When it comes to engaging with clients, ePayPolicy Account Manager Trevor Bye advocates for candor. “Transparency and honesty are key,” he said.
For example, when answering a client inquiry, he encourages admitting a need to “circle back” with requested information as necessary.
“If anything, that shows that you are human too, and want to make sure you get everything completely correct on the first go-around,” Bye said. “This leads to long-term trust and confidence in managing their needs and concerns.”
Those tenets are valuable in reverse, too. The ability to go the extra mile also hinges on candid communication from clients to their partners.
For example, at survey platform QuestionPro, John Johnson, senior vice president of customer success and operations, said that internal tools such as an email signature with a “rate me” survey helps solicit user feedback from which the organization can act.
At the end of the day, it’s important to view a client relationship as just that — a relationship, one which requires thoughtful care and attention.
“Remember that your customers are real people,” Johnson said.
Below, Johnson and Bye shared how they aim to not just meet customer expectations — but surpass them.
What awaits the company’s new enterprise clients? One-on-one sessions with CEO and Founder Vivek Bhaskaran. Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Operations John Johnson said that personalized touches like these meetings are just one of the ways that the organization caters to clients.
How has your team developed specific benchmarks for customer success or satisfaction? What are they?
As a survey company with a platform that helps our clients measure and improve the customer experience, we eat our own dog food. We engage with our customers and constantly ask them to rate our performance. In fact, many of our team members have a link to a “rate me” survey in the signature block of their emails. If the numbers are not good, we immediately connect with the customer to find out how to do better.
We engage with our customers and constantly ask them to rate our performance.”
What’s one thing you do regularly to go above and beyond for your clients?
One thing we do for our enterprise customers is a one-on-one meeting with our CEO, Vivek Bhaskaran, as part of the onboarding process. It’s a great chance for him to learn about customer needs and to direct internal resources accordingly. It is a high-touch approach to making new customers feel valued.
What’s one piece of advice you have for people in customer-facing roles who are looking to really dazzle their clients?
Remember that your customers are real people. You have to always be creating opportunities for the relationship to grow, through simple things like sending a birthday note, congratulating them on an article published or high-fiving their work anniversary on social media. The small things count.
But, even more than that, we understand that by aligning our success with our customer’s business objectives, we become invaluable to them. In addition, if we can help a customer succeed in their own career, it’s a bond that is difficult to break.
“Our goal is to keep payments as simple as possible so our clients can get out of the collection business and focus on their own clients,” Account Manager Trevor Bye said of the growing e-payments organization. In interacting with customers, Bye emphasized open communications as crucial to relationships.
How has your team developed specific benchmarks for customer success or satisfaction? What are they?
As we launched our customer success program, we wanted to make sure that everything that sales and marketing promised was being delivered and was going above and beyond those expectations.
Using survey data, internal analysis and general client feedback, our team has been able to set high but achievable goals that all of our team members can agree on. From their experience with interacting with our team to the usability of the product, we track our progress and record activities in our CRM to manage a large amount of data.
What’s one thing you do regularly to go above and beyond for your clients?
We offer three types of payment pages: basic, custom and an integrated version. These integrated pages connect to our client’s agency management systems — programs that do everything from invoicing to claim management and accounting — and they love them. However, ePayPolicy isn’t integrated with every management system yet.
This is where the fun part starts. Whether it’s getting on a conference call with a customer support team or scouring help articles, we look for workarounds to help our clients speed up their receivables. Not only does this help our clients out, but it also expands our industry knowledge beyond the scope of what is required for ePayPolicy. This builds a higher level of trust and rapport with our clients.
Transparency and honesty are key.”
What’s one piece of advice you have for people in customer-facing roles who are looking to really dazzle their clients?
Transparency and honesty are key. There is merit in telling a client that you don’t know the answer to their question and that you’ll need to circle back with an answer. If anything, that shows that you are human too, and want to make sure you get everything completely correct on the first go-around. This leads to long-term trust and confidence in managing their needs and concerns.
