by Often when I speak with CEO’s and leaders the topic of what I call ‘frequency of interaction’ comes up. What frequency do they have for what they are doing e.g., how often are they checking in on customers and their team, looking at progress, observing performance, giving feedback, particularly positive feedback (catching them doing it right). The conversation always includes a level of doubt about doing this often enough.
When is the right time and what looks like too much interaction with clients, customers, and employees? My answer always comes back to the initial setup – planning of the product or service or the training and coaching model and how it is communicated.
One of the areas I’m known for is my Leaders as Coaches program which is a massive driver of improvement and one of the key conversations of that program is frequency of interaction.
When coaching you need to have increased frequency of interaction when you have performance concerns but once you see the change in behavior or performance you can decrease the frequency of interaction, but you should always have some.
It’s important to set people up so that when you do follow through, or recommend the next step, it isn’t a surprise, rather it lands like a 10/10 level of service.
One of my secrets I have found works exceptionally well with both my clients and my team is to create the communication process or model in such a way that it includes a continuous review of performance.
With a number of clients, we work on a revenue game where each part of the business develops goals to improve critical areas, we start by benchmarking the current results then set a goal of increasing each one by 10%. In all cases these games have been highly successful one of the reasons why is the monthly frequency that we review each game. This drives actions much more than if we did this every quarter as an example. Frequency drives action.
The review is focused on growth and increased revenue. Why, because that’s what being in business is all about, right!
We look at key questions:
How do we get more new customers?
How do we convert people who like our product or service?
How do we convert more to purchase?
And then we look at:
How do we get people to come back more often?
And:
How to increase the average spend?
It’s that simple.
I tell a story, then show simple actions that they can take to create their own plan and drive ownership across their team/s.
And then we work on creating critical promised actions and how they will be tested, so that each month we can measure the outcomes and adjust if required. The point is it is an ongoing process which generates the opportunity for an appropriate frequency of interaction. The first month is about the benchmarks and having a very clear understanding of the starting point. If my clients don’t have the numbers, or access to the numbers we literally set someone up to collect the information. For example, we have someone count how many people walked in or telephoned with an enquiry? How many people purchased? Etc. These numbers become our benchmark?
If you want more customers recommending you to their friends and colleagues, then you need to know what makes them return.
When people are faced with showing up to a scheduled review where the context of the conversation sits inside of the results of the last months actions, people act!
Customer Loyalty Research
It’s important to note our journey with our clients always begins by getting more clarity on the conversations your customers are having about your business. Using the Net Promoter Score (NPS™), we explore how well your business is delivering the customer experience that has them actively promoting and recommending your services to friends and family.
My passion, however, is to help you apply your customer research results to improve the delivery of products and services to your customers. Too often we see research being much too complex for many front-line staff to understand. Our proven Six-Step System utilises the true voice of the customer (verbatim) to identify the exact behaviours from which any team can implement to increase revenue.
By implementing the review, testing the actions, and measuring the outcomes, a quarterly research sample, will tell us exactly what we need to know.
Need more information to answer these questions? Have a look through my previous Blogs, located on The Loyalty Zone website or contact me, I look forward to hearing from you.
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Warm regards,
Craig