Welcome to the second half of our 2-part series with Matt Barnett of Bonjoro. In today’s episode, we get more specific and go through a 7-point plan to enhance client relationships. This is based off a whitepaper that Matt and his team at Bonjoro put together to help business owners grow their businesses.
Episode Highlights:
- 1 Identify key customer moments
- 2 Understand your own business culture and values
- 3 Test new ideas constantly
- 4 Share your successes internally
- 5 Continue to refine these activities
- 6 Measure, measure, measure
- 7 Have fun!
- 1% Pledge – Giving Back Affiliate program
- Help us make an impact
Joanna: Hi, it’s Joanna Oakey here and welcome back to Talking Law. A podcast brought to you by our commercial legal practice Aspect Legal. Welcome to the second half of our two-part series with Matt Barnett of Bonjoro.
In part one, we drilled into the concept of enhancing client relationships through systems and through technology like Bonjoro. We also talked about the connection between having a strong client relationship and being able to prevent legal disputes with clients into the future.
Now in today’s episode, we get more specific and go through a seven-point plan into delighting your customers based on a white paper Matt and his team at Bonjoro put together tell business owners enhance relationships with their clients and customers, so keep listening and we’ll get started.
Joanna: Matt, I saw in your white paper that you have a seven-point plan to create an approach that aligns with your business culture. I think this sets out a good action plan for all of the listeners here whether a thing using Bonjoro or something else within their organisation to deepen those client relationships. Maybe you can take us through the seven-point plan that you guys have put in place.
1 Identify key customer moments
Matt: This plan is to specifically delight customers, and delight is a term we use for surprising and adding this human touch points when they’re not necessarily expected. The first one is you want to identify key customer moments. So you’re going to have touch points for instance first contacts, first follow up, when you close a project when the first time when he emails the second one. I think with this journey try and map out all the common touch points with your customers and you’ve got to look at which ones make sense to do automated communication and which ones we reach out in person. So I would always say that first touch point should be in person via Bonjoro or phone call.
Joanna: This is a really good point in relation to using something like video in one of those first touch points because quite often we’ll build terms and conditions for our clients. Before our clients engage in a business relationship with their clients, they’ll be sending terms and conditions.
But terms and conditions on their own couldn’t look a little bit stark. It’s really nice if you can take both the legal protective elements, so you know you’re setting up your relationship correctly from a legal perspective, but then you’re also adding on top of it these personal elements. Like for example, the Bonjoro welcome video that adds personality and talks about the important elements of what it’s like to work with you I guess.
Matt: Yeah absolutely.
2 Understand your own business culture and values
Joanna: What’s the second element in your seven-point plan?
Matt: This comes down to culture. Understanding your own business culture and common values. We phrase it as take time to find your own values. Depending what those are, this will actually limit and help shape how you talk customers and when you can talk to them.
For instance, in some legal fields, there might be a case where you have to come across absolutely professional. But then there’s other touch points where you can take tie often and relaxed a little bit with the customer. And it’s understanding when those are and how you, not just you but your team as well, can I guess communicate and build relationships with these customers.
Joanna: If we can use a bit of an example here so that we can make this real for our listeners. Let’s take Aspect Legal as an example. Maybe you can work me through this process looking at Aspect Legal. Our values here are excellence of service firstly, secondly innovation and third client care. They are the three absolute cornerstones of our values within our organization. How do you suggest we can use customer delight within this framework of our values?
Matt: I mean you couldn’t have given me the easiest ones to work with here.
Joanna: Fabulous!
Matt: I think it’s if those three are your core values then using different matters to communicate with clients and go above and beyond with them, innovation has become a buzzword. When you’re a company actually does innovate, and you communicate in different ways and you know like obviously video coming through, I can guarantee people legal aren’t doing this. It just reinforces that massively. I mean I see you guys always have more flexibility because the innovation side of it. It means you can try out new ways to communicate and your clients you actually expect that.
Joanna: Yeah and I guess in law it’s a fairly low bar to innovation right because for the competition not a lot of lawyers are highly innovative.
Matt: I mean I look at these industries and I think it’s amazing because the opportunities to stand out, to be frankly honest, is huge and it’s not a massive buy as you say. Just a few things and you jump ahead.
3 Test new ideas constantly
Joanna: Brilliant. What about number three? Where do we go to next?
Matt: Number three is to begin to test new ideas at these key customer moments. I think this isn’t actually very much embraced by the car and tech world a lot because it’s hugely competitive. We all try to build things fast as much as we can, and we get us out this idea where we test and we test and we test and we test.
My team will test 10 things a week, and if we threw 8 those in a bin and 2 work out well, that’s a great week. You don’t need to go and plan everything you have and have everything in place is just waste time. But there’s a day of if you have ideas which key moments work just go and try out some new methods of communication. Test them out. Do it one afternoon on a Friday. Don’t spend too much time on it. You’re very quickly see if it’s got legs. Only if it has legs, go to the next step and dig a bit deeper and start to refine over time.
It’s actually just testing stuff and trying it out because you never know. And this is the innovation part. The big mines of innovation is be willing to try things out and fail in little ways knowing that after 100 tests you’re going to be two or three times better of whatever it is you’re trying to do.
Joanna: Yeah, and I think that’s a really good point because a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs who are used to feeling like they need to get things perfect each time before they push things out to market. I guess this is such a good point. Rather than aiming for perfection and going for the whole big project, just test little things you know incrementally over time and let failure happen rather than trying to be perfect all the time I guess and waiting until everything is perfect.
Matt: It’s interesting what you’re saying earlier about mistakes be made when people don’t communicate. With relationships, you can’t test relationships with little notice here and there. At the beginning they might save you jumping in feet first down the line and make mistakes.
Joanna: That’s a really great point. And look anything that you’re doing in this sense of testing I guess is helping in any event to think about ways to deepen the relationships with your clients. So what are examples here of someone, so for example who might jump on and try Bonjoro out, what’s an example of the sorts of things that they can be testing, that business can be testing along the way in each of their Fridays or in the 10 minutes that they’re allocating to testing as you’ve suggested?
Matt: One thing they should absolutely do is not just test Bonjoro. We are a communication method try out a few more as well before you go and try Bonjoro yourself. Like try different things.
Bonjoro can be one of your test. Now when you use it, you might want to use it with the few new leads that come in, you might want to use with a few interesting clients, you might try a different team member, you will find some of you are much easier on video and more natural. Others might not enjoy it. There’s definitely personality types that work with this. Try them in the office versus when you’re getting a coffee. Test these things. But don’t just jump on Bonjoro and try that. Try that for sure. But think what else you can do. Like if you’ve never used SMS before and give that a go. If you’ve never interacted on different social channels try that. If you’ve never tried sending little postcards, I mean, there’s always different things you can do with just unexpected and some will work and some won’t. And every business is different. Every customer is different. Find the ones that repeatably work well for you. But don’t invest too much time and money and efforts to get that answer.
Joanna: I guess implicit in what you’re talking about here is that a business allocates some time for testing and thinking in this area. Because people in business are busy, right? We’re all busy. There’s a million things to do and the idea of testing new approaches will if a time is not allocated, a regular time allocated, for the concept of thinking and testing then it just won’t happen because it will keep falling to the bottom of the list. I think I hear in part of what you’re saying here set out your 10 minutes a small period of time on a particular day of the week regularly then that makes this whole concept of testing and refining a lot easier.
Matt: Yeah. There’s definitely a cultural thing as well. So think about us with teams. So empowering your team members to be allowed to test things. You know maybe low in that bark, allowing them to fail and be okay about it, which can be scary for some of us, but again if it’s a small test, it shouldn’t be too impactful. And if you are going to empower your team, if you have ten minds instead of one, you’re going to find that those things would worked ten times faster.
4 Share your successes internally
Joanna: Yeah absolutely. So then where do we move to next, what’s number four in your seven point plan?
Matt: Share your successes internally.
Joanna: Ooh, that’s a good one. Yep.
Matt: We do have successes with clients and some with customers. Everyone’s interest shows out. If you are at the stage of using something like Slack or internal communication tool, we actually would suggest putting up an entire channel where any of the team can post back any wonderful feedback from any customer at any time and the other team members can ask how did that happen, how did you get there, what did you do. When you put this out, again it comes back to empowering employees. It comes back to sharing, it comes back to celebration as well and ensures that when good ideas are done they can be propagated and repeated.
Joanna: That’s a great idea Matt. I’m writing this down. That’s my big takeaway today I think. That’s a really good idea internal communication about what’s really working.
5 Continue to refine these activities
Matt: So number five is, it’s kind of long-term thing, to continue to refine these activities. So as a team discuss what has worked and know that, we talk about perfection, you can get close to it, but it doesn’t happen on the first point. It happens on many many many iterations. And so when you find something that works. Dig deeper. Test again and then keep going down. And over months to months, you’ll get these little nuggets that come out that’s actually genius but they are never an overnight success. It’s all about iterations. So apply that to the way that you discover and do things to delight customers.
6 Measure, measure, measure
Joanna: And then I guess simplicity in that once again is that you are allocating time. So you’re allocating importance to the concept of refining these ideas. So once again testing, I guess testing and measuring. And where are we going next Matt?
Matt: So next is to measure. So the one thing with this whole we told we call custom delight is that everything you do business, you should measure everything. We’re massive fans of that and this includes the intangibles. Customer delight can be seen as being some quite fluffy. It has an absolute ROI on business and that ROI comes in you know a higher lifetime based customers. Like customers stay longer, spending more money. It actually does work. But measurement can be hard.
One of the things is if you haven’t tried, well the place to start is NPS. It’s very well understood. These are net promoter scores. They’re simply survey that go out to your users that say how likely will you be to recommend this to another person. And you’ll get either a positive score, a kind of middle average which is not counted or triple-a detractor. Out of those when we built enough them then you start to get back a score and you know you find telcos in the world generally have negative scores because that service is awful.
Other brands, I mean, announcer here I think, I think smasher you know 60 70 percent or more, if you know you get you above 70, it’s amazing. If you’re below that, the good thing there’s massive room to improve. And the good thing here is that you can measure it over time. And you know if someone’s going to want to refer you, this is the whole advocacy word of mouth. If you do things to the delight customers and to provide excellence in service, it’s one of the quickest ways to get people talking about you and wanting to spread the word and so your NPS will actually rise over time.
Depending how or what you get, you can over time measure the lifetime value of your average customer and see if that starts to rise. You can measure the average spend. And so just try and put numbers to these efforts you do or try and find something you can measure to know if it’s working and then to share internally the impact it is having on the actual business and that will then drive everyone to try more.
Joanna: Well it is fascinating that you raise this actually because we’ve always been really focused on customer surveys and trying to keep close to how our customers are feeling about our services and our service provision. But we just right now about like literally in three minutes time are about to send out an NPS survey to our entire database. So there you go. It’s really good timing.
I think one of the brilliant things about NPS as opposed to just more generic or in-house created surveys like the one that we have used up to date is NPS is great in terms of allowing you to benchmark more easily. I think that’s really, you know, when it’s tried and tested. We’re big advocates of NPS although we don’t know what our score is. We’ll see, we’ll report back on that.
But you know I think it’s a really good point if you’re doing things then what the NPS or whatever your other measures are internally for how you work out whether you are in fact delighting your customers, whether the investments that you’re making of time and perhaps also money are having any impact.
Matt: If you do the NPS, one pro-tip is when do you get back you advocates, those who measure very highly, it’s a perfect time to get back and ask for a testimonial. Ask them to act on that, because most your advocates, I think only 30% advocates maximum will ever actually talk about your business not because they don’t mean to they just don’t think about it. When you get an advocate that comes to NPS, you should get back to and say, “Hey thanks so much for a high score, would you mind a testimonial?”, and they will go “Absolutely.”
7 Have Fun!
Joanna: That’s a really good tip. Thank you Matt. Pro tip there good work. I’m taking notes. Well do we get to the end of the seven points or have we got a last one.
Matt: One more, one more. And this is the most important is have fun at his. And when you do get customer delight like rattle on it and enjoy it. It is immensely satisfying when you have customers come back and they say not only is the products and service and everything else is outstanding but the support and the culture and the team and the communication is amazing to. Enjoy a moment when that comes in. That’s yours and you deserve it. And again, shout out again. Enjoy this, have fun. Don’t take it too seriously. If you’re having fun, it will be infectious and your customers will pick it up as well.
Joanna: I love that Matt. You do that so well. I’ve seen the bear outfit that you guys adopt, and I guess that’s your approach to fun. Is that right?
Matt: Yeah. We try to change the way a business brand can be. I think we wanted to do men respect, and we don’t expect all of us to go to this kind of length. But we want to show that again the whole world the business consumer coming close together and just because wearing suits and ties underneath doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be on the beaches surfing or how we few bears we can be the humans that we are. So we’re just trying to you know show you can push those boundaries and that business is changing absolutely.
1% Pledge – Giving Back Affiliate program
Joanna: And look we’ve almost run out of time on this episode, but I just really want to briefly cover, I saw when we started talking you were wearing the 1 percent top bar. And you know I think we’ve got some values that really align. Can you talk about what the 1 percent is and how Bonjoro approaches this concept of giving as part of a community?
Matt: So the one who started the pledge was started by Atlassian, Hill Know and Salesforce as well. And many years ago, they decided to put one percent of their company into a funds. If they ever sold, they would have some money to go and do good with in the world. They then went a step further and they start giving one percent of profit, one percent of products and one percent of employee time. It was doing good. That’s started to grow especially in recent years.
We picked that quite a while ago one of the spokespeople here in Sydney. What we do is we put one percent of the equity away. So when we go to IPO one day you know when the last I’ve heard they had a 60 million dollar fund and they’ve gone and basically tackled I think female education in the Philippines and a after one thing and that and that and they’re doing it and changing it is amazing. But you know the other thing is just giving products to social causes, giving employees time say five days a year your employees get to go and work on causes that they want to work on or you get to go as a team and help a company or do something good, giving away profits as well to support things.
I think that the most important thing here to remember is this is not something to deal when you make a hundred million dollars. And it’s so easy to fall into that trap and especially with younger founders. More than anything, you know, when you’re in your 20s and stuff, you should be starting for small hoots and it might not feel like you have a huge impact. But the point is it then becomes a part of your culture, it becomes part of what everyone does, it becomes part of what is expected. And when you do get to, if you can Salesforce a size, I think Salesforce was saying that they had 35,000 charities that they support.
Joanna: Wow! That’s amazing. Isn’t it?
Matt: It’s more customers than we have! It’s amazing.
Joanna: It’s just such a good point. My personal belief about the world is that generally people are very generous and they want to give and support and feel like they’re making a difference. But people don’t often don’t always know how. And business is busy right. It’s really busy and it sometimes it can be really hard to work out easily what to do in an easy way. So I think this one per cent pledge, I think in our notes will absolutely link to Matt and Bonjoro, but let’s also perhaps throw in a link, Matt, I presume the 1 percent pledge has something that we can link to, so we’re linked to this in our notes. And if you want to find out more then head over to the link that we’ll put in there to the 1 percent pledge because this doesn’t have to be hard, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but it’s about just doing something even if it’s not a lot. I think just getting started.
Matt: Both Atlassian and Salesforce do a lot of events here in, not just Sydney, but the other cities as well that you can go along to and you can hear about it and they do a just an outstanding job of bringing the companies into championing it. So go along to all of those, find out a bit more about it and you’ll meet some amazing people who do the same thing as well.
Joanna: That’s a really good bonus tip here. I love it. Matt thank you. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast today. I think this is being really important information for businesses to really maybe reflect on. It’s hard to reflect when you’re listening to a podcast, but there’s some really simple action points that you can take from this. If you want to find out about Bonjoro a little bit more, which I’m absolutely an advocate of, it’s some I think it’s a fabulous software program and that’s why I have Matt here today. Because I think the approach of Bonjoro is something that you know is a really important yet easy step for businesses to make. So we’ll put some links in our show notes through to the Bonjoro and you can go in and try Bonjoro out in your own organisation. And if you’re interested in the 1 percent pledge we’ll also link there to. So thank you Matt I really appreciate your time.
Matt: And it is wonderful to be here.
Joanna: Great thanks.
Help us make an impact
Joanna: And that ends today’s episode and our two-part series with Matt Barnett of Bonjoro. As a quick recap today, Matt walked us through the seven point plan to customer delight. The seven points are:
1.) identifying key customer moments;
2.) understanding your own business culture and values;
3.) testing new ideas;
4.) sharing your successes internally;
5.) continuing to refine these activities;
6.) measuring; and
7.) having fun.
If you want to test out Bonjoro for your business then please head over to our show notes at www.talkinglaw.com.au and look out for this episode. There we have a very special link that gives you a 30 day free trial with Bonjoro. But that’s not all.
If you continue with a paid Bonjoro plan then Bonjoro and Aspect Legal have combined to contribute 30 percent of your membership fee to providing access to clean water for villages in Cambodia by funding the building of pool pump wells. So by using the Bonjoro software to deepen your client relationship experience, you’ll also be providing Cambodian villagers the ability to irrigate gardens or create fish ponds, improve their food supply and their health and create the opportunity for income for them from the sale of excess provisions. That really is a true win win win, awin for your business for your customers and for the villagers in Cambodia.
Once again if you want to be part of this special program just head on over to our show notes to find your link. Well that’s a wrap for us for today. As always if you enjoyed what you heard then please subscribe to talking or on your favorite podcast player. And thanks again for listening in. This has been Joanna Oakey and Talking Law, a podcast brought to you by a commercial legal practice – Aspect Legal. See you next time!
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