What is a Client Journey?
The path to becoming a client of a business can be a quick exercise or long courtship depending on the service or the product. At Clinked, we focus on this journey because of our focus on being an online client portal to better delight clients with tech-savvy delivery and engagement. Also, we want to understand why our clients choose Clinked and purposefully look at those existing clients requests when developing our roadmap.
Let’s discuss a typical client journey today and where Clinked helps our clients throughout their client’s journey.
Awareness + Engagement = Client Journey?
Stage 1: Awareness In most businesses, developing awareness is the crux of business success. Strategy setting, marketing efforts, SEO campaigns, conferences, advertising and more roll into this component where the client journey starts. This is where an individual or firm becomes aware of your company’s product or service through a combination of research, marketing and sales efforts or, the holy grail, word of mouth referral. This is your chance to catch their attention with a rock-solid value proposition (i.e. You have this need, I have a solution - here’s how!). Use those fleeting moments of need and precious desires for a solution to create a call to action to qualify their interest and move into the next stage.
Stage 2: Engagement Those “qualifying” their interest in your product or service enters these prospective clients into your sales funnel where your rock star team (or maybe it’s a solo effort!) will have various touch points throughout the funnel that can be tracked in a CRM, spreadsheet, notebook or, for some, your head. Each touchpoint is vital in helping the prospect make the decision to commit to working with your business or not. If all goes to plan, engagement means just that - they come on board as a paying customer and for many this marks the end of the journey…
However, the next steps are crucial. Unfortunately, this is where many businesses go wrong due to limited resources or focus on new sales. And, when left out of the journey, will result in the loss of valuable clients very quickly.
This part of the client journey is where we focus on and enable with Clinked to delight your clients - and help your team understand the health of your client portfolio.
Awareness + Engagement + Delight, Delight, Delight = Client Journey :)
So you’ve made the sale and got a new customer on board. You’ve tracked in a CRM or email system the communication exchanged between you and the client. They’ve signed a contract for one-time payment or rolling periods and the revenue is coming in. But, what’s next?
Stage 3: Delight
Clients looking for a service or repeat product orders provide many opportunities to delight. Setting expectations on delivery starts with client contract signing but doesn’t end there. Providing consistent service or support gives your clients an effortless approach to working towards achieving the solution they sought. Also, consistently working with members of your team results in stronger relationships and reduced friction in your client’s journey customer. This allows awareness of satisfaction levels to get ahead of potential churn. Focus on providing your services and support at a high standard ensures the ability to assess the satisfaction of clients.
But, how do you measure whether your clients are happy with the service you’re providing?
Delight; the stage of your client journey that Clinked can help. Clinked as a next-generation client portal goes beyond the usual one-way file transfer tool to allow you to build and strengthen long-term relationships with your clients after they’ve agreed to be a paying client.
A client portal can be utilised by so many different industries, but as an example, we're going to use a consumer (B2C) financial services need to demonstrate how. Although most of our customers have a B2B business model, we decided to use a B2C use case as an example to make it easier for everyone to grasp.
“Currently, 1 in 6 consumers are dissatisfied with their experience interacting with their bank’s call centre.” - Marketforce (1)
With the recent shift in consumer expectations due to the rapid growth of new technology and digital solutions, individuals now want a quick and easy to access platform where they can view relevant information and the status of requests. By using a client portal technology like Clinked, customers are given the improved communication and transparency that they want. For example, a bank could use Clinked as a channel to send out regular updates to clients such as monthly statements, new offers and upselling opportunities. As well as using it as an information hub to give customers a location to go to when they’re in need of support or additional services offered by the bank.
“Companies that choose to use the flywheel model over the typical funnel have a huge advantage because they aren’t the only ones helping their business grow — their customers are helping them grow as well.” - Hubspot (2)
If done successfully, this method of delighting client relationships can provide massive benefits to your business and delight your clients. This will also reduce churn by administering processes to measure engagement and assess satisfaction of clients. As clients are delighted, they are more open to express their delight through recommendations and word of mouth therefore growing and attracting more clients to your business.
Curious to learn more?
Schedule a time to speak with our team to discuss your need. We’re excited to speak about the solution a Clinked Client Portal can bring to your client’s journey.
Reference(s):
1. https://www.marketforce.com/en-gb/blog/time-reconsider-financial-services-customer-journey