Now that the season has begun, you may have had a few small events or even experienced a major storm! These first few events are a crucial time to review not only your operations and processes but also your client interactions. How you interact with clients can determine your success throughout the rest of this season and beyond.

So, what makes a happy client? Perfect service? Cheap price? Immediate action? Ease of interaction? Perks? The answer may be different for every client. What is not different is that you will interact with every client. How each client perceives these interactions can be crucial to building a strong and lasting contractor-client relationship.

Customizing interactions

During those first few weeks of service, especially with a new client, there can be a learning curve. Each season you build stronger relationships with that client as you learn the optimal behaviors through the interactions your customer has with your organization. The key is to learn what that client expects after a specific interaction. This is what will drive your customers' opinion of the level of service that has been provided and will determine the success or failure of your relationship.

Take a moment and think about the different interactions a client has with your company - from the moment they reach out for a quote to the point of service. Believe it or not, there are a lot of interactions just between that first phone call to the moment you begin estimating.

Through all of these interactions, failures or bottlenecks can occur that derail your customers' experience, leading to dissatisfaction. A great way to review these is through the fail-safing process, which is a common practice within manufacturing and service companies.

What is fail-safing?

Once you have identified the failure point(s), it's important to review what procedures can be put in place to prevent these failures.

Where do you start? Begin with a service blueprint - chart that identifies the relationship between multiple service interactions, reviewing people, resources and processes that are directly correlated in a customer experience (see example service blueprint below).

Service blueprinting allows anywhere from a high-level to a deep look into your processes from a customer perspective. For example, you could identify the desired outcomes of an interaction between your organization and your client (high level). You could focus your review on one area of the customer journey due to the complexity of that interaction. Or you could focus on the service provided - all people, resources and processes within this interaction (deep look).

Finding failure points or bottlenecks can improve your efficiency, bring clarity to teams, drive the bottom line and, most of all, improve relationships with your customers.

Take action

Once you review your service blueprint, what do you do once you have found a failure point or bottleneck? Review and consider whether you have a system in place to prevent it. A great example of basic fail-safing is looking at the pump at any gas station: are there instructions on the pump clearly explaining what to do and what not to do? Review your interactions with your client with the same mindset.

Reviewing your interactions with your customers is crucial for that client relationship, and service blueprinting can help. This process will allow you to see the gaps, overlaps, bottlenecks, failure points, processes and so much more, even beyond the customer's view.

This can increase the efficiency of your teams, processes and resource allocation. Ultimately it can aid in the flow of information and decrease the bottlenecks that your clients are experiencing, increasing the chances of happy (and returning) clients. 

Example of a service blueprint

In a service blueprint you will review six areas:

1. Customer interaction. These are the actions that a customer takes. In the example, the client requests information.
2. Physical evidence. With that action there will be some type of evidence that this took place. For example, an email, a phone call, or a form that the customer fills out.
3. Front of stage line of interaction. This is the interaction that is visible to the customer. Either the process, resource or individual would directly interact with the customer. In the example, it would be the salesperson who speaks with the customer and the website the client reviews.
4. Back of stage line of visibility. These processes, resources or individuals would directly assist your customer but not interact with them. In this example, it could be a website host or an office assistant managing the forms.
5. Line of internal interaction support processes. These processes, resources or individuals would not interact with the customer but are crucial for supporting the interactions. An example would be a marketing campaign, or the human resources or finance departments.
6. Failure point or bottleneck. Review all interactions throughout the process to find any failures or bottlenecks, and place an indicator. 

Time & materials invoicing fail-safing example

Service blueprinting can help by clarifying to teams what processes are essential and why.

Process: Collect all information related to the time and materials \uc0\u8232 that were used to service the property.

Bottleneck: Operations manager did not receive information \uc0\u8232 from the team, requiring him to track down the information.

Outcome: Delayed invoicing, which the client could perceive as disorganization.

Root cause: Speak with the team members to find the root cause of why the information wasn't collected. The root cause was either the inability to gather it or that it was simply overlooked. Ask (do not assume) why it was overlooked or why the team could not gather the information. Were they not aware they needed to collect this information, or did they not know how? Is it easy or cumbersome to collect this information?

Prevention: Once you have that information, determine the proofing that could be put in place to prevent this failure or bottleneck in the future:

• If the team member forgot or was not aware, a simple solution is to place reminders. This could be a visual reminder in the equipment, a verbal reminder, text reminders, etc. There could also be a stop mechanism using technology that the next visit is not visible until this data is collected.
• If they were unable to gather the information, review what prevented this from occurring. Was it a lack of understanding of the materials or the process of collecting the time? Train on proper protocol and reiterate the importance of completing this step - give employees the reason "why."
• If the process is cumbersome, review what process could be put in place to ease this step. Is there a technology or process available to aid effective and efficient collection? 

Jenny Girard, ASM, is client success implementation specialist for The Integra Group. Contact her at Jenny.Girard@TheIntegraGroup.com or 518-231-9748.