When you're in business for yourself -- and especially when your knowledge and training are your primary "product" -- your professional reputation is an extremely valuable asset. Many things go into building an excellent professional reputation including:
- abiding by professional ethics
- observing high personal integrity
- holding good boundaries
- providing service commensurate with the fee
- promptly resolving consumer complaints
With more customer review websites coming online, such as Yelp where anyone can post about you, and Angie's List that does include health care providers, it's a good idea to take some time to think about your customer service policies and practices.
To my mind, there are 4 practices counselors, coaches, and all doctors can follow that will help protect your professional reputation.
1. Listen without Defensiveness
When a client has a complaint, no matter how small, listen with openness to their point of view. Try to hear it as valuable business information rather than a personal attack or judgment about you.
Receiving their perspective without getting defensive -- even in the face of their anger or upset -- will go a long way toward regaining their respect and willingness to listen to you.
2. Tell Me What You Wanted and What You Got Instead
People sometimes aren't very direct or specific in how they articulate what their complaint is. Help them sort it out by asking what did you want and what do you feel you got instead. These simple questions tend to help people feel heard and taken seriously. Often, this is all they really want.
And knowing what they wanted and didn't get from you is excellent feedback that helps you examine your service practices and make useful changes that can improve your business.
3. Make good
Always offer to make up for the mistake, misunderstanding, or unintentional mistreatment in some way. In retail businesses, customers get replacement items. In advertising, the error in your ad is corrected and re-run at no extra cost.
As counselors, coaches or NDs, we can't give back time or take back words, but we can give a make good session at no charge. If you have products -- such as CDs, books, or a dispensary -- you can offer a free product in addition, as a good faith gesture.
4. Give More than Expected
Even in customer service, an ounce of prevention is worth the proverbial pound of cure. You can build up such excellent good will with your clients by always providing more than is expected that they feel no urge to complain.
And when the occasional curmudgeon lights into you, you can still safeguard your professional reputation by going out of your way to take extra good care of them. Thank them for their complaint, let them know you value their feedback, demonstrate that you have made reasonable changes when you can, and follow up with a how am I doing now feedback card or email.
You can turn complainers into allies and good referral sources if you give their perspectives a fair hearing.
For more on this topic, read Diane Stein's Don't Be an Ostrich!
I keep saying I'm not a techie. But it's true that after some 10 years or so of doing web-presence marketing, I have learned a few things.
Here are 4 techie tools I use and recommend because they are supremely easy, free or really cheap, and have high benefit even if you are still figuring out your first website.
www.Constant Contact.com
A broadcast email marketing service. - 60 day free trial
- Then only $15 for up to 500 names on your email list(s)
- You can have as many lists as you want
- Send as many emails a month, week or day as you want
- Plenty of design templates are attractive and customizable
- Includes ability to have one autoresponder option that sends up to 5 pre-set email installments when triggered
www.Davesite.com
Online free html tutorials. Scroll down past all the junk on this site to the links for the tutorials. I'm totally intimidated by the thought of computer programming, but his instructions are very clear.
- Really really easy to understand
- Instructions for making text bold or italic
- Creating a bullet list, and many other basic html code features
- Make your web-presence stand out even more
- Examples of what to do and what happens
www.Bravenet.com
Free membership gives lots of very cool features to add to websites and blogs. Listen, if I can do these things, you can too. Bravenet makes it easy. - Poll widgets
- Email forms
- Speaking avatars with your recorded voice
- Message forum tool you can use to add a discussion board to your website
- More spiffy tools available from Bravenet with paid membership upgrades
- You can use the free stuff forever
www.StatCounter.com
Free membership to see how much site traffic you're getting and where it's coming from.
- Track the most recent 500 hits to your websites and blogs
- Multiple "projects" lets you track many different sites you own
- Shows what country visitors came from
- Gives what pages they looked at, how long they stayed on your site, and more.
- You can pay to see more than the most recent 500 hits
- Old hits are replaced by new ones, so most of us don't really need that paid feature
Okay, I'm talking to myself here. I admit it. I hate networking.
Well maybe it's more that I'm intimidated by it. Those horrible early morning breakfast clubs of bright eyed, bushy tailed people are my worst nightmare besides dreaming about snakes crawling on me. (Funny, they both give me a creepy crawly sensation)
However ----
Most of us do more informal, unconscious networking than we realize. Time to reframe the creepy crawly feeling, and optimize these moments to help us stay in business.
My favorite form of unconscious networking is to be an active, helpful participant in several online communities. There are multiple opportunities for using this tactic:
- membership forums and topic specific discussion boards
- Yahoo groups and other e-lists
- social media -- post questions, links to resources, compliments to others, not your daily activities
- blogs -- yours and your comments on others
A second form of unconscious networking that doesn't involve breakfast is the random sharing of info and resources on a personal basis. Whether a tactic for staying in touch with former clients, or cultivating new ones, you can:
- pass along links to online resources of interest
- forward notices of others' events
- send new tips sheets of relevance
- recommend books, services, workshops
- ask for their opinions or help
And third, make a point of meeting influence leaders in your niche for lunch or coffee. Ask for their help in understanding the concerns of their friends, colleagues, or clients (as relates to your specialty, of course). Use the information you gain to develop a tip sheet, and send it back to them with your thanks (and your card!). Request that they pass it along to everyone they know who'd be interested.
There. Now isn't that easier than trying to get a word in edgewise at 7:15 am that's coherently self-promoting?
One of the most frequent things I hear from counselors, coaches and naturopathic doctors is how overwhelmed they feel with the sheer volume of marketing tasks they perceive it takes to build a successful practice.
And it's true -- there's a lot to do in the beginning and most of us were never trained for exactly how to do it. We quickly end up feeling like we're operating in the dark.
Here's the advice I give my clients:
1. Start with only the strategies that fit your personality.
That is, if you're an extrovert, capitalize on your outgoing networking skills.
If you're an introvert, develop a dynamic web-presence.
2. Get your basics in place as soon as possible so they can run on autopilot.
That is, do first all the things that need to be done just once (get your website up, list on locator directories, get give-aways loaded into an autoresponder feature or email link to you, design and order business cards, develop a brochure or promotional flier, etc).
3. Set aside dedicated time every day to keep yourself moving forward until all the basics are in place.
Optimal is 3-4 hours every day. Realistic for those with families, or another job, may be 3-4 hours a week.
Schedule it as an appointment with your business, as if your business were a client.
Perhaps put this on your schedule as an appointment with someone named Business Self.
Enlist others to help you keep this time commitment, because it's vital.
4. During your Business Self appointments tame overwhelm by:
- having a plan to guide your efforts each week
- being clear about your daily task goals
- getting instruction or examples to calm the uncertainty
- doing the easiest tasks first
- recognizing your signs of creeping overwhelm
- taking short breaks -- get away from your desk
- avoiding second guessing yourself
- letting go of perfectionism
- asking a knowledgeable friend or colleague to give you feedback
- working with a coach to avoid reinventing the wheel
- postponing the marketing tasks that require repetition* until the basics are done
- taking a week off once your basics are in place
*Examples of tasks that require repetition:
- blogging
- social media
- attending networking groups
- approaching referral sources and following up
Becoming systematic is the key building a successful private practice, and that includes having a method or system for your marketing as well.
You can do this.
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