Building a delighted customer experience.

Carly Woodland, Manager

These sessions cover areas such as productivity, strategic thinking, growth, brand and culture. We chose one of the innovation sessions ‘Build a delighted customer experience – Touchpoint analysis’ which aims to identify and improve your customer experience at every touchpoint.

John split us into two teams, and we had to identify the various touchpoints between Pinkham Blair and our clients at different stages from meeting of a prospective client, initial engagement, proposal, onboarding, training and continuing services/customer experience.

Each team then chose one area to break down further into the different components and then rate them as green (meaning we are very good at this), orange (we are okay at this but can improve), and red (we need to improve in this area). Of course, we scored green in every area as I’m sure all our clients would agree! But there is always room to improve things even further and we all took away some things that we could look to improve in the short and long term to enhance our clients’ experiences even further.

We asked everyone in the team the following questions:

1. What did you hope to get out of the workshop?

The consensus from the whole team was that everyone hoped to get a deeper understanding of our processes, and how each interaction with clients (whether by meetings, phone calls, emails etc) effects their overall satisfaction of our services. This impacts on client retention and how likely clients are to refer us to their family and friends to grow our client base further.

Everybody was also looking forward to the chance to sit in the same room together and discuss our own business. It’s not often we all get the opportunity to take a step back and really look at things from an outsider’s point of view, and discuss how we can improve things as a team.

• What surprised you about the workshop?

The answers to this question included the following comments:

• I was surprised to learn how small changes at key touchpoints can lead to significant improvements in customer satisfaction.
• I was surprised that some things I thought we were doing right for the client didn’t come across the same way to them. It emphasized how even small adjustments at certain touchpoints can significantly enhance a client’s satisfaction.
• It surprised me how useful it was to run through a systemised process that analysed the business and highlighted areas that needed to be worked on.
• The whole team are buying into the need to up our marketing game generally and have already updated things such as Xero profiles following the session.
• We were so over-awed by the experience we forgot to take a photo to illustrate a LinkedIn post (whoops that was my job!)

• What will you do differently as a result of the workshop?

The workshop identified the need to regularly check-in with clients to request feedback on the experience with us whether that be new clients or established clients to make sure that all clients are happy at all stages of our professional relationship with them. We have been trying this out at few client meetings and luckily for us this has so far been wholly positive.

The workshop has also flagged up that there needs to be greater communication within the team in relation to each client’s needs and circumstances so that we all have a deeper understanding and that the scope of our work is more clearly defined.

We also need to spend more time on the business as a group to get everyone’s insights and feedback on how to improve processes and the client experience. We are working on these areas to improve all the touchpoints with our clients.

Summary

Overall, it was a very insightful session and made us all see where improvements could be made at different levels of the business. It was useful to hear everyone’s opinions on this and we really appreciate John facilitating this for us.