Now more than ever we need to ensure that we are looking after not only our staff and colleagues, but our clients too. With round 2 of lockdown fast approaching how are you going to ensure you are still delivering a top notch service to your clients?

Here we will explore how to plan a designed digital client experience so that you can offer a consistently high level of service to your clients. As it becomes increasingly unlikely you can meet client’s in person, a single central digital location for your clients and team to work remotely, can help ensure relationships continue to develop during uncertain times and consistency of experience can be delivered. It’s important to make processes easy to implement and execute with internal teams and external parties, in turn this will help to deliver to all your client base.

Explore how a digital client experience can help your clients today with our team

So why is it wise to invest in a digital client experience? 

With the implications of COVID in 2020 and beyond, it’s become vital to deliver some sense of familiarity and personal touch whilst remote working. Not only that, client expectations still need to be managed. 

While email has been a key interaction touchpoint with clients over the years, does it deliver the service level your clients need? It’s 2020 - people have increasing competition in their inbox and time. No one has the time to be sorting through email chains looking for documents, or searching for the latest update. Emails being used as a main avenue for collaboration and client interactions leaves room for errors or dissatisfaction. 

A recent study shows Australia’s digital expectations and found that a massive 85% of consumers expect to do business digitally. Why? They find paper-based transactions slow, inconvenient and unreliable. They expect quick, seamless experiences – whether they are interacting with your business on their mobile, their tablet or their laptops.(1)

How to create a digital client experience? 

Businesses can buy or build to develop their own digital client experience. In deciding how to invest yourefforts you’ll want to have a full understanding of your client’s journey, to know how they came to your business through marketing and sales efforts, what was discussed during that process and what expectations they have during rendering service. Components of this process could include prospect qualification, onboarding with your team, and ongoing client management. Each component is an opportunity to develop and define your client working relationship through human and technological interactions. 

Investing in developing a digital client experience can be costly when done in-house or with external technology providers. If you’ve done the initial work described above and need to get quickly into a product to service clients remotely now, consider a client portal. A client portal is an external software product that can offer all the necessary components you’ll need in your digital client experience without the need to invest in-house to develop. There are many options on the market that allow you to find what you need - perhaps it’s a cloud based system, a mobile application with your branding, or a white-labelled product to feature your brand rather than the software’s. 

At Clinked, we help over 3,000 businesses work better with their clients every day with our cloud-based client portal. As a white-labelled platform, Clinked offers clients a secure, mobile platform that can be setup quickly and seamlessly integrated into company processes for immediate interactions with clients. 

How a client portal can help?

• Tailored & personable experience: Each client can have a tailored space that compliments your physical, established client experience and expectations of services being rendered. 
• One central digital location for clients to interact with client facing: Bringing together all interactions offers consistent messaging, knowledge sharing and brand awareness in an accessible anytime anywhere system. 
• Streamlining client services to ensure easy access to help and advice: Not only can you make content and helpful links easily accessible, it can ensure your business is accessible to clients for instant responses with the communication tools found in a client portal. Access to such help can be made easier by using QR Codes on your business cards.
• Deliver paperless experience: Going paperless has many benefits - saving time, improved document security and secure digital signatures - that compliment offering digital forms for clients to access when they are ready to complete documentation! Requesting documents in a paperless way is quick and easy through a client portal. 
• Reduce client waiting periods: Elevate your client’s experience and team’s processes by ridding all of the waiting game of paper forms being posted, processed and signed. Let’s be honest, the post isn’t timely nor the most secure way of exchanging important documents.

How will your team benefit from a digital client experience?

With all these tools available, your team who remote work with clients will have an increasingly effective, engaging and powerful “must have” experience that goes beyond what can be offered meeting clients in person. 

What do we mean? Well take into account meeting someone in person - you’d need to take into consideration a time to meet, the location, the length of the meeting, potential parking needs and/or a route to get to the location. The overall time and effort required to meet face to face can be extensive for either or both parties. These meetings are certainly needed and will continue to be a significant component of all client relationships. However, partnering these meetings with a digital client experience streamlines interactions before and after a physical meeting. Also, offering video calls and in platform messaging allows flexibility for your clients to work with your team on their schedule. The interactions and communication that drive relationships over time can be easily enhanced and confirmed with a client portal through offering 24/7 self service access to documentation, task status, discussion boards, and 1-1 instant messenger. 

With this in mind, has your business made the investment into creating a digital client experience yet? 

"75% of executives agreed that they regard digital transformation as becoming more urgent in light of the COVID-19 crisis, and 65% said that they anticipate increasing their investments in digital transformation"

With the current global situation, digital transformation of your client experience isn’t a luxury - it’s a necessity. 

Start tailoring your clients experiences remotely now with a branded secure and accessible portal with our Clinked team. We’re happy to discuss how a client portal can help you improve your clients experience.