Episode 028: Winter is Coming – Auditing Your Systems

As a systems and business strategist, you know I couldn’t wrap up this three-part series without encouraging you to audit your systems! There is always improvement to be made in our systems to give our clients the best experience from us. In today’s episode, I’m sharing a few ways that you can improve your systems so that you don’t drop the ball, but also a few examples of additional touch points that will improve your overall client journey!

The Business-First Creatives Podcast is brought to you by CRM and Dubsado expert Colie James. Join Colie each week as she discuss how to build a business that brings you joy and a paycheck! From business advice with fellow entrepreneurs to sharing automation tips and tricks, Colie and her guests are sharing industry trends and resources, along with a little bit of sarcasm.

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This episode is part one of a three part series, Winter is Coming!
Listen to part one in episode 26!
Listen to part two in episode 27!

Here are the highlights…

[:13] Recap of day 1 and 2 of Winter is Coming Series

[:30] Your Systems Audit

[:50] Where did you drop the ball?

[2:45] How can you make your clients feel appreciated and understood? Add in touch points with automation.

[7:45] Write Your Entire Customer Journey from Beginning to End

Mentioned in This Episode

Episode 1

Episode 26

Episode 27

Review the Transcript:

Hey everyone, welcome back. I am simply loving this three part series and hopefully this next section doesn’t come as too much of a surprise because I think I’m known as the systems person, so day one of this three part series was an offer audit. Day two was a messaging audit, and day three is your systems audit.

Yay, I finally get to talk about systems. Your systems audit will not start inside of your crm. Your systems audit is actually gonna start with a blank piece of paper and an awesome marker. First, we are going to be focusing on your main offer in this episode, but once you have done the systems audit for your main offer, I would then encourage you to do it for all of your subsequent offers.

The first thing that I want you to think about from all of your clients in 2022 is where you dropped the fucking ball. I want you to be honest.

It’s a little hard. I know, there are a few leads that I should have followed up with. You know, the automated process took care of part of it, but I didn’t pick up the ball and like cross the finish line, if you will. I can admit. But I guarantee there are places that you dropped the ball in your systems in 2022.

I want you to just take a few minutes and write all of those incidents down, those ones that you’re like, Oh, damn, like am I gonna get a one star review from this? That’s one example. Another example is just, Oh, I really wish I’d done this and you didn’t. These are the things that I want you to write down.

because these are gonna be different for all of you. I can’t exactly help you fix them. You know, in a podcast episode, if you would like to DM me on Instagram and tell me what they were, I would love to give you some advice on how to make sure that they don’t happen again. But for the purpose of this podcast, we are going to assume that whatever instances you.

You will have a solution for plugging them. So in other words, if you double booked yourself for a session, cuz that’s actually happened as someone told me on the podcast, maybe you wanna look at a scheduler inside your CRM or using something like Calendly or Acuity to make sure that you are always up to date on your sessions and that you’re not accidentally double booking.

Second kind of, oops, that can happen, that can be solved by the same kind of tool is if your client forgot your session, or heaven forbid you did. Um, both of those can be solved by scheduling and then automatic reminders. So those are the kinds of things that we’re plugging guys. But after we make sure that you’ve plugged your holes, I do want you to think about your systems holistically.

Every single person can probably benefit from emailing or getting in touch with their client two more times during their process. I honestly cannot think of anyone in the hundred students that I’ve served in my course, or the 50 plus people that I’ve done do SODO setups for. I cannot think of a single person that contacted their clients too.

There is literally no such thing. Okay guys, so I want you to think about two extra touch points that you can add into your process anywhere between when they contact you to hire you. And even like, let’s go a month or two after delivery, like anywhere in that time span. I want you to think of two extra touch points that you can add to the process to make your clients feel appreciated or to clarify part of the process.

Any two that you want. I will give you two examples that I, I can think of off the top of my head. I do this for a lot of my clients and some of you guys are gonna be like, Okay, but you were already doing that. But actually I wasn’t . So for a lot of my clients that I’m doing setups for, I have started adding in an email halfway between the session date.

And the anticipated delivery date. So if my editing window is two weeks, I am encouraging all of my clients to send an email out at one week. It does a couple things. It reminds them that they are still, you know, a high priority for you, that their session is still in progress. And you can either do one of two things.

You can either remind them of how awesome the session was and that they should be thinking about their next session Now. Or you can be preparing them to buy additional products when the gallery is deliver. If you’re using something like simple sales, of course every single collection comes with a print or gift credit.

This is just an email where you can be encouraging your clients to think about how they’re going to spend that print product. The more touchpoints you have with clients on buying products, the more likely it is that you will actually sell products. Guys, it’s just a fact. If you never mention print products and your clients get to that gallery where they have a hundred, 300, even $700 in print credit, if you are not reminding them of the awesome products that they could use it for, many people will just leave that money on the table and not actually spend it.

Okay. So two extra touch points. If you are someone who is not already asking for that elusive feedback that I mentioned in your messaging audit on day two of this three part series, this is one that you can add in 30 days after delivery, 60 days after delivery, you can start automatically asking your clients for this feedback.

Now, there’s a couple tools that you can use to do this. You can simply ask them to reply to the. I don’t recommend that , but you could. Second thing that you can do is directly ask them for a Google review and provide the link to them Guys. Don’t expect people to go Google your business to find your Google My Business listing to click on it to give you the review.

That’s not their job. Okay. If they’re willing to give you feedback or give you a testimonial or a review, you need to make it as easy as possible. And so inserting a link directly to your Google reviews is the best practice. Now, method number three is what I actually recommend to all of my clients, and I hope that you will take me up on this inside of your crm.

Or using a click up form using an air table form using a jot form or using a Google form. I would highly recommend that you ask your clients a few of those customer research questions that I mentioned in yesterday’s episode. And in addition to those questions, you provide the link at the end where they can click and basically copy and paste their answers into a Google review for.

This is doing two things, guys. This is making sure that you get a copy of all of the amazing things that they’ve said. It’s also making sure that you actually get the Google Review, which helps with your social media authority, helps you on Google, all of those amazing things. Okay, so. We’ve got those two extra touch points that you’re gonna add.

The last thing that I want you to do for your systems audit is I want you to write down your entire customer journey from beginning to end. How do clients contact you? What’s the process to get them booked? How are you onboarding them into your business once they pay? And then how are you off boarding them when the service has been completed?

This should just be one really long list, guys, a list of every single email, every single form, every single call that you need to schedule inside of their customer journey. Now, guys, after you do all of that, then and only. Are you ready to start talking about CRMs and software? Only then are you ready to start talking about which emails can be automated, which parts will require approval, and all of those things that I talk about on a daily basis on Instagram and also inside this podcast.

So guys, I hope that these three days have given you a starting point of where you want to go, if you are ready to make big changes or even small ones inside of your business in Q1 for 2023. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.