‘training’ emails to make sure the links still pointed to the information promised. Training is supposed to simplify the learning process, and that means spending some time to edit it down to the essentials. Make sure your material gives required information in a concise way that honors your customer’s time.

Do you have a standardized client intake? Are you answering the basic questions a new client would have? One way to find out is to survey your customers. What you find out will only improve the experience you give your customers.

In this post, we’ve focused on what information you need to provide your client, but there is also information your client needs to provide you. Do you have that written down, so you always ask all the questions you need? Have you ever had to call a client a second time to get information you forgot to get?

Documenting and standardizing your client intake is one of the things you will do in the next Rapid Action Day. If you like the idea of standardizing your intake, even getting it to a point that you can hand it off to someone else with confidence nothing will fall through the cracks, I encourage you to give me a call.

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