The Client Experience Advantage - Episode 198

 You've probably heard the phrase, Customer Experience Matters, so many times, it starts to sound like background noise. But here's the truth. If you're not intentionally designing how your clients feel, function, and flow through your business, you're probably leaving some serious cash on the table.

Experience isn't just about being nice to your clients. It's about building systems of trust, moments of clarity, and emotional cues that tell your client you made the right choice, and you should do it again. Today, we're diving into what the best businesses know about fulfillment and client experience, and how this hidden engine fuels long-term growth.

Welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast.

Good day, and welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Bridges.

In each episode, we dive into practical business strategies that you can put to work in your business right away. We also focus on inspiring stories from leaders who are shaking and making things happen in their industry. It's all about giving you the tools and insights to take you and your business to the next level.

So get comfortable, and let's jump right in.

All right, all right. We are on episode 198, and today is May 9th, 2025.

Today, we're going to be exploring the customer experience, a key bridge that separates normal, forgettable service businesses from the ones who people rave about. Here's what we have lined up. First, we'll anchor today's discussion with a powerful quote.

Then we'll break down what client experience really means in today's service-based market. We'll highlight a few of the most overlooked CX drivers, customer experience. I'll share a quick case study or two that proves how fulfillment drives referrals.

And we'll wrap up with simple ways you can level up your client experience this month, plus a sneak peek at next week's episode. So let's dig into our quote of the week from Blake Morgan. She's a consumer experience futurist, keynote speaker, and an author known for her expertise in customer-centric business strategies.

She said, The brands that win are the ones that deliver the best experience in the simplest way. That's it, right there. Great experience isn't about gimmicks.

It's about the leadership DNA you infuse into every step of your client growth and client journey. It's what creates loyalty among your clients, among the people that you work with, and the people who you employ. So let's dig into what client experience really means.

Client experience, or what we call CX, isn't just about how a customer feels. It's how everything works together, from your systems, to your delivery, to your communication. Think of it like a backstage crew at a theater.

When it's done right, the audience doesn't see it, but they feel it. They leave impressed, connected, and ready to come back. If you're anything like me, you've probably experienced a bad customer experience.

One that could be considered to be anything but the best. So let's take a look at the contrast between customer service and customer experience. Customer service is generally inbound and reactive, meaning you have little control over the process, and very few, if any, controls on the quality of the delivery.

A lot of it has to do with expectations of the person that you're counting as a customer, and you only know when it's not working right when customer service starts getting complaints. Customer experience is completely different. It's proactive, first of all.

It's holistic because it's end-to-end, and it's relationship-based. It's not transactional. Now, according to Price-Waterhouse-Cooper, 73% of people say customer experience drives purchasing decisions.

And Bain tells us that 80% of companies believe they deliver great customer experience, but only 8% of their customers agree. That's definitely a big swing, and not a good one, because if you think that you're doing well, but your customers think you don't, well, guess who keeps the lights on and guess who keeps the bills paid? Now that we have a kind of a separation here, so we really kind of start looking at the customer experience a little broader, let's look at three CX levers that can fuel your growth. And a lot of this information I'm going to be bringing comes from The Exceptional Experience by Michael G. Walker.

We've talked about this before, and it's a great book to grab, take a look at, and really build into the DNA of what you're doing. The first lever is onboarding that wows, right out the gate, right? Mike says that first impressions don't just count, they compound. It's not about how one experience will work by itself in a standalone impression.

You know, do your customers or your clients feel confident right away, or do they feel confused? In a CX lever, you're looking to personalize your expectations and pre-frame your next steps. You want to automate the touch points as much as possible, so that they feel natural, they feel at a time frame that works for most people, and yet they're automated nonetheless. Great example of that is HubSpot gives guided setup tours, and they actually have a user retention boost of about 25%, because people are not confused dealing with this huge CRM program that combines all the different pieces of the puzzle.

On that same onboarding that wows, maybe you have inconsistent onboarding. What you can do to get around that is to build a repeatable onboarding process that sets expectations clearly, and yet feels personal. Think a short welcoming video, milestone checklist, and a here's what to expect messaging.

These kind of onboarding features that a lot of people kind of let go on their own, actually can create a problem when they're not there. The second CX lever is delivery that feels human. Right? Mike says that technology should support human connection, not replace it.

And that's a really good point, because if you're dealing with something that doesn't feel human, chances are it probably isn't, and it's a terrible sign. At this point, you start looking at things like the human experience and the interactions. Again, it's not transactional, it's relationship.

So are you reliable and consistent? You want to sometimes add some moments of surprise, that little special gift that just appears. Nobody asked for it. Nobody said it was coming.

It just appeared. You know, milestone messages, handwritten notes, special little things that the other person actually would appreciate. And here's a stat for you.

McKinsey tells us that personalized experiences equal a 40% faster growth rate. That's a big difference. Now you're going to find it happen every once in a while, but if you find yourself in reactive communication where things don't really feel right and you're doing it too often, you want to take a step back and set your calm expectations early.

Set them with your team, set them with yourself, and set them with your client or customer. Do things like create proactive check-ins that show the client that you're one step ahead. Even an automated progress update goes a long way.

And the third CX lever that you can use is a follow-up that builds trust. Mike says that loyalty is a delayed reaction to how well you made them feel. And here's kind of the strange thing is the post-delivery moment.

We all know that piece. It's where you get done with whatever you're doing and then you stop and you're either pivoting and transitioning to something different. But in any case, it's what we call silent and wasted.

Do your customers and clients know what comes next? Do they want more? How do you find out? If you go into silence on the post-delivery moment, you're missing out on a great feedback opportunity that will make a difference. This is where you can use tools like Bajoro, which is a video thank you. You can utilize surveys and you can utilize check-ins.

Now, if you find that you really have no off-boarding or follow-up, systemize both of them. Ask your customers and clients for feedback. Ask the team for feedback.

Suggest a next step or offer a follow-up call and see what happens. That last impression may be your next sale. Now, all three of these are operational questions that hide inside emotional experiences.

And when you get them right, you reduce your churn, boost your referrals, and ultimately increase the lifetime value, all without adding more ad spend. That's right. These are ways to do things that don't cost you anymore.

They simply are a better process at the end for you. So, let's talk some real-world results with a couple of case studies that might be of value to you. The first one regarding customer experience is the Ritz-Carlton.

They have something that's called the gold standard. Essentially, every employee can spend up to $2,000 per guest to resolve issues. $2,000 sounds like a lot of money until you realize just how expensive it is to stay at the Ritz-Carlton.

But why this matters, right? Trust is built at the point of friction, not at the end of perfection. Even if you resolve it all the way, if you can at least get something straight right then, right there, where the friction is occurring, and move things forward, that's your best opportunity. I have another story I can tell you a little bit about, but, you know, what this Ritz-Carlton gold standard does is it combines operational freedom with personal accountability to create standout moments.

The outcome of doing this is their NPS stores consistently top all luxury travel lists worldwide. And if you're not sure what NPS is all about, this is a customer standard where you are given scores of, I believe in most cases, you get zero points for 0 through 6, and you only get one point on 8, 9, or 10. That gray area in between, there's no benefit to it.

And that's what a lot of people usually do. And so, as you go through and you get more of these accumulated, if you get 8s and 9s and 10s, especially 9s and 10s, bigger companies want to get 9s and 10s consistently. But, you know, that's where the NPS score comes from.

And the lesson of this is relative to what you're dealing with, you don't need a big budget. You just need clear standards and empowered people to make the difference. So let's look at a second case study, one where customer experience can pay you back.

A small marketing agency I worked with was struggling with their retention. They had great clients, but they'd only stick around for a few months and then just vanish. And they came to me and I was like, okay, let's really dig into this because it makes no sense why a great client would leave unless you're either too expensive, not delivering on all the things you should, or maybe someone else is undercutting you.

And so we dug into it, and the issue wasn't service quality. It came down to the lack of structure in the client experience. The clients didn't feel any sense of progress or value beyond the initial honeymoon phase.

And they got started on things, communication came to a stop, and then as you were going along, nobody knew how much progress was being made. Nobody could measure the progress in any meaningful way. And the client simply said, yeah, I'm not seeing what I need to see, and then they left.

And we've all kind of had that situation every once in a while where a customer or a client isn't seeing the results they expect. So if you've got a dialogue open, it becomes much easier. So what we did is we introduced a milestone-based onboarding system, and this went for a long way.

We gave regular progress summaries to the clients every two weeks, and they were automated. And so a simple onboarding call, you know, worked well because you could know that there was a checklist of things that need to be accomplished after the onboarding, all the way to the offboarding section with a what's next roadmap. It's very common that a lot of people miss out at this very point.

But the result for my client, well, their average client retention went from four and a half months to nine. And that's not just a doubling of the client retention. That means that they made it all the way through these projects because many times these projects would be multi-phased.

If you're missing out on these things, you are very likely as a customer or a client to think that the project is either not delivering what it should be or you're not getting what is expected. Referrals also tripled. They were doing referrals with people, but very few people would actually go beyond the initial referral.

As the project would proceed, there would be more opportunity to ask for referrals and to get referrals. And ultimately, the client's team felt more confident because they had a process. They weren't just hoping things were working right.

They could actually see that they were. And that's the power of designing the experience of your customers or your clients. So let's talk about how to audit and prove your CX right now.

I want to simplify this because it's really something that is easy to overlook, but I think you'll see along the way that you're building your own feedback loop. The first thing to do when you want to audit and improve is walk the journey yourself. You're the owner.

It's your responsibility. So become your own client for a day. Go through your website, your emails, your onboarding, and your delivery.

Where do you get confused? Where do you feel wowed? Identify these and build in for your team an opportunity to go back and restructure that and use your personal experience to actually give them the feedback that comes from an unadulterated I own the company, I know how it should be. Number two, ask your clients, but ask in a better way. Instead of saying, hey, how are we doing? Try what surprised you in a good or bad way about working with us.

These types of questions are not normal ones that you would hear because everybody's, hey, how we trying? How we doing? Everybody will be like, oh, yeah, you're great. And you don't really know. And the third thing is to systematize the emotional moments.

Alex Hormozi talks heavily about the emotional moments because every business has wow opportunities. If you've got reminders, automate them. If you have thank you notes, prepare them on the schedule and get personal videos at key moments.

There's another tool that I've known of that helps to deal with these kinds of referrals, but also, you know, feedback. And that's BOAST, B-O-A-S-T. You want to make these videos as spontaneous as they can be.

If it occurs too far away from the project or too far down the line from what you did, it becomes harder for them to remember it. Therefore, they become more general. You want your CX to be unforgettable, all without overloading your team.

At the end of the day, client experience isn't about adding fluff. It's about removing friction in different levels. When your clients feel seen, supported, and guided, they don't just complete the journey.

They actually continue it with you, with more trust, more referrals, and more willingness to invest again. Great fulfillment isn't accidental. It's designed.

And if you treat your delivery process like a living system, not just a task list, you'll create a business that grows with every client you serve. So let's take a sneak peek on next week. We're diving into something a little bigger.

How to bridge the gap between visionary ideas and real-world execution. We're going to be unpacking concepts from Michael G. Walker's new book, The Systems Thinking Visionary. I'm only halfway through the book and I am absolutely knocked out by this.

Because it's a rethink and reframe of what it means to be both a visionary and an operator. So for those companies that are really small in function, this is going to be something you're really going to watch. It's about turning vision into velocity.

If you've ever felt stuck between what you want for your business and how to make it real, you won't want to miss our next episode.

That's it for this episode. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas.

If you want to keep the conversation going or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out. And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow.

For the budding entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. Take care, and we'll see you back here next.