Evolving Business Minds

Boosting Client Loyalty through Effective Communication with Andy Silvius | #132

• Andy Silvius • Episode 132

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Learn how to avoid common mistakes in business communication to ensure client satisfaction and successful interactions. Improve your communication skills today!

Can poor communication really cost you clients and even tarnish your business reputation? This episode uncovers the indispensable value of effective communication in retaining clients and fostering success. We’ll walk you through how putting yourself in your client's shoes can revolutionize your service delivery. By prioritizing communication, you plug gaps in your service and potentially outperform other investments like marketing. Through sharing personal experiences and observations from other business owners, you’ll see firsthand the transformative power of clear, consistent client interactions.

We don’t just talk about the problem; we offer practical solutions. Learn five actionable steps to elevate your client communication—from auditing current practices to understanding the customer journey and enhancing touchpoints. Discover the importance of setting clear expectations and regularly updating clients to boost satisfaction and loyalty. We also delve into the benefits of implementing a customer success role, automating notifications, and training your team effectively. To make things even easier, we provide a downloadable checklist to guide you through these steps, ensuring your clients remain happy and your business thrives.

Get a copy: Client Retention Assessment for Business Owners

Episode Sponsored by: Olive Branch Bookkeeping, Inc

Message from our sponsor: A profitable business needs a tailored financial solution for growth. Understanding your needs and what matters most to you is our #1 priority. We have put together a bookkeeping service that will allow you to take control of your business and future growth.

📲 Schedule a discovery call with Olive Branch Bookkeeping, Inc here: https://calendly.com/caryn-23/discover_conversation

Evolving Business Minds podcast links:

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/evolving-business-minds/id1498316242

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Qqiizmt3UzcbQM9EJFViw?si=cJSjUhPMTSqS5tH0z7SkUg

Links to connect with Andy Silvius:

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andysilvius/

Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResourcefulAgent/

Follow on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewsilvius/

Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andysilvius?lang=en

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Andy Silvius:

All right, welcome to another new episode of the Evolving Business Minds podcast. If you're new to the podcast or didn't catch last week's episode, I had mentioned in last week's episode that I was going to start incorporating some of these solo episodes, and while I love interviewing guests and I think they bring a ton of value to the show, I think there's a lot of stuff that we do in our business that maybe I take for granted or don't share enough of, and I think maybe there's some valuable insights for people that can take away what challenges we have faced, things that we've learned in our business that we need to, that we've done and implemented. And so, like I said, I love interviewing guests and there's tons of value there Just tend to not get into the weeds with some of the details, and so I'm going to try this format for a while and see if you guys like it. Definitely would love feedback from everyone who you know if you listen to this or watch this on YouTube. I'd like the feedback and just see if you guys like this episode.

Andy Silvius:

So today I want to discuss I want to discuss one of the things I think hurts a business and the reputation more than most people realize and that is going to be their communication, or lack of communication with clients and or team members. And this piece, this lack of communication piece, I think really increases people's churn. So, just for definition sake, sake like churn is when it's it's the amount of clients that you lose out of your business, and so there are, there are so many businesses now that I think are okay with running and being mediocre that we don't put effort into making sure that we're giving the clients, and just the client experience is not great, and so I really this is just something that I have been stuck on for a while. I think this communication piece and client retention, they go hand in hand, and for some reason maybe I just didn't realize this years ago, but I feel like in the last five to 10 years businesses are just really dropping the ball on communication, and we are experiencing this, but not from the bad side. We're actually benefiting from it in our business, which is not a complaint, but I do think this transfers to just about any business in any industry, or the majority of industries, and so, even if you're not in the same business as we are in, I think this kind of stuff can really help you if you make it a priority in your business.

Andy Silvius:

So a little later in this episode I'm going to cover some five actionable steps that I think you can use to improve communication in your business today. Use to improve communication in your business today and then I may have a downloadable link for you. I got to make sure I have it and I didn't look at that before I started recording the episode, but I'll have a downloadable link for like a checklist that you can use for your communication. And so I want to just set the context here of imagine you're a customer hiring a business to do a project for you and as soon as you hire them, the communication goes silent. So you probably would start questioning you know, if they're even doing the work, if they forgot about you, or you might even have a bit of buyer's remorse, especially if whatever you're paying for service or product, and typically this is going to refer to service-based stuff. But the buyer's remorse kicks in for most people within 24 to 48 hours. So if your process isn't great or if you can't communicate or haven't communicated well with them, people are going to question whether they made the right decision in hiring you for whatever the need is or whatever service that they're looking for. And so you know, this is what clients feel when you don't communicate with them and what you're, with what you're doing and where you are in the process on the job.

Andy Silvius:

And so what I really think that we should be doing as business owners is starting to put ourselves in our customer's shoes when it comes to hiring our companies and think about it like, go through your business and say, if I were on the flip side, if I were the customer in this position, would I be happy with this service? Would I be okay with the lack of communication I'm receiving? And again, this can be difficult, I think, as a business owner, because we get sometimes we become blinded by our own, you know, perception of our business and we don't realize like hey, we're not actually doing great in this area. So you know, if you feel like you're one of those people that can't self-assess very well without being too biased about your business, get a friend, get some colleague, get somebody you trust and just go through the entire process with them, exactly how you do it with every other customer, and get their feedback. I think that's a big. That'd be a free way to do it and just to evaluate whether you have gaps in your business or not.

Andy Silvius:

And so, besides running multiple businesses of my own between my wife and I, I've also had the privilege of speaking with hundreds of business owners through my podcast here or just other forms of networking friends, colleagues and so from my own experiences, as well as watching others, I've recognized that most businesses lose business and they get a bad reputation simply from a lack of communication. And the craziest part about this is that the communication piece is free in your business, and yet we still seem to people still seem to drop the ball with this. We'll, we'll, we'll invest money into marketing, we'll buy all these systems, we'll buy all this stuff because we think it's going to make the business do better, or we're always focused on marketing. But it doesn't matter how many people you bring in your business if you're always losing them through the back door. So something that we've experienced lately.

Andy Silvius:

So, again, if you follow this channel for any period of time, or my show, or know me personally, you know that I was a mechanic, went into real estate, grew a real estate business, started a team, and then we moved about a little over a year ago and a couple of years back we decided my wife had decided to start her bookkeeping firm and so when we moved it was a great opportunity for me to kind of shift gears and help her grow that, and so obviously things were slow in the beginning, but within this last year we have been gaining customers consistently, like on a regular basis, and they're all leaving our competitors or, whether they whether we know the competitors or not they're leaving other competitors of ours so bookkeepers and accountants and we always ask them hey, what's going on? Why are you switching away from the person you've been working with? And I would say almost 100% of the time lately. If they're coming from a competitor, it is because they couldn't reach them. No one answered the phone, no one communicated with them. They couldn't reach them, no one answered the phone, no one communicated with them, and so they just they felt ignored.

Andy Silvius:

Especially when it comes to finances, you want to know the person that you're hiring to do a service. Are they, are they, are they doing the work? Or if you have questions about your business and you need someone to answer you. It's unacceptable if somebody reaches out, you know, if I'm a customer and I reach out to you and you're running an accounting business and you go and nobody responds. And it could be two, three, four weeks and still no response. Hey everyone, I have a quick interruption from the show, but I'll make it brief. I've got something that I think is vital for every entrepreneur out there and it can be a game changer for your business.

Andy Silvius:

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Andy Silvius:

You know we all get busy in business, but it is a lack of systems. A lack of discipline is a lack of systems, a lack of discipline and really, at the end of the day, it's, it's. I think it's just a lack of caring about customers in a sense and I know that sounds really harsh and maybe you don't feel like that's you, but if you feel like you're dropping the ball, you don't have systems in place to be able to manage the communication and it's such a crucial part of business. And so, like I mentioned earlier, a lot of businesses think they need more incoming leads. But the problem is, if you keep having incoming leads and you keep trying to sell new business and meanwhile you're losing your current business out of the back end or out the back door you know you're it just creates this stress in your business where you're always spending money to bring in new business. And keep in mind too hiring or not hiring, bringing in new business it typically costs a company far more to acquire new customers and fulfill on those services than it is to keep the current client base and do well with them, upsell them new services. But if you're doing bad with communication and fulfillment with the first set of clients that are already active in your business, you're not going to be able to upsell them, you're going to end up losing them, and then it's going to cost you more every time you have to go get new clients into your business to replace the ones you're losing through the back door, and so this can be kind of difficult too.

Andy Silvius:

I found, just by evaluating other people's businesses, it can be difficult to understand truly why some people are leaving, because I think the majority of people don't like conflict owners, but most of the customers don't enjoy conflict, so they're going to tell you they may tell you the truth, but they may make up some lie about you know why they're leaving. But a lot of times it's going to come down to lack of communication or lack of, you know, lack of fulfillment on the service, and that's a whole nother video this one. We're just going to simply talk about communication and client retention from that aspect. But the other piece of this too and I'm not going to dive in too deep with it because I do think this could be an entire video, whatever new podcast episode for this but not only is losing customers or clients a huge issue for your business, but if you're bad at communicating with customers and your clients, you're typically going to be bad with communicating with your team if you have one. So if you have people in your business that work with you, if you can't communicate with the clients, those are habits that transfer over to your team and the. You know.

Andy Silvius:

Some of the repercussions of this is you're going to have bad company culture. People are going to be, you know they're just not gonna take it as serious if they don't know what's happening or they're trying to communicate with you and you don't return that communication. It causes missed deadlines, project errors, you know, low morale, lack of motivation and all kinds of other issues that will just plague your business and make it very difficult to not only run but the chance of growing. It is going to be substantially less or much harder for you if that's the case. So that, all being said, this all leads to missing revenue, and but it's all within your control. So if you have this issue with communication, there are things you can do to fix it, and so, yeah, the great thing about it is, if it's happening, you can fix it and you can fix it, but there's going to be some steps along the way.

Andy Silvius:

So here are five steps that I've used to make significant improvements for our communication in our business and, like I said, we didn't. I didn't feel like we had the problem that others do, but I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose sight of it, because it's easy, as you get busy, to just go through the motions and then go, oh shoot, like I haven't communicated this piece. And so here's the five steps that I go through. So the first one is going to be to audit your current communication process or practices, and during this stage, I think you need to review how your business currently handles client communications across all channels. So phone, email, social media, wherever you communicate with clients, you need to understand all the channels and how that works.

Andy Silvius:

The next thing is going to be identifying the communication gaps, so any recurring issues, identifying the communication gaps, so any recurring issues such as delayed responses, missed calls, lack of progress, updates, and something I should have put in here as a step and I would say this is like the pre-step to any of these is you need to identify your customer journey, and so you need to. I mean, I don't care if you use a Google doc, if you draw it on a napkin, a piece of paper. You need to. You need to identify from the point that you nurture a lead a lead that's not an active customer yet to the point that they become a customer, and then, whatever the process is, from the time to become a customer until the time you fulfill the service or the ongoing steps If it's an ongoing service, you need to identify that entire customer journey. And then I want to see what you're going to want to see is that where are you communicating to the client through their customer journey? What points? Are you stopping and saying, hey, we did this for you, or hey, this is what's happening next and you're setting expectations.

Andy Silvius:

If you don't understand the customer journey, it's going to be very difficult to audit your communication process. But what's nice about it is, once you understand your customer journey, this is where you can really identify those communication gaps. So if you understand that, hey, sally gets you know, sally just onboarded. Well, do you have an onboarding process? This onboarding process is massive and it could be a simple text and email, it could be a phone call. Whatever it's going to, this is going to set the expectations of what they should expect, moving forward with the service that you're providing for them. And so when you start drawing this on paper or writing it in a list.

Andy Silvius:

However you, however you work, um, cause everybody's a little bit different it's it gives you a visual of like, wow, we have all these steps along the way to fulfill this service for this customer, but we've only communicated with them two times, and so when you see it on paper, it makes it more real, and then you can go back and say you know what there's these three steps prior or whatever, and I can go in and let them know hey, this is what's happening in these areas and just update them. Honestly, customers with a simple update would be far happier than just being completely ghosted, and I have heard from friends of mine that are business owners that are bad at communication that, oh, customers, they create this story in their head that customers don't want to be bothered, they don't want to have, they don't want to be bugged with, like, updates on their stuff. Um, I don't buy that for a second. I think that you can update them and they may not respond to you, but they're going to see the messages. Whether it's a phone call, a dropped email, a dropped voicemail or an email, they're going to see it and just even for a split second, that peace of mind, oh, they are working on this and they're thinking about me and they're updating me. That goes a very long way for a customer. And then so, to reiterate, we have audit current communication practices. We identify the communication gaps. Now we're going to set communication standards. Identify the communication gaps Now we're going to set communication standards. And so this is going to be something that should, if you have a team whether you're by yourself or you have a team setting communication standards and defining clear standards for response times, updated frequencies and communication channels to be used, like this is going to be a huge piece. And if you have this outline for your team and you say, hey, our standards are, we get back to our customers within, you know, an hour or less, or five minutes or less. You know, the shorter the timeframe, the more ideal it is for the customer. But have standards in place that they don't, that don't get broken.

Andy Silvius:

If you have a service you're fulfilling, you need to know what's the frequency in which I update them on the service. How many times am I going to let them know? Or at what points am I going to let them know hey, we're at this point in the project or we're here or there. And this all goes back to the customer journey understanding where the gaps are that you already have and where you should be updating them to keep them informed and keep that communication very clear and open with them. Step four would be to automate some of these update notifications so, wherever possible, you can use software to automatically send updates or progress or milestones.

Andy Silvius:

And this stuff's not hard like it can be difficult to figure out some of the technology these days. But there's so many programs, there's so many things out there. Um, we're actually developing all of it for our business and we're we're building it out for our industry. So if you know anyone in bookkeeping and accounting, that's going to be coming soon. We just haven't really, uh, haven't launched it or anything yet, but it's going to be something that that helps with this communication process and eventually we may open it up to new industries as well. Um, but there's so many applications, there's so many programs out there now that can help.

Andy Silvius:

You know, I'm not I'm not ignorant to the fact that, like in business, we all get very busy. There's so many things that you're wearing a hundred hats, especially when, in the beginning, when you don't have leverage in your business. You're doing all the things and so it can be difficult to remember oh, I need to go, I need to go update this person, or I need to update that person. And so if you can utilize technology to update some of these notifications, to automate these updates, it'll streamline your business. You know, it'll just make things easier. Now you still have to remember if there's an automatic update and there's a channel or a way that they can respond back, you need to make sure you respond to them. But that's, we can get into all the technical stuff on another video.

Andy Silvius:

And then step five that I have is to train your team. So this is a big piece, obviously, if you are not by yourself and you have people working with you to ensure your team members know how to handle the client inquiries and concerns and just effectively communicate and handle the situation. And so, again, it goes back to your standards. If you, if your team, knows that you guys have standards in certain areas, they're going to know what needs to be done. But training is still ultimately the same, on the same level, where you need to make sure that they understand all the steps and what the you know what these standards are in your business and, like I mentioned at the beginning, it's it's not hard, it's, um, it's easy to do. Can it be, you know, time consuming? Yeah, but it's it's far less time consuming than losing customers and having to go acquire new business on a regular basis. And so, yeah, it just gets frustrating for me, because I think that we have so much opportunity to build a big business, big businesses, and I think, whether you decide you're going to have a small company or not, just the standards we set these days seem very low and we have more opportunity to communicate faster and easier with clients, especially with technology, that there's really no excuse.

Andy Silvius:

And so I'm going to put together a detailed checklist for you guys to download, um, I think I mentioned at the beginning, so I'll make sure I find that put it into the show notes, um, and this will just be like a checklist on, you know, kind of guiding you through this whole process. So you have something to reference and obviously, if you have questions, you can reach out to me. But some action items I want to put in here for you guys. So, if something that we implemented in our business, so in our book, you confirm, is that we decided to implement a customer success role. So, using all the steps I've talked about, we we wanted to make sure that our clients were happy with our services and communication.

Andy Silvius:

So I've done something simple that you know my initial call to the customers to introduce myself as the new customer success manager, or the person that we hired in that position, and and so the first call goes out to introduce yourself, let them know who you are and what you're there for. And in that call you can ask them some feedback questions. And it's it's very simple. I don't have the questions in front of me, but it can just like hey, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate our communication with you on a scale of one to 10? What are you like? How do you feel about the services you're being provided Like? You just want simple feedback. It doesn't need to be overthought or overcomplicated, but you want simple feedback to understand. Are you moving in a direction that's positive for the clients and you're creating a good or a great customer experience, or are you moving in a direction that is making clients uneasy, frustrated and ultimately leads to client churn? You know client turnover.

Andy Silvius:

And so, monthly after that, after you do the initial call, I send a check-in text and I want to check in and make sure, like, how are things going in their business? Is there anything that I can do to you know? Is there anything that I need to jump in and do to help? And you can do this if you hired someone in this position, or you can use automations to do the same thing with one person. And then we implemented quarterly feedback surveys. So I get my first feedback survey, I'm checking with them monthly, make sure things are going well, and then every quarter I'm going to send a variation of survey or something that gives me feed, a feedback loop, on are we continuing to provide the service we think we are, are they still happy with the services they're getting, are they happy with the communication? And so these aren't difficult things to do. Again, it's just something that you have to implement in your business and do it and consistently do it. You can't say you can't check in within one month and then wait six months and check back in again. It's just, it's going to defeat the purpose. And so that has been a huge.

Andy Silvius:

A huge piece in our business is getting feedback and client surveys and you know if you are sending these client surveys out. I guess a good way to just see if the communication is better or that they're understanding is, like it, just see what the feedback is. It's a good indicator that you still have areas that need to be improved if they're giving you negative feedback. I know it sounds very obvious, but always be evaluating your processes and how things are going. Always be evaluating your processes and how things are going. I hope this helps you guys.

Andy Silvius:

Again, this is before I filmed this episode. I thought maybe this was really basic Cause I have been thinking about this for a while, but again it's. I think just today we had a new customer come in because it because they didn't have the communication piece from the person before, and if I can help any of you just reduce client turnover, even by a little bit, I think that this one piece will help you. So I just want to thank you for listening today. Again, new style of episodes. These are solo episodes without a guest, and so if you like this style, go ahead and let me know. I also would love to know if there's anything that stuck out to you most from the show, if you could leave the comment. And yeah, we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for watching.