PODCAST EP45: Creating a Seamless Client Experience: Payment and Onboarding Tips

Welcome to Podcast Episode 45: Creating a Seamless Client Experience: Payment and Onboarding Tips

Today, we’re diving into how you can streamline your client payment and onboarding process to make everything run smoothly. Using a CPR training business as an example, I'll share all the steps you need to create an efficient, automated workflow that not only reduces your stress but also saves you tons of time and seriously enhances your client's experience.

You’ll discover how integrating tools like Dubsado and Google Calendar can completely revolutionize your business operations. Imagine focusing more on what you love doing and less on the admin stuff, all while keeping that personal touch with your clients. Trust me, these tips are going to make a huge difference in your business.

Let’s make your client experience seamless and stress-free!

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

00:34 Understanding Client Payment and Onboarding Challenges

02:00 Defining the Ideal Business Workflow

02:10 Example Business: CPR Training

03:04 Mapping Out the Onboarding Process

08:50 Implementing the Ideal Workflow

10:04 Choosing the Right Tools and Technology

13:20 Executing the Workflow

16:51 Benefits of an Optimized Process

17:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

• Dubsado CRM (20% discount link)

Talk to you soon!

XOXO,

Kate

Owner + Founder, Kate Waldo + Co. 

Creator of the Smarter Not Harder: 3-Day Workweeks for Millennial Entrepreneurs©  Program

P.S. Curious how you can grow your 6-figure business while slashing your workweek in half? Click here to learn about the Smarter Not Harder© program!

Some of our content contains affiliate links which provide us with a commission at no cost to you. Kate Waldo + Co. only recommends affiliates that we know, use, and love. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

 Welcome back to another episode of the three day workweeks podcast. I am so happy you're here today. We are going to talk about if you came to me and said, Hey, I need some help with my client payment and onboarding process. It's stressing me out. It's taking a long time. What should I do?

So I'm going to give you an example of a business and I'm going to talk you through exactly what I would tell you to do. Since you're here, you probably already know that I specialize in helping people organize and optimize their businesses so that you can get to those three day work weeks. You can scale your business the way you want to scale it without sacrificing your life your health, your body, and really achieve your dreams. Just a little caveat here. I say three day work weeks. You don't have to just work three days a week. I talk about this in our smarter, not harder program a lot that it can look however you want it to, but the main goal is that you are able to run your business in a way that lights you up, that you feel like you could do this forever and ever, because it's your passion and you.

You have the ability to work when you want to work, but you aren't owned by your business. . You get to work on your business when you want to. You're not just stuck in the trenches working in your business all the time. So that said, what does it look like to have a job? a business that's fully organized and optimized.

Let's go through the example that I have for us here. They do CPR first aid and AED training, wink, wink. Let's say that they came and they were like, All right. I need your help because from the time that somebody says, yes, I want to do a class with you. I want to do a training with you to the time that I show up at a job.

It's just a long kind of stressful process for me. I know that it probably feels that way for my client too. I'm doing all this back and forth. There's a lot of paperwork and it just seems kind of too much and possibly unnecessary for both me and my client, and in the process, sometimes I lose clients because they just fall off.

maybe it's too much work, maybe it's too confusing, maybe I forget to do part of the steps, and somewhere the ball gets dropped. How can I make this process easier?

Now you can apply this to whatever business you have. It will be pretty applicable to most ways that people would run a business so first what we're gonna do is we're gonna go over. What does this look like to you in a dream scenario? So they say to me, I want to click a button and then as soon as the client pays, all the dominoes fall from there, and everything's taken care of, they get reminders, they have their copies of everything, paperwork that they need, their invoices, all the things that take up so much admin time if I don't do it myself.

I also get questions about, hey, where's this, I need that, and it's creating a lot of back and forth. It would be amazing if it all just kind of went very beautifully in order together. But at the same time, I don't want it to be a mess. difficult for my clients, and I don't want it to be something that makes them feel like I don't care about them, it's not personalized to them, or that they're just talking with a robot, because nobody wants that.

AI is great in a lot of ways, and we can leverage it where we need to, but we never want to make our clients feel, you know, alienated and like they're just another number to you and they're not special. We have identified what we want it to look like and now it's important to know how your business operates.

What has to get done? Between the time that somebody says, yes, I want to pay you and I want to work with you to the time that you either show up in person or have that first day of working together, because that's really important to know what kind of systems need to go in place. So for this example, the client says, yes, I want to work with you.

And then what needs to happen is they need to sign a contract. They need to pay for the services in order to book the time with the CPR teams calendar. They need to have reminders that. Their class is coming up and ideally they have a calendar invite too.

A lot of times they ask for copies of their invoices. They'll ask probably for a copy of that contract that they signed. They need some details about FAQs of what they need to remember to bring, are supplies provided

things that are a little more admin based . Of course, some of this stuff is answered on the front end as well, but that's the gist of what they need some back and forth of like, how do we pay?

And those kinds of things can, can slow things down in that process for the CPR company. So now we know, How the business in general operates but if you didn't have the answers to all of that, look in your business and start to you can even just take a piece of paper and write down the different steps that happen.

For you in this process. We'll call this onboarding a client from the time that they pay to the time you show up We'll call it onboarding. So you what is your onboarding process look like? What steps have to get done because the more that you think about this The more that you'll like you're probably doing it every time but you might be missing some steps or you might Want to be doing something that you haven't had the time to do or you realize like I mentioned about people Asking for a copy of their invoice in their contract.

You might be getting those questions all the time You're like, wow, it would be really nice if I didn't have to do that Manually every single time or remember to send it to them take notes for yourself of all right What does this process look like? So, you know . And then think about what works well for you right now. And what's working well for the client right now. In this CPR business, once they get off the phone with the owner of the business, they feel like they know what to expect for their training.

They're really excited. They have all their questions answered. That part of the process is really clear. The business owner feels really good about it and the client feels really good about it. Now, what are the parts that aren't working well right now? We're getting lots of emails for I want a copy of my contract or where's the copy of my invoice I need to send it to the billing department, some people not showing up to the training because they didn't get a reminder email.

Then on the back end, it could be, this is a lot of admin work. It's taking a lot of time. I'm not able as the owner of the business to I don't work as many jobs as I want to because I've got so much admin work to do when I onboard somebody I'm just feeling overwhelmed it's Impacting the sales process and I noticed that sometimes people fall off because we get off the sales call.

They say they're gonna send me a check and, sometimes they forget and I don't know when to call them back and get them through the process to get them to be assigned on client and work the job. Things that they've tried before, let's say in this example that they I tried to send a PayPal invoice as soon as they got off the phone, but that just kind of gets lost in the shuffle it didn't really satisfy all the pieces of the puzzle. So we know that just sending a PayPal invoice Probably doesn't work the best because it doesn't include the contract. It doesn't include follow up emails with copies of things. And it's not really a comprehensive workflow. It's a lot of logging into different places to get things done. We can't keep client notes in there.

It's just kind of confusing. Now that we've kind of established what we've got going on, what's working well, what's not working well, what our dream scenario is like, we're going to start mapping out the process. And I like to do this by kind of visually mapping out, okay, what happens now?

Then what does that mean after that? That triggers this. This means this happens. This email gets sent here. How much time do we want to wait before this email happens? When do we want reminders to go? Those kind of things. So we're going to map it all out we're going to remove any of those barriers like I gave the example of the check.

Sure, people can still pay with a check if they want to, but this client, would like to just take e checks and PayPal and credit card. So, we're gonna make it really easy that the client has any payment method that they want to pay. They have that option from the get go and it's not something that's keeping them from actually paying and reserving their dates so that they can have their training happen.

We're going to go through any kind of barriers that might happen. Then we're going to consider our tech options. We're going to, based on whatever the business size is and what they're trying to scale to, we'll pick how do we want to do this. In this scenario, this business is a small but growing business, they know they want to do more, and they like the idea of being able to scale without everything falling apart.

So, we can't just use Google Sheets and tack them together with a Zapier Zap and kind of like cobble things together like we would if we were trying to stay on basically no budget. We're going to put a little bit of budget to the tech and then we're going to create that implementation plan.

So who's on the team of the business? Who can help? Is it just the owner themselves? Do they have someone on their team who's tech savvy? Is there somebody who's really good with words? Who knows what they want any of the client communication to read like?

What's that plan? Who's going to be in charge of what? In this scenario, let's say that two people are in the business and the owner is really good with writing, they're really good with wordsmithing and how they want to speak to the client, but as far as the technical part of it, not so great.

He has an admin helper and she's somebody who can make sure that he gets pinged to approve the process. She's got a little bit of insight into how the business works so she can answer some questions. But mainly the implementation would go to me in this scenario to set up the workflows and make it all talk to one another and work really nice.

So then we get to work. So their dream process for the CPR training business, they want the onboarding process as simple and straightforward for the client with the least amount of admin work and back end work to make it happen. Essentially, click a button. button or two and all the dominoes fall the tools that we're going to use for this company are Dub Sado, which is a CRM system It's my favorite for any service based business and coaching business that is And it really works very beautifully.

It's easy on the back end and it looks so beautiful and professional to the clients. It includes all those pieces that we were talking about, invoicing, contracts. You can create a proposal that encompasses all of that and they can pick their options for what they want. You can have them fill out forms to gather their information.

You can keep all the client notes together and it's all within a portal that you can The client access to if you wanted to, you can track everything together. So we're going to use that and we're going to use Google Calendar because they want to be able to send calendar invites to remind the client of their training.

So now everything's built out, we've got it all working well. We've tested it. We've made sure that there's no kinks and everything looks good, feels good. from both sides, the business owner side and the client side. , so I'm the CPR business owner and I just got off the phone with a client, they were like, yes, I'm so excited, we're going to do training for 20 people and we want to do it on April 1st.

Not a joke, not April Fool's Day. , I'm the business owner, and so what I'm going to do is I go into my Dubsado account, and I go to that client's profile, and I'm going to click to start the workflow. Then what's going to happen is I'm going to have an invoice where I can edit it, so I'm going to say that they have those 20 people.

And Send the invoice via email. Now, the client is going to get an email from my business that looks very clean and beautiful and nice and it's going to have instructions for how to review and complete the onboarding process. Part of that is signing their contract and paying their invoice and then immediately when they complete each of those steps, they get an email automated.

From the CRM system, Dubsado is the one we're using in this example, they get an automated email that's a copy of their signed contract and a copy of their invoice that they just paid. And then you get a notification as the business owner that they have paid, that they've signed their contract, that they're good to go.

All the dominoes are set up and they're falling very nicely. We've got a welcome email that goes out to them that confirms when the date of their training is. It tells them any information that they need to know about that training. It tells them what to bring, the location that we've decided on, where it's going to be, what time it's going to be, if they need to bring anything extra, and how to contact us if they have any questions.

We're also have calendar invites that are already pre populated for us that we're going to send out to the client so that they can add anyone on their team to make sure that they've got the training built into those calendar invites or reminders. We have three days before, 24 hours before, and one hour before the training.

So everyone's up to date, nobody misses it. They all show up on time with exactly what they need. They're fully prepared for the training. They've got everything they need to know. And the trainer, Who shows up to the job, knows that the clients are fully prepared, and they're fully prepared because everything's handled on the back end.

Everybody's happy. And we're able to do this without printing out any paperwork, so much less manual labor. No emailing or faxing things back and forth. You've got a contract executed and signed and a copy sent to the client. Same with the invoice. There's no tiresome back and forth where a lot of times the clients have fallen off.

So we've got clients that are converting really, really nicely and they're happy. They feel loved. They feel seen. They feel heard. They feel appreciated. They feel like you've got your stuff together and that they're going to be really well taken care of through the entire process. This is just priming them for that five star Google review at the end of the training.

This is something that would have taken hours and hours to do manually and a lot of remembering, making sure you've got those standard operating procedures in place and that they're being followed to a T, but so much of this is happening automatically. What's really cool is that the business owner can do this process literally from sitting in a beach chair if they want to.

takes next to no time to do so. It's a fraction of the time. It's a better experience for both ends. This allows the owner now to take on more jobs to feel like they can scale to bring on you. team members and have other trainers, and then that they can take some time off because this is so much work that they would have had to be doing, but now they don't have to because we leveraged some technology.

That's what it looks like to have this Easy to do business with CPR company and the client keeps coming back year after year because they feel really taken care of and they're like, this process is easy. It's not a headache. It's not like, oh man, we got to do our CPR training again. It's going to be a whole process.

We're happy to do it. We want to do it more and we have very happy clients. I hope you guys enjoyed me walking you through that process. I wanted to jog your brain so you can kind of think through what does it look like to optimize your business?

What does it look like to have those processes streamlined? What do you need to think about? What's not going so well, what could go better for you and what your dream scenario could look like because every single day we have better and better technology that helps us be better humans to do more of the stuff that we really love to do to really love on our clients to do the part of the business that we're really passionate about and make still have the other parts of running a business happen and happen really effortlessly and smoothly.

That's all I've got for you today, but I hope to see you next time and we'll talk to you soon.