Creating Client Touchpoints Will Connect Them To Your Business
How many times a year does your business have contact with your clients? The industry standard is at least seven touches a year. Those touches can include client reviews, phones calls, birthday and holiday cards.
Client touches help ensure that your clients are connected to your business. They can be designed to make sure the client knows that you care about them. It’s not just about “selling” something to them. And they help ensure that your clients won’t easily go to your competition.
The common problem in most agencies is that although they know the importance of client touches, there isn’t a plan in place. Some agencies have client reviews on a schedule. Or even a system in place for birthday cards. These are great and should be implemented, but what ties it all together?
There needs to be a strategic plan for what client touches should happen as well as the systems to execute and track those client touches.
Your strategic plan should include what client should receive which touch. This is because not all clients, and not all touches, are equal. For instance, your top-level clients may receive handwritten birthday cards from you. This is a great personal touch but would be hard to duplicate for all clients. Other clients might receive a nice birthday card that is signed by all members of the team but is a photocopy. Your top-level clients may receive a one-hour review with you and other clients may receive a review with a member of your team.
Once you have a plan, you need a system to make sure these activities are proactive. For instance you might have a review system to ensure that all clients are offered a review 60 days before they renew. You might also have a system to create a reminder the first week of December to ensure that client holiday gifts are selected. The goal is that every touch should have a proactive system to either take action or remind your team to take action.
Tracking is the last, and often lost, part of your client touch system. How many of the touches happened? For instance, did a client decline a review the last two years? Or did we not reach them when we made a pre-planned phone call? You want to know what touches were not only attempted but also completed. If you have a CRM you can easily use that software to track your touches; but if not, a simple Excel spreadsheet will do. This way at any moment in time you can track, by client, how close you are to the seven touches a year.