Continual growth can be one of the hardest components for businesses. Yes, it starts with strong marketing and business development teams to ensure new clients are coming in. However, to compound these efforts, significant focus and attention is need to ensure they stay in the long term. It brings us to ask, how are you ensuring clients are satisfied with the service they receive from your business to remain loyal recurring clients?

Growth not only comes not just from adoption, it also comes from retention. 

Did you know that only a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%? 1

Client satisfaction may have historically been monitored in how your services were delivered in person. However, the pandemic underway and changing needs of clients are shifting many business to adjust their practices to incorporate physical and digital in their delivery of services.

In today’s remote environment, building and maintaining a great digital client experience that matches your offline experience is essential. What does that mean? By providing an easy-to-access, unique location to your customers that is fully branded and adapted to their needs and specific situation, you can strengthen your brand in the mind of your client and generate more revenue from retention as a ripple effect. And if you don’t have a big IT department, there are ways to deliver out-of-the-box solutions, such as Clinked, to quickly go digital and delight your clients in days - not months.

Want to discuss with a member of the Clinked team?

Let’s explore how you can ensure your online client experiences match your offline client experiences. Here are 5 fantastic tips to help you strengthen your business with a digital client experience. Let’s dig in!

1. Create a One Stop Shop for Clients

With so many elements required to run a business, you may use multiple platforms or methods of communication to complete services for your clients. But, how do you deliver the end results or products to your clients?   Rather than relying on emails and a separate file management system, a client portal solution gives you a way to communicate faster and directly upload & download documents within seconds. It gives you one central digital location for a plethora of client management requirements, say your client is required to sign a document, they can do this within the portal! Our Clinked portal even encompasses an integration with Zapier to help you connect with many other applications.

A Clinked portal ensures your branding is synonymous with your company and your website. You have customisation options available including the option to add your company logo and colours to the portal as well as having a custom URL. This means that when clients are being directed to the portal it would seem as though they never left your website. Simple and effective!

3. Guide the Clients Experience

It’s a fact - change is overwhelming. Habits are deeply rooted into our routine, to the point that we don’t notice them anymore. So when designing your very first digital client experience, make sure you only show what is needed and relevant for each specific situation - so your customers don’t get scared, or worse, overwhelmed. Every word, every button, every information should be carefully chosen - just like you would do with your offline experience.

“ It’s not information overload - it’s filter failure.”
- Clay Shirky, American writer, journalist and consultant

Guiding the experience will not only ensure stickiness and adoption to the solution you’ve chosen, it will increase the perceived value of your brand and push the end user to the actions you want them to take. 

4.Stay Open Around the Clock 

What does this mean? In essence, most businesses have ‘working hours’ where their lines will be open and clients can contact for help and support. With a client portal, there are no time constraints on access.

Need to sign a document? No problem, just log in! Need to complete a task before a closing date? No problem, just log in!

It’s as simple as that, don't wait around for someone else, complete things in your own time.

5. Communicate in Real Time

Good communication is at the heart of everything we do as human beings. Whether we are building relationships or running projects, the format, tone and timing of communication can shift the outcome for the better - or the worse. Unsurprisingly, a recent study showed that 28% of leaders report poor communication as the primary cause of failing to deliver a project within its original time frame. As such, acknowledging the impact real time communication could have on your business will help you better work towards it.

In summary, when designing your digital client experience there are a few things to ask yourself, your team and business: 

• - Can my clients locate documents easily and in real time? 
• - Do my clients need a digital chat option to communicate better with my team?
• - How often do clients reach out for the same content or status updates? 

Having answers to these questions will help in considering if it's time to upgrade your service offerings to partner physical delivery with a digital client experience. After working with over 3,000 organisations in 22 countries, our Clinked team is here to discuss your digital client experience queries when you need it. 

In the meantime, feel free to download our infographics that summarises the 5 tips we just discussed.

 Hope you've enjoyed this blog! 

Notes: 1. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-retention