How to keep your clients happy? 8 Simple Steps!

Keeping existing clients happy is a lot easier than acquiring new ones. But that’s easier said than done.

Think of yourself as a customer. When you walk into a shop, you expect to be treated in a certain way - a smile, a small greeting, “Hello, how are you?” and you want to feel like you matter.

You don’t want to be treated as just another customer. Excellent service makes a difference to how you perceived the experience and if you return to that store again.

Opposite our office we have a coffee shop called Rise. If I ever want a coffee, I go there and wouldn’t think about going anywhere else. This is all because of their excellent customer service.

Even before you are at the counter ready to order, you’re greeted with a friendly “Hello” and the staff make you feel valued and appreciated. Here are a few ways you can keep your clients happy so they are amazed by your service and never want to leave…

1. GIVE FREE ADVICE

If you come across as only wanting fees from your clients, they’ll run in the opposite direction. Giving free advice shows that you care about your clients’ success. It doesn’t mean you have to be on the phone with them every day answering a list of questions, but if they know you’re available to give advice when they need it, you’re more likely to be referred.

Don’t think about trying to sell them other services - treat it as a form of developing the relationship with your clients.

2. UNDER-PROMISE AND OVER-DELIVER

We say this a lot to our clients, but it’s true! If you promise someone too much, you’re putting pressure on yourself just to impress.

If you can see them for one hour a week, but you tell them they’re entitled to 30 minutes of your time every single week—they’ll be blown away when you over-deliver.
 

That’s a lot better than making promises you can’t keep (even though your intentions are never to break them).

3. COMMUNICATE CLEARLY WITH CLIENTS

If there is anything clients like - it’s to be kept informed, even if you have some bad news to tell them. Don’t let months go by without speaking to them. And this goes for your team too. Make it part of your team ethos to regularly keep in contact with clients about their workload. No matter how small the situation may seem, if a client’s work changes, they should be informed. 

It will go a long way in creating excellent customer service. 

Feedback emails are a great way to check in with clients to make sure they’re happy with the service provided. Ask your team to send an email to clients every few months making sure that everything is running smoothly. (This is a great way to keep your firm moving forward.)

4. BE AVAILABLE

Similar to point 3, communication is key to developing a strong relationship and making sure everything runs smoothly. 

You can’t be available every hour of every day, but there’s nothing worse for a client than not being able to get in touch with their accountant. Set aside a few hours a day when you are free to chat to clients if they ever need you and let them know that you’re unavailable any time outside of these hours.
 

People don’t like to be left in the dark about things, and if they haven’t received a response back from you within a few days, then they will lose confidence that you care.

5. DELIVER WORLD-CLASS WORK

This goes without saying really, but if clients aren’t satisfied with the service provided, they will cancel.
The primary reason clients came to you is because of the service you provided, and not how great your customer service is. Keep track of any work your team might do for clients, so you are always aware of the status of their work.
 

If your service isn’t up to scratch and they don’t see results - you can expect a cancellation.

6. ASK YOUR CLIENTS QUESTIONS

The only way to know what your clients want is to ask them. Feedback emails (as mentioned earlier) are an excellent way to over-deliver. And it goes a long way that you made the effort to ask.
 

Ask questions about their company too - find out the best times to communicate with them, what excellent customer service means to them, what their goals are and more. Establish what their expectations are and exceed them. Treat this as an opportunity to get to know your clients too.

7. MAKE EVERYTHING PERSONAL

People like personalisation and not being treated as just another client (think back to what I said about Rise earlier). This means every moment of truth with the client should be personal - from their name on letters to a personal touch to emails.
 

Make all of your clients feel appreciated. If you’re holding an event - invite them along. Invest time in building a relationship with each and every one of them.

8. UNDERSTAND THEIR POINT OF VIEW

Your clients are busy people and you won’t always get a response from them as quickly as you’d like. If you know that you need something from them, then asking the day before isn’t sensible. You have to put them first. 

Put yourself in their shoes. If they’re upset with how a member of the team has spoken with them, empathise and do everything you can to turn the situation around. Get the facts from your team and see the situation from the client’s side. (This doesn’t mean they’re always right, but look at things from their side)

PJ

For Accounting, Marketing, Business Building help, contact us:
☎ 020 89310165 | ☏ 07900537459 | ✉ info@apjaccountancy.com

We're on Social Media too :)
     

Understanding Twitter Analytics To Get You Results

I f you want to improve, you have to measure your results to see what isn’t working and, more importantly, what is.

The good thing is, if you have a Twitter account set up, you can view your analytics for FREE.

‘Why do I need to see my analytics?’ you might be wondering. As with every other marketing strategy, you should be evaluating the results so you can prioritise your time on strategies that give you the results you want.

Image Source: PanoramaStock

And everything is displayed simply on your screen so you don’t have to be a marketing expert to understand what pieces of data to dig out.

Twitter shows you everything so you can really get to know your audience and see what they like. It’s no use just presuming what content they like from you.

It’s crucial that your audience appreciate your content or you’ll notice that nobody seems interested in your services.

Here’s how to access your analytics dashboard:

• Sign into your Twitter account
• Next, visit ads.twitter.com. It will automatically link your account to this page
• Across the top of your screen will be Campaigns, Creatives, Analytics and Tools.

You only need to focus on the Analytics section for the information that tells you everything you need to know.

From there, you can view:
• Followers
• Tweet activity

1. From the followers section, you can view your followers’ demographics, interests and gender.

Why is this important?

If all of your followers are from a location far away, then you know that they probably aren't going to be potential clients. (Instead, you can re-focus your content to talk about the industry.)

If this is the case, you may also want to target Twitter users who are from your location.

You can also evaluate the pace at which your account is growing (by that, I mean the rate at which you are getting more followers).

If you hover over each segment of the section called Your current follower audience size, you can see the speed at which your account is growing.

Followers increase is great news, but remember that the data only makes a difference if it is what
you want.

Check the analytics for the main language of your audience.

Check whether your audience are potential clients. If the analytics show that most of your followers spoke French(when your potential clients are English), you have to change the way you target users. 

2. Tweet activity

This part of the analytics is probably the most important. Your content is the core of your social media presence.

If your followers don’t like your content, then they probably won’t be interested in your services.

Just to break it down, here’s what Impressions and Engagements mean.
Impressions are the number of times users saw your tweet on their timeline.
Engagements are the total number of times a user has interacted with your tweet. For example, a retweet, favourite or reply.

Tweet with an image have more engagements than just text.

The goal is to have more engagement. If people just see your tweet and do nothing with it (i.e. retweet, reply or favourite it), you need to restructure your content strategy.

Let’s recap on the key points for maximising your Twitter presence.

Once a week, or every fortnight, look at your Twitter analytics to evaluate what is working. Rather than focussing on the bad, focus on what gets you results. And keep doing that.

Look at what types of tweets get more engagement. Do images perform better? Or text? And if text, what type of content? Informative? Jokes? Business advice?

Social media is forever evolving. So you may need to review your strategy every few Months.

The Huge Pitfalls Of Reducing Your Price & What To Do Instead!

As the economy struggles to recover, and competition gets more and more fierce, we thought it was important to bring to your attention the problems you encounter by reducing your prices in the hope that this will bring you more sales.

One of the most common and most costly traps business owners fall into has to do with the perception that the quickest way to increase cash flow when sales are down is to have a ‘sale’.

On the surface, the concept itself seems to make sense. We need more sales, so we lower our prices.
Lower prices will attract more buyers who will purchase more of our products at the reduced prices. And we’ll make up for the money we’ll lose with the lower prices by the increased number of sales.

But the reality is, rarely is this strategy a success.

Having a sale, reducing prices in order to attract more customers, can often be the kiss of death for businesses unaware of the bigger picture.

In reality, there is rarely a good reason to reduce your prices. No matter what you think, most people do
NOT buy on price and price alone. In fact, research over the last 6 recessions has shown that only between 5% and 20% of people buy on price. Most people think it’s the other way around! So let’s take a look at the effects of reducing your prices...

Let’s assume, for illustration purposes, that your business operates on a 30% margin and you want to reduce the price to increase sales. If you lower the price just 10%, you’ll need to increase the number    of sales you make, or the number of customers you sell to, by 50% just to maintain the original profit.

Don’t believe it? Let’s walk through the numbers…

Let’s say that you sell an item for £100, and that your total costs to acquire that product and get it out the door comes to £70. That leaves you with a net profit of £30 on that item.

Now, let’s say that you reduce your price by 10%. You now sell that item for £90.

You didn’t do anything to reduce your product costs or your expenses. All you did is reduce the amount you charged your customers.

If you subtract your £70 costs from the £90 sale price, you net £20.

Now, if you subtract this £20 from your previous profits of £30, you end up with a £10 difference. Divide the £10 by £20, and you get 50%.

So to get back to the same profit level that you were enjoying before you lowered your prices, you’ll have to sell more items  or the same number of items to 50% more customers.  Now, here’s another problem most businesses fail to take into account. No one knows you’re having a sale unless you tell them about it.

So you need to advertise or send something out to let everyone know you’re  having a sale.

And if you expect to attract more customers and sell more goods, you may need to beef up staff, salespeople, delivery, packaging, money processing, accounting, stocking, signage and any number of additional things that you may not initially consider and all of which further increases your costs.

So when you look closely and carefully at having a sale, you may have to sell considerably more than the 50% to even come close to breaking even.

IMPORTANT
REDUCING PRICES IS THEREFORE SOMETHING YOU NEED TO THINK VERY CAREFULLY ABOUT. REMEMBER, VALUE AND PRICE ARE LINKED – SO PROVIDE MORE VALUE AND YOU’LL STILL GET THE SALES!

The Value Of Increasing Prices

In our estimation, we believe that 90% of ALL businesses charge too little for their products and services.

Often people are scared to increase their prices, and business owners rarely test different price points (do you?). 

But having carefully targeted your prospects and customers (like we always advise you do), you are in a position to charge premium prices because you are seen by the market as THE go-to company for their specific requirements.

And there is no quicker way of increasing your profits and the success of your business than by increasing your prices. Let’s take a look...
Using the same 30% margin as in our previous example, instead of decreasing prices by 10%, you raise them by 10%.

The result?

You can now maintain the same profit margin with a 25% reduction in sales volume… either in the number of items sold, or in the number of customers sold to.

You could actually lose one out of every four customers and still make the same money.

Now, let’s compare two identical businesses which sell exactly the same products. Business A lowers prices by 10% and Business B increases prices by 10%.

As was pointed out, Business A has to sell 50% more, and Business B can sell 25% less, and they’ll both make the same profits as before.

While the owner of Business A is working his/her tail off just to break even, Business B owner is cruising along without all the stress, worry and other problems, and yet is making the same net profits.

Furthermore, what is often surprising to business owners is that when they do increase their prices, the opposite of what they expect actually occurs. Instead of losing customers, they actually gain more customers.                                   

Why?

Because the higher prices are met with the perception  that your products or services are worth more and therefore this perception of ‘added value’ gives the business a welcome influx of sales it would previously never have received.

We have numerous examples of this. For instance, a photographer was charging just £450 per day for his wedding service.

With very little change to the way he carried out the service, he increased his prices to over £3,000 in three months.

A restaurant owner increased her prices by 20% and saw an immediate increase in bookings .

A jewellery store increased prices 15%, resulting in an increase of £25,000 a month in sales.

These are not isolated incidents. If you get your target market right and you deliver a good-quality product or service, increasing your prices and increasing your sales is NOT a pipe dream.

So what if you’re selling a commodity-type product or service, whereby people can easily shop for the best price? Well, it’s no different. What you have to do, though, is create a level of service that is unmatched by any of your competitors.

This includes offering superior delivery times, quicker service or using a powerful guarantee which no other competitor offers and creating ‘premium’ products or services that customers will be happy to pay more for.

So even if you’re reluctant to increase your prices, concentrate on giving more value and you’ll still get many more sales.

As long as you create a gulf of value between you and the competition you’ll be able to increase your prices.

Believe us no matter what you sell, increasing your prices is something you should look at doing now.

Of course, don’t just make a wholesale increase right across the business. Increasing your prices is a tactic that should be approached like all your other tactics. Test small and then roll out when you have sufficient evidence that it works.

9 Tips on How to Face Difficult Conversations in Business Avoiding Stress!

We all have to face up to difficult conversations at times that we’d sooner not have. Whether it be an employee, a client, a business partner or someone else, the thought of being the bearer of bad news, facing up to the elephant in the room or handling an error, can lead to many a sleepless night. Here are some tips on how to reduce the stress and get a better outcome.

How To Lower The Stress and Improve Your Outcomes When Discussing Real Issues?

 1. Is the conversation necessary?

This isn’t a cop-out! On occasion, a major issue today may be a lesser one tomorrow. You should decide, without fooling yourself, whether time is on your side or whether this is something that isn’t going to go away. If it’s the former, then schedule a moment for you to revisit it - say, a week ahead - and forget about it until then. If the latter, then let’s carry on…

2. Choose your conduit

Face-to-face discussions are usually going to be best. Telephone or email may seem the easier option but the absence of visual signs depersonalises the conversation and makes misunderstandings far more likely whilst, physically, people remain in their own defensive camps. Practicalities or security may require otherwise but, even then, video and online conferencing can allow a degree
of ‘face-to-face’ benefit.

3. Choose your location

If you are driving the conversation, then you will want to be on your home turf, so that you can control more aspects of the meeting and have the benefits of being the home team. However, if your position is weak - let’s say you are trying to address an error by your firm - then being the visitor can have its advantages. By going to them you are already taking a conciliatory tone. You are holding your hand up. If neutral turf is required, then make sure you’re the one who organises the practicalities, giving you that element of control again.

4. Plan your approach

This does not mean lying awake at night going through imagined conversations. Three areas of preparation should be in focus:

• Be clear with your objectives. What outcomes are you looking to achieve? This is the most important point, as it will help to guide the conversation.
• Do your homework. Make sure you know the history and the facts from your end.
• Consider your options. Be clear what is acceptable to you and have a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C…….

5. Plan your meeting

Nobody likes nasty surprises. Planning an ambush may work in Westerns but is unlikely to result in a positive outcome for you. Arrange a meeting in advance and with at least an indication of the topic for discussion. Make sure that the time requirement is clear so that attendees don’t have an excuse to rush off.
Prepare for your guest's arrival. Make sure that you have everything to hand that you will need, ensure that your location is welcoming and devoid of distractions and make their attendance as easy as possible with a convenient time, clear access instructions and a friendly welcome.

6. Getting into your meeting

Keep your introduction short. After the formalities, explain clearly and briefly what you are together to discuss. Don’t keep your attendee waiting for the topic to come out, it will only add to the pressures. Explain what you intend to cover and ask if they wish to add any topics or points of their own.

7. Style

Your manner and body language is vital throughout. You should be clear, calm and composed and your body language should be open and neutral. No folding of arms, leaning back in your chair or raising your voice. This may be difficult at times but lose control and you lose the meeting.

8. Don’t make assumptions

Don’t assume that you are right, don’t assume that your option is the only one and don’t assume that you know how they will react. Instead:

• be prepared to listen...and do listen
• be prepared to be flexible (within your objectives)
• be prepared for a range of emotions (and don’t assume the immediate reaction is the true one)

9.Sign off properly

The key to such discussions is always to be clear and unambiguous. That applies just as much when you close the meeting. If a resolution or action plan has been reached, then summarise this and follow it up in writing. If the matter is unresolved, then be clear on what happens next, whether it be further discussion, a cooling-off period or a proposal to be made. Again, follow up in writing.
Thank your attendee….it’s just business!

PJ
☎ 020 89310165
☏ 07900537459
✉ pushkar.joshi@apjaccountancy.com

Delegate For Happier Employees & To Reduce Your Stress!

Delegate: To entrust a task or responsibility to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself.
Sometimes you’ll feel overloaded, and there’s only so much you can do. One hundred things need doing, and unless you’re superhuman, it’s physically impossible to get everything done.

So what do you do? Well, you do something. Anything that makes you stressed can’t be ignored! You weren’t born to place a heavy burden on yourself all the time.

Take action by delegating. The very word ‘delegate’ can send a shiver down your spine. But delegating isn’t a bad thing. It can benefit you and your team.
It benefits you by:

• Saving you time
• Relieving stress
• Employees acknowledging your leadership skills

It benefits your employees by:

• Developing their skills in new areas
• Testing their imagination and how they handle more responsibility
• Retains your hard workers

These are just a few of the advantages. There is, however, a fine line between delegation being beneficial and detrimental to your relationship with employees.

If you don’t delegate properly, you risk employees feeling like you’re overloading them with work. They become stressed, unhappy and feel ill-treated. But doing it correctly actually enhances your employees’ job satisfaction.

There will be a point when you have to delegate with your team because you have new projects, the firm is growing or you need to balance the workload. Change your mindset from thinking ‘I have too much do to and need someone to help’ to ‘How can I challenge my employees so they’re happy and feel fulfilled whilst enabling me to focus on other things?’ 

When To Delegate:

The process should never just be about you. Handing out extra work due to your poor timekeeping will decrease employees' loyalty to you.

But don’t hold a huge weight on your shoulders just because you’re worried about how employees will react (more on how to approach employees later).

Have you considered your team’s workload? Are they in the middle of a huge project right now? If so, it’s not the best time to ask them, or maybe they’re not the right person to ask. Their workload will become too much and the task won’t receive the level of care and perfection it needs.

How To Delegate:

To avoid confusion and unhappiness, tell the person who is completing the work why they are. Explain how you came to this decision, including how they will benefit from it, and why you aren’t taking on the responsibility.
Here are a few points to help:

1. Choose the right people for each task.

In order for it to develop your employees’ skills, dedicate each task to those who will a) Enjoy it, b) Have time to do it, c) Want to develop skills in the area.

2. Be patient.

Your employees will probably have lots of questions and at points will be confused. It could take time before they know exactly what is expected of them.
Not only this, but you shouldn’t approach them one day with a list of things you “need doing by the end of the week”. Allow a reasonable timescale for completion. If that means someone else handling some of the work, then so be it.

3. Communication is key.

Nobody likes to be in the dark. If you think something might change, tell your team. If the deadline needs to be shortened, tell your team.

4. Provide clear instructions.

Right from the get-go, make it clear to your employees exactly what is expected of them.
Could you build a car without instructions? Anyone can do anything if they’re told how.

5. Be aware of their workload.

Do you know what your employees’ workloads are like?
Rather than dropping a bomb on them unexpectedly one day, listen to how much time they have available. You don’t want the project to be rushed, nor your employees to be stressed.
At this stage, you may even choose to reduce their normal activities to prioritise the new work.

6. Give credit.

And when it’s all over, don’t forget to say “thank you” and “well done”. Taking all the credit for something you didn’t do is a sure way of your employees not helping you out again.
If you delegate often, your employees may be thinking towards the end, ‘What am I getting out of this?’ and you need to have an answer.

How Not To Delegate:

There are wrong ways too. When I say ‘wrong ways’, I mean approaching the situation with demands that make your employees unhappy coming into work, which will tarnish their relationship with you.

1. Only delegating when you feel overwhelmed. 

This tells employees that you’re unorganised and unwilling to be a team player.
2. Don’t be a perfectionist.
Perfectionists don’t usually delegate effectively. You’d be right in wanting something to be completed to a certain quality, but not everyone works the way you work. Don’t be too specific in your instructions, or not clear enough. Strike the balance.
3. Don’t keep extending work.

Have you ever done something and then been told it wasn’t needed? If yes, your time and skills were wasted.

Don’t cause confusion by constantly changing what you originally asked for. It’s unfair and stressful.
I could have written pages and pages on how to make this process enjoyable for everyone, but these are the main points. If you don’t make delegation a negative process, it won’t be.

PJ
☎ 020 89310165
☏ 07900537459
✉ pushkar.joshi@apjaccountancy.com