110: Stacey Rolfe – Level Up Your Client Experience & Create A Sustainable Business

So I think the first thing I would say is that. This is probably the place that you can get the most return on investment for your time right now. So what I see is a lot of photographers spending thousands and thousands on improving the top line, which by which I mean their photos, the ultimate product that we’re giving our clients. And ultimately that’s what we’re here for. That’s what we all love, and that’s what our clients care about most. They really do. But to deliver value to your client, you have to also be delivering that end product with a seamless, easy experience. It needs to be stress free. It needs to be simple for them. And that’s where the back end comes in. And the simpler you can make it, the more people you’re going to convert. So, I suppose the most important thing, I think, is that your system is efficient, convenient and friendly. So it’s approachable and it builds trust with your client. So a few things that I think that I normally look at when I’m tweaking a system.

So we either give people like an off the shelf system. So people who come brand new to Studio Ninja don’t know what they want, but they want something proven to start with. We give them an off the shelf system, or if you’re more deep in the weeds of your business and you know exactly how you run things and you’ve got your own ways, but you just have never used studio and studio ninja to automate that, then we will build whatever it is that you want us to build. So there’s a few things that I tend to look at. First of all is speed. Um, I think that you need to have most clients expect you to apply same day. Most clients actually expect you to reply within like four hours. So using automation, having those, um, having your contact form automated so that you can set up a lead quickly and have an auto responder or some kind of redirect URL, is really helpful in giving your client an immediate piece of feedback. So that’s somewhere that I would.

That’s the contact form is the first thing that I would use. It automates your leads. It automatically creates your client profile for you and it creates an entire it can create an entire workflow just from them submitting their form. So I think most people are not using that properly. They’re still managing everything through their DMs and they’re ending up doing a lot of data entry. So the first place I would look is how can we speed up your responses? The other major part to that is, the mobile app. So running your business on the go. So if I see a lead come in, I get my email, come in, tell me I’ve got a new lead. Even if I’m pushing my kids on the swing, I can. I’ve timed myself. I can respond to that lead in under 60s – and it can be easily personalised. These aren’t templated. I mean, they’re templated, but they’re not impersonal. You can add things each time, but all of the correct links are in there.

It’s basically making it self-service, so making it very convenient for them. So that is the first place that I would go to improve my client experience. The next place I would probably go is to make sure that you’re always on the front foot. And this is definitely something that comes from the lawyer days, more so than the current job. The photography job. But nobody likes having to chase people for information, and nobody likes feeling like you’ve forgotten about them. So I always actually run my systems through myself. So whenever I build something new and I build something for a client, I always run it with me on both sides of that system so I can see exactly where the bottlenecks and issues come up. It’s the quickest way to do it. Otherwise, you’re going to be relying on clients telling you that you’ve got broken links and stuff like that. Um, but preempting them builds that trust because they feel completely held and safe with you in the process. You don’t want them to be asking you what date, what time, where they’re meeting, what they have to, where you want to be on the front foot with all of that stuff.

The other benefit of that is that you have a really clear process. You map it out from the start. This builds trust as well. You have no surprises in your process. That’s super important. And then the final, big point that I always make to people is that their information have to be really easy to find. So we think a lot about Searchability. So looking at your email address that’s coming up, making sure you’re making use of those subject lines and the variable subject lines. I host a lot of information on my website, rather than hiding it all on a client platform or attaching it to emails, it’s very convenient for them if they know that everything’s on a website. And I also have that link tree coming out from Instagram. Ultimately, it’s about the expectation versus reality gap, really, and just making sure that that gap is as small, small, small as you can possibly make it. Because as soon as you have a gap between what they expect and what you deliver, you’re going to have clients turning up who just are lacking trust in the whole process.

Lean into yourself and lean into your superpower and not to be shy about it. So I’m naturally a people pleaser. I don’t want I don’t like people to think bad things about me behind closed doors. I tend to stick very carefully to my lane. I stick very carefully to the things that I know that I’m qualified to talk about. But what I’m understanding more and more as I get into the car business is that, I’m not just good at one thing. There are a bunch of things I’m really good at, and I think that I’ve wasted a lot of time by not leaning into those. So my advice, would be to trust your superpower and go with it!