Valuing your company's clients is mentioned often. Most people see the value in making those who choose your company feel smart and appreciated. Such care and appreciation for your cousomers is essential to getting repeat business and strong referrals.
Touch Tracking
Paying attention to these good clients generally benefits from systematizing the efforts. Otherwise good intentions get lost in the hurly-burly of the day-to-day.
Touch tracking is one way to stay focused. A given employee reaches out to a list of past clients on a regular basis. It might be once every four months or six months or more. Best practice is to set a specific frequency. The contact is to be by visit, phone, or a personal note, but not by email or text. Some of the positions who would have such responsibilities could be the owner, sales, and design. There would be a monthly gathering of all the touch-trackers to report on their efforts and what they heard.
The goal is to have the past clients who are so "touched" to feel moved to tell their friends, family, etc., about your company. By being so moved, your clients help sell your company and its services for you.
All sounds good and achievable, right? Yes, especially if it is systematized.
Honor the Promise Keepers
Who gets lost in what I am describing? Who spends the most time with the company's clients and get the least attention from the office?
The promise keepers: your production team.
To prevent that from happening, it's essential to have a touch-tracking program for them. The attention of the office staff, including the owner, sales, design, and estimating, at the very least, is part of the compensation the production staff deserves.
Most people are not motivated exclusively by money. I think craftspeople, in particular, get tremendous satisfaction from having others in the company talk to them one-on-one onsite, and walking the project with them. At the same time, I know companies whose designers are so focused on getting the most projects ready to build that they never see completed projects.
Lunch, coffee, a site visit—these are just a few of the ways to brighten up someone's day. It doesn't take much to make a big difference in their productivity.
Set up a touch-tracking program that will have your production staff feeling appreciated by your office staff and enjoy the production team's smiles happening. Watch the projects get done on time and on budget, because that attention is priceless.
The best present someone can get is personal attention. Give it to your promise keepers because they deserve it, too.
