President’s Quarterly Update
How to Win Client Loyalty
Our March 15 program, “Building Relationships Through Client Experience Mapping,” had great attendance, and I hope everyone found as much value in it as I did! Admittedly, I’m an experience mapping advocate. In fact, experience mapping has directly shaped my career and how my firm addresses client retention.
As we learned at the program, experience mapping looks easy to implement initially, but once you engage in the exercise you realize the sheer number of variables, touch points, and channels of information that influence your firm’s interaction with clients. It’s worthwhile to bring an outside consultant on board to peel back the layers. Doing so helps identify where you can bring the most value to your clients and differentiate yourself as a service firm, which is the great challenge in an industry that increasingly fights commodification.
Let’s face it: it’s not always the best design that wins (although we’d like to think so), but the firm that offers the most rewarding experience. This means bringing a hospitality mindset to our services. Restaurateurs know that an average meal served with solicitude and graciousness beats out the best meal served with indifference. Clients will tell all their friends, post it on social media, and become evangelists for such a restaurant, and they will return there again and again even though there are hundreds of options in the area.
At the beginning of this programmatic year, the SMPS SFBAC Board conducted an experience mapping session as part of strategic planning. We mapped out how members interact with our programs: how they hear about them, register for them, attend them. The takeaway was that we spend a lot of time preparing for the program, promoting it, and conducting it, but there are gaps in the process. Who needs to approve their attendance? How do attendees get to the venue? What if they have a deadline at the last minute? Being aware of these touch points helps us identify opportunities to improve the member experience.
As always, if you have ideas about how to improve the experience, we’d love to hear them.
Evolution of “The Shortlist”
One of the experiences we’re working to improve this year is access to “The Shortlist,” our quarterly newsletter. The SMPS Archives travel from president to president, and when I received the box this year I was amazed to find hard copies of “The Shortlist” dating back to the 1980s. Some of the topics that were written about back then are still things we’re talking about today. Here was a wealth of knowledge that our members had created that was just getting lost in a box underneath my desk!
Migrating “The Shortlist” to a blog will, we hope, make it more accessible and interactive, as well as allow us to access analytics in order to understand what content our members find most valuable. With the evolution of content marketing impacting our industry, the time is right. Consider these statistics (drawn from Hubspot’s helpful compilation):
- Websites with a blog have tend to have 434% more indexed pages.
- 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.
- 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders.
We want “The Shortlist” blog to be a place where our members can share their thought leadership, hold discussions, and share resources. As marketers, we’re constantly promoting the achievements of our technical staff, submitting them for awards and speaking engagements, but do we do that for ourselves? If we’re going to fight for a seat at the table, we have to position ourselves as experts. So this is my call to you: Write for The Shortlist! Together, let’s create a place to store the depth of knowledge our members have. Let’s elevate the experience.
As TEECOM’s Experience Director, Nicole La purpose-builds remarkable experiences for talent, employees, and clients. This means developing an understanding of how clients, staff, and potential hires interact with TEECOM’s services and products so that the firm can provide continuous improvement. Her strategic leadership at TEECOM sets the standard for the firm’s unified culture, brand, and communications, from recruitment through the end-user interaction with TEECOM buildings.
