How to create a proactive communication schedule

I met with a prospective client recently who expressed that he has a major issue with chargebacks and refunds.

He had two customer support folks and was confused about why there were this many issues with customers and why hiring support reps wasn’t decreasing his chargeback rate.

I kindly suggested that perhaps his communication schedule was off. 

He looked slightly more confused. 

Lots of teams wait for the client to reach out to them with a question or a problem. They’ve already gotten confused or frustrated by trying to find the answer themselves, so they reach out to you at a heightened level of dissatisfaction. 

What if we changed that cadence? What if we proactively reach out to clients and customers to lead them through the process of working with us.

Flipping the script has helped my clients improve their chargeback and refund requests (without changing a single deliverable in their service), increase overall customer satisfaction and retain customers for a longer lifetime value. 

Let’s jump in. 

First… if you want to see an example and some guidelines, you can copy mine here.

And if you want the quick and dirty 3-minute version of this, check out my 3-minute ops tips video on creating a proactive communication schedule.

Principle #1: Language is important

One of the most important things we can crystalize to improve our client communication is to define what language we’re using. 

My career in small business operations support has highlighted the importance of identifying what we’re actually talking about. When you ask 100 people, ‘what is a process’ you may get 100 different answers. I had to figure out the hard way (and early on) that defining the key pieces of your deliverables are going to help customers understand our language.

We have industry expertise. Whether that is in marketing and web solutions, software, technology, or coaching. Our clients do not. Industry jargon is not going to serve them.

Try to define the words you’re using to update your clients about progress and try to speak to them in ways that will make things feel simple, yet beneficial.

Principle #2: Give customers only the information they need and want to know

When onboarding clients, I like to determine one key metric that they can focus on to determine success with my agency. A north star. 

I use this metric in all communication with my clients. We reference it constantly. 

This does a few things:

1. Customers know you’re in their corner and their needs are important to you.

2. Customers know that you are as obsessed with their success as they are.

3. We wipe out all the other noise and reinforce that the investment they’ve made with you is a good one. 

I see marketing agencies getting this wrong all the time. They’ll launch a campaign or build an absolutely beautiful website and give their clients a 300-line report on all the things that are happening behind the scenes. 

The marketing agencies love the reports, they dig in and it’s like a fun Easter egg hunt for the thing to tweak or the next button to push.

For the vast majority of clients, this level of depth doesn’t interest them. Or perhaps, they don’t even understand it. 

We want to decrease their confusion and increase their excitement about progress. Show them the things they’re interested in. If a client comes to this particular agency to grow their email list of engaged prospects, show them that number. Don’t worry about the overall traffic report unless they ask. 

Principle #3: Give them a path

The best way to retain a client or customer long-term is to provide short-term (immediate) value and then give them a path for long-term results. 

I worked with a software company that served the Real Estate market. They decreased the friction for property managers managing multiple properties. 

One of the first things we implemented was an onboarding setup call with their new customers. 

We did the basics– we set up the platform with them for basic use and highlighted only the important features that they could use to get a win right now.

Customers felt like they could put the application to use immediately after the call.

As a follow-up just a few days later, we had onboarding specialists reach out to customers to ask them how they were doing with the software and show them what next steps look like as they take on new properties, and add new vendors into the application. 

We saw their retention rate and their Net Promoter Score increase in just a matter of months. 

Monthly recurring revenue was climbing as a result. Simply put, more users were staying on the platform and those users were upgrading their service because they were able to grow.

Communicating proactively is one of the best customer service tools I have used with my clients. It affects day-to-day operations and helps decrease the number of administrative fires the team has to focus on. 

Here are a few action items you and your team can do to implement this critical piece of customer management…

Create a really clear onboarding process

Define what the first stage of working with you is like and give that process an owner on your team. We have an onboarding specialist whose role is to make sure that clients are onboarded quickly and effectively so that they can get results as fast as possible. Dedicating a team member (or a portion of a team member’s role) to this is absolutely critical.

Develop a cadence for communication

How often are we checking in with clients? Depending on scope of work or the product you are offering, this will differ. But the principle remains: be proactive, not reactive in client communication.

If you want to snag my example, you can copy it here. 

Create a path

If you don’t have a clear path for your clients and how you can serve them long-term, sit down today and draw one out. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but it needs to be clear. 

If you’re a service business, address the problem that your customers came to you to solve, then paint a picture of a future state that you can help them get to.

A customer comes to you for a website, you create a beautiful homepage with a handful of additional pages. 

The next steps may be to get a content strategy developed or begin running advertising to those pages to get more leads or customers. Paint that picture. From no website, no one knows that this company exists to hundreds of customers per day. That seems like a great transformation.

The reason we exist is to make our customers' lives easier.

Swipe and deploy this strategy as soon as possible.

Happy operating!

Alyson