3 ways to upgrade your client experience (tips for designers)
The way people feel when they first start working with you has a long-lasting impact on their overall satisfaction with the service you're offering.
Having a professional onboarding experience to move your clients through shows you know what you're doing and gives them confidence that they've chosen the right person to work with. The other important thing about onboarding? You want to get your clients excited about what's to come. Renovating, designing and decorating should be fun, not stressful - so what can you do to bring some enjoyment to the process for your clients and make it rewarding experience (not a stressful one!).
Today I’ve put together some tips for onboarding your new design clients when they first start working with you.
The purpose of an onboarding experience is to help your clients learn:
what they are meant to be doing
what to expect and when things will be happening
how to get help if they need it
set boundaries around communication and expectations
Here are some tips for how to improve your onboarding.
Onboarding tip 1: Onboarding Questionnaire
Do you have an onboarding questionnaire that you send out to your clients when they first start working with you? Ideally this would capture background information on what they like, their budget, their design style, the scope of their project, their 'wish list' and heaps of other information as well.
I know many designers already have something a bit like this but most are just sending out a word/PDF document that clients then have to print off, write on, scan in and email back. I don't know about you but when I get something like that sent to me I find it SO annoying and often it takes me ages to get around to doing it (as it's all just hard), so think about how you can make this process easier and more enjoyable for your clients.
The easiest way to do this is to put the questionnaire online. This means you simply send them a link, they complete it there and then and the data all comes back to you automatically. A great experience for your clients and much easier for you as well as you immediately have all the info you need digitally.
Get my Client Onboarding Questionnaire Template here
Onboarding tip 2: Client Welcome Pack
Create a welcome pack for your new design clients that has all the info they need about working with you, what to expect, when/how to contact you, FAQs you often get asked, a copy of their signed fee proposal/scope of work and other documents that help them get started with working with you.
Remember that although you design and renovate houses for a living your design clients have likely never done it before and probably lack an understanding of how it all works (otherwise they wouldn't have hired you!). So make sure you give them all the info they need and address any concerns they might have.
The pack can be created as a digital set of documents or you can print them off and give a copy in a presentation folder. You do what works for you.
One thing to remember with the pack is to balance the amount of information you give (remembering they are busy people). Don't make it lack substance but also don't overwhelm them with copious documents to read. Make it helpful but not overwhelming!
Get my Client Welcome Pack Template here
Onboarding tip 3: Welcome video
Send a personal welcome video once they sign on with you and email it over to them. This is a great personal touch and is something clients won't expect.
To do this record a quick 60 second video saying how much you're looking forward to working with them and let them know the next step you would like them to take (which might be for them to complete the onboarding questionnaire). This is a very simple strategy but is very effective and always well received. A great tool for doing this is Loom.
So all of that is what you should be doing to onboard your clients. If you want to go faster and have all of this implemented for you then consider my business short course for designers called ‘Upgrading the Client Experience’. In this course I have done all the hard work for you so all you have to do is to 'plug and play' the strategies straight into your business.
So for onboarding this would include email scripts, templates for the welcome pack, all the questions to include in the questionnaire, the tech tools needed to send the quick video and the scripts to use for recording the video - everything that is needed to get this process up and running in a matter of minutes rather than a matter of days.
Find out about that course - and all my other courses and templates for designers here.
Courses and Templates for Designers and Architects
DO YOU WANT TO….
Improve your professionalism?
Find more clients?
Bring in more revenue?
Create better systems and processes?
Then check out my business courses and templates for designers and architects.
These courses and templates leave you with work done - not just a long list of things you need to do next. We have a really strong focus on taking action and getting things created that improve your business.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
