If this is the year you’re looking to improve your client experience, you’ve come to the right place! Auditing your systems and workflows is key to not only improving your experience, but optimizing and refreshing it year after year. To kick off our new client experience series on the podcast, I’m sharing a breakdown of my own audit process and what I’m looking for in your systems!
This is part 1 of a 4-part Client Experience Series!
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Find it Quickly:
00:29 – Starting the Client Experience Audit
1:19 – Winter is Coming Series Recap
5:17 – Identifying Red Flags in Client Experience
6:21 – Steps in a Client Experience Audit
12:27 – Self-Audit Tools and Next Steps
Mentioned in this Episode
Winter is Coming Series:
Review the Transcript:
Hello. Hello. And welcome back to another solo episode of the business first creatives podcast. Today, I want to talk about client experience audits. I think that as entrepreneurs, we have a mindset of creating systems to run the back end of our business and we set them up and we make sure that they work and kind of, we don’t really take another look at them until there’s a problem.
And I’ve had a lot of people coming to me recently who have been in their current CRM for months, years, and they say to me, Colie, my systems work. I just know they could be better. And so to me, that is when you start to look at, okay, but like, how could they be better and how are they working or not working right now?
And so that’s when the client experience audit comes into play. So before we go too far down a rabbit hole, I want to refresh your memories that way back in November of 2022, I did a three part series called Winter is Coming. And it was how to get yourself ready to audit your business in the off season, if you will, because I was mostly talking to photographers, specifically family photographers, and we are all go, go, go in fall. And then in Q1 of any year, things are mostly dead. This is when we start to look for conferences to go to, ways to improve our business, maybe getting a new brand photography session, updating our website, and then somewhere down the line, updating your systems, maybe ringing in the back of your head somewhere.
So if you haven’t listened to it, I would really recommend that you go back and you listen to that three part series. It was over two years ago, but it still has some really good bits and pieces in there about how you can improve your business when you have time.
So episode 26 was how to audit your offer. And the thing about your offer is you should be looking at your offer every six months, every year. And the things that I mentioned in that podcast episode were making sure that you know exactly how many of each offer you sold in the previous year. Now it doesn’t have to be the previous year.
If you’re doing it in the middle of the year, it could be, you know, the last six months, whatever your timeframe is. You want to know how many of each of your offers you’re selling. You want to know if they are profitable. Cause here’s the thing , we create pricing and we do a lot of research and like soul searching before we set our prices.
We figure out what they need to be profitable. We figure out how many hours we’re spending on a service and then we never really do time audits again. And so if your service has changed, maybe you’ve added a few things, maybe it’s taking you additional time to do your service. Um, even if you’ve raised your prices, you might not have raised them enough.
So anyways, episode 26 audit your offer went over how to determine whether or not your offer suite is what you want to do going forward. Is it still profitable? Is it still enjoyable? Because how you feel doing your offers matters. Okay.
The second part was auditing your messaging. And this is when you take a good look at all of the emails inside your client experience, how you’re talking about your offers and also how you’re talking about these things on your social media and your website.
So yes, your messaging audit goes beyond your CRM and your systems because your customer journey does not begin when someone inquires about your services. It begins when they are first introduced to you or your business out on the internet or in person. And then part three of the Winter is Coming series was your systems audit.
This is when you look at your customer journey, you figure out whether or not you have any holes. You have any serious errors where an email is going out that says, Hey, thank you so much for filling out that client questionnaire. And you haven’t actually sent the client questionnaire yet. So that was the third part.
And that’s kind of where we’re going in today’s episode where we talk about the client experience audit. So, to jump right in, I think I’ve already set the stage for why you might need a client experience audit, other than if it’s been six months since you’ve looked at your systems, you need one.
You might not need a full in depth schedule an entire day or a few hours a day for a week to do it, but you still need to review your systems, but red flags, if you will, that are like, you need to do your client experience audit right now are if you are getting ghosted a lot after you have a consultation call with someone after you send a proposal and you can’t figure out why.
A client experience audit is a great way to find those answers. The second thing is during your customer journey, if your clients and leads are asking you the exact same questions over and over again, that means that somewhere you need to communicate those answers earlier in the process. And last where I feel people will probably feel most familiar is if you are spending way too much time going into the customer journey and customizing forms, customizing emails, you’ve got bottlenecks where your customer journey is not continuing until you push a button and you are quite frequently forgetting to push the button.
So these are all of the red flags that might be saying right now is when you need a client experience audit.
So now I want to kind of give you an idea of what I do when someone hires me for a client experience audit, because I feel like there’s a lot of things that I can communicate to you and you can kind of do this as like a self audit process.
So first, when someone hires me for a client experience audit, you may be surprised, but I do not send them a very in depth questionnaire. When you hire me to set up your systems, you get multiple forms that ask you all the questions, so that I can get super familiar with your business. But in a client experience audit, I actually don’t want to be super familiar with your business.
I want to jump in and have fresh eyes on your client experience so that I can see what’s happening in real time and figure out the critical errors that you have and also just suggestions to make it better. So I begin by asking you to give me access to your CRM because I need to be able to get in there and see the back end.
But the second part is I ask you which offer we are going to be auditing because I’m not going to hop in there and if you offer five different services, give you an audit on all five services. It’s honestly not worth the time that it would take to do that because a lot of the times if you have errors in service
a, those same errors appear in B and C and D and so on. So I ask you which offer you are most interested in getting my eyes on. Now there’s a couple of criteria that you can consider for identifying which offer I’m going to review. Which one are you selling the most of? So which one is most profitable?
Which one do you book? You know, month after month, which one would you be really sad if no one ever booked that again? That’s one way to look at which offer I should do. It’s also if you want to book more of a particular offer and you are not, maybe that is the service that you want me to get my eyeballs on.
But on the intake form, you’ll tell me which offer you’ll tell me, which one of your booking forms inside of your account goes with that offer. And then I give you like a, tell me more, give me the 30, 000 foot view of your business and tell me what’s keeping you up at night. Now, I just told you, I want to look at your business with fresh eyes.
So honestly, you are telling me these things kind of to get them off your chest, but I don’t read that part before I do the initial part of the audit. I actually don’t look at it at all. I go through your business and your customer journey with fresh eyes. And then in the second part is when I review what your questions were, what concerns you had, and if I haven’t already addressed them in the first part, which I mean 70 to 80 percent of the time, I’ve actually already addressed what your number one concerns were in the audit. But if I haven’t, then I address that in your overview. Okay. You fill out the intake form, you give it to me, and then it takes me 10 to 14 business days to get this done for you.
Now, I go in, and I start with your website and your contact form. I fill it out like I am a client and then I just see what happens. I look at every single email that you send your client. I look at every single form. I look at the workflows on the back end of what you are looking at as this process unfolds.
Because the goal of the client experience audit is not only to make the process easier for your client. It’s to make the process easier for you. So I’m looking at everything from two different perspectives, the perspective of your client and then your perspective as the business owner.
As I go through this entire customer journey for your main service, I am recording myself.
I am making suggestions and identifying critical errors as I am going through every single asset, your workflows. All of it. Now, don’t worry. You don’t need to like get a piece of paper and start scribbling down the issues and the suggestions as I make them. I do give you an action plan at the end.
Now, I have a rubric of 82 items that I am looking for in your CRM to see how effectively you are using the features inside of your CRM. Some of these are as simple as, do you have your email connected? Do you have your calendar connected? Are you using the internal scheduler to schedule your consultation calls, your services and sessions?
Like I’m just checking boxes off. For others it’s a little bit more nitty gritty. It’s like, you know, are you using the proposal? Do you have a contract in an invoice attached? Is that contract able to pull things from the booking proposal or are you going in and customizing every single time? So it’s a basic checklist but I’m also looking for some pretty nitty gritty things near the end and you will get a grade on your CRM based on this rubric. Now don’t worry, it’s not like high school. If you get a C, you’re not going to fail. That just means that you have a lot of room for improvement. Now after your customer journey video walkthrough is done, after the rubric is completed, after I have reviewed what your main concerns were, I make you one final video that’s like an overview of the entire audit. And that is what I see overall, where I find issues that you could improve your customer journey, and then I kind of give you like my recommendations, like is your list small enough, concise enough, easy enough to where you can jump in and do it yourself.
Is your list of critical issues and suggestions something that if you wanted to hire me to fix it, I could do in an hourly capacity? Or do you really need an overhaul? Of your entire system. And so then we would be talking about a full setup. So these are the things that I do in a client experience audit, and now I kind of wanna highlight what I think you can do all on your own.
Okay. So that rubric that I told you about, I have taken the most important items off of this rubric, and I have created a self-audit quiz that you can take all by yourself, when you get a chance. If you go to Coliejames. com slash audit, you will be able to access this self audit quiz.
Now, I have two versions. There’s one where it says, give me the quick grade. And there’s another one where it says, let’s take a deep dive. I mean, both of them are in quiz format. It is not the same thing as me going in and checking the boxes. But I do think that this self audit quiz is really going to give you a good idea of where your CRM sits and potentially some of the features that you could be benefiting from that you are not currently using.
That’s the first part. The second part of the client experience audit, when we talk about the customer journey, this episode is actually episode one in this four part series. If you tune back in next week, I am going to be walking through what to do on the other side of the audit. So how is it that you develop systems to know what you want your customer journey to look like from beginning to end?
We’re going to talk about that in next week’s episode. And then I’ve got two more amazing topics for us to cover in order to take a look at your business and your customer journey and find ways to improve it going forward. All right. I hope that this has all of you guys motivated to take a look at your own client experience and to tune in next week for the next segment.
All right. That’s it for this episode. See you next time.
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