Podcast Ep. 02 — How Your Systems Can Improve Your Client Experience & Increase Retention

Most of your revenue will not come from new clients, it’ll come from a small percentage of clients who decide to work with you over and over again.

Have you heard of the Pareto principle? Also known as the 80/20 rule, this magic ratio is actually your secret to customer retention. The Pareto principle is the idea that 80% of outcomes are based on 20% of causes. And while the 80/20 rule has many use cases in business, in episode 2 of our podcast, we’re going to be discussing how 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients, along with the ways better systems mean you’re more likely to retain that crucial 20% of loyal customers. 

Here’s what I discuss: 

• Staying top of mind with your clients by creating follow-up systems

• Delivering consistent, high-quality experiences that give clients the familiarity they crave

• Using systems to get better client results 

Better systems mean better retention…

Better systems mean providing the same, excellent customer service every time, from sending appointment reminders to easily collecting client information and reaching out with follow-ups. When customers find a service they’re consistently happy with, they’re much less likely to go looking for something new. Putting functional, easy-to-use systems in place for a seamless customer experience means that those 20% of loyal customers are much more likely to keep generating 80% of your company’s revenue.  

If you’re a service provider in the real estate, consulting, or creative industry and your business needs systems to help you retain clients, our Done-For-You Systems service may be perfect for you. We’ll simplify processes, set up tech tools, and document all procedures. This service will help you remove yourself from day-to-day work, effectively delegate to your team, and work more efficiently, which will all increase your client retention!

Book a call with us here to get started.

Don’t want to listen? Read the transcript instead:

“Welcome to the Day to Day Assist podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer, here to give you bite sized tips on how to transform your workday with strategic processes, technology, and human resources. My goal is to help you run your side hustle, six figure, or multi million dollar business chaos free.

Most of your revenue will not come from new people. Instead, it'll come from a smaller percentage of clients who decided to work with you multiple times. There's an economist who discovered this thing called the Pareto Principle or the 80 20 rule. And it's a concept that basically says that 80 percent of your revenue will come from 20 percent of your clients.

For you, this may look like 50 clients deciding to repurchase from you over and over again throughout the year, as opposed to you going out and finding 250 new clients to buy your services within that same year. Systems are not just designed to help you operate better internally, but they also help your business retain more clients.

In this episode, we'll discuss how systems can help you improve your client experience and increase retention so that those 20 percent of clients keep driving your revenue. You're going to hear me use the word retention a lot throughout this episode.

Retention is a word that people use in a bunch of different industries like education and human resources, but in this case, it just means your ability to keep or retain your customers over time. There's an entire formula for measuring your CRR, or customer retention rate. But, to keep it simple, you can start by choosing a time period, like 3 months or 1 year, and then tracking how many customers you kept, or the ones that came back for more than one service, throughout that time period.

Retention matters because it will make you more money, and it is so much cheaper and easier to keep customers than it is to find new ones. Okay, before I get to the first point, let me start by saying this.

People already did so much work to find you the first time. And if they had a good experience, the chances of them spending that much time to go out and find someone different to do the exact same thing are slim. So you have to make sure that you're making their experience really good by using systems.

Systems help you retain clients by keeping you top of mind and reminding your past clients to repurchase your services. When it comes to medical exams, checkups, doctor visits, whatever you like to call them. I absolutely hate everything about them. I hate looking for offices. I hate finding a new doctor.

I hate going to my appointments. And honestly, I wish I could exist without having to go to the doctor at all. But I can't do that, especially with my eye doctor, because I don't have 20 20 vision. And if I skip my yearly appointments, I would not be able to see anything at all. My eye doctor is so great with retaining me as a customer.

He sends me an automated text message one time every year reminding me to book my yearly eye exam. If I don't book it at my 12 month mark, which I've done before, they will continue sending me reminders and leaving me voice messages until I book that appointment. An automated follow up system that probably took them less than 10 seconds to add me to has kept me going back to their office to get my eyes checked and purchase contacts from them for the past three and a half years.

The same thing applies to me getting my oil changed. No matter what state I'm in when that oil light comes on, you. I will find a Take 5 oil change shop. Why? Because they send me emails and text messages every three months with coupons telling me that my car is due for an oil change and that they are ready and available to perform that service for me.

These service providers have done such an amazing job retaining me as a customer by simply staying top of mind whenever I need an eye exam or an oil change. But maybe you're not an eye doctor. Or a mechanic. And you can't see how this may apply to an industry or business like yours that isn't.

Quote, unquote, essential. You may be thinking, Jennifer, we have to go to the eye doctor and get oil changes, but we don't have to purchase marketing services or use a real estate agent to buy a house. Your service will always, always, always be essential to someone who needs it. Technically, I don't have to go to the eye doctor or get an oil change.

There are plenty of people walking around with blurry vision and driving around until their oil gets down to one percent. And there are people who've decided to check their eyes and change their oil themselves. I have never entertained the thought of doing it myself because I'm constantly getting reminders and follow ups from a professional service provider who can do it faster and much better than I can.

But if you still feel like your industry is not essential, it's all the more reason for you to use systems to retain customers. Why? Because they don't have to come back to you at all. But having a system to remind them of why they should work with you as opposed to doing it themselves, or going elsewhere and how it can impact their life or business will keep you top of mind.

So when they're ready to have that particular service done again, they will come back to you.

Another way systems help you retain customers is by ensuring you deliver a consistent, high quality client experience. This breeds familiarity and makes customers trust you enough to come back. Client experience is the quality of a client's interactions with your business. It's how they feel about the business as a whole and the problems they were able to solve by investing in your services.

When clients say they had a good experience, it means at the core that you were able to solve their problem and that they got value out of the time and money they spent working with you. Consistency is so important because when clients decide to come back to work with you multiple times, they have already built an expectation in their minds around your business and how you can help them.

When you're inconsistent, it impacts their ability to make a sound decision about whether your service will be able to solve their problem the next time. Inconsistency makes clients feel like they're risking time and money every time they work with you. Let me ask you this. How would you feel if you went to a restaurant like Chick fil A or Ruth's Chris, ordered the same exact thing that you always order, and it tasted different the second or third time around?

I know how you would feel, because I talk about it with my friends all the time, and when a restaurant is not consistent, we label it as a hit or miss, which means that I am taking a risk every time I go there, because my food has a 50 percent chance of being good, and a 50 percent chance of being mediocre or terrible, and I don't know about you, but I hate spending my hard earned money on bad food. Chick fil A and Ruth Chris are still both in business and retaining customers very well. So how do franchises that big make sure that your chicken and steak taste the same every single time? They have a system that ensures the food is always prepared and cooked following the same steps and ingredients.

When your business has systems to help you deliver a familiar, high quality experience over and over again, it reduces your client's desire or need to go somewhere else when they're ready to invest in that same service. Clients crave consistency, and you can create that for them by having systems around how you deliver services to ensure they happen the same way or better every single time.

Your systems will help clients trust you deeply to solve their problems over and over again. Please do not take for granted that there are hundreds of people who can do what you do and your clients can decide to up and work with someone else at any given moment. Clients will 100 percent choose to come back and spend more money with you when you have a great familiar systems. This leads me to my last point. Systems help you get better client results, which increases retention. In our done for you system service, there is a set process that every client goes through for them to experience results. I have a client in the wedding industry who works with me a few times every year to update their client relationship management systems.

And each time I meet with them to make an update, they have the most amazing news to share. Over the past two years, their wedding venue has gone from 40 weddings per year to 100 weddings per year. And they recently opened up a second venue that is starting to get booked. The system I used to help them improve the way they manage their client relationships got them the results of more money, more time, and a more aligned team and happier clients.

I helped them automate their client onboarding so they could set up a portal and gather all the information they need from new brides who booked their venue at the click of a button. Then I documented it for them so that everyone knew how to use the new tools and follow the process. This gave my client the confidence and capacity to book more weddings because the brides were happy with their experience and the team was no longer spending so much time onboarding clients manually and trying to figure out how to use the tech tools. Results like that keep them coming back to work with me multiple times a year.

Now I recognize that I'm talking about a system that I used to create a system for my client So hopefully you were able to follow that example but what I'm really trying to emphasize here is that how I work with clients to help them get the results is the same. If you are reinventing the process for how you work with clients every time they will not all get the same results. When you have the same process, and that process is good, they will get results.

And when they get results, they come back. They tell other people about you, and you can showcase their results in your marketing to attract new clients. All of those things will increase your retention. Okay, so today we discussed how systems help you improve your client experience and increase retention by acting as reminders for your clients to reengage with your services, helping you deliver a consistent, high quality experience and helping you produce better results.

Now that you've listened to this episode, I want you to think about the systems you have in your business and how they're either helping you retain clients or causing you to lose them. Are you reminding them to come back and work with you? Are you keeping the experience consistent? Are you getting them the best results over and over again?

If you are a service provider in the real estate, consulting or creative industry. I know you're always looking for methods to help you improve your client experience, so you can keep more clients coming back to work with you.

Now ask yourself, are your systems helping you meet that goal? Are they helping you keep clients longer and get better results? If you're not sure how to answer those questions, I encourage you to book a call with me to find out how you can get the most out of your systems. Day to Day Assist might just have the right solution for you.

The nagging operations problems your business has been experiencing can finally be eliminated in three months or less with our Done For You Systems service. Your processes will be simplified, tech tools set up, and procedures documented so that you can improve the way your business operates and retain more clients all while removing yourself from the day to day work that you hate.

You can find more information about this service and my calendar link for you to book a call today in the podcast show notes. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode.”