The Value of Attention — How To Be Available While Staying Profitable

Think fast! You’re walking to lunch and a social media influencer approaches you with a microphone. They ask you to name three products and services you use every day and why you chose those.

You might say you picked your sunglasses, water bottle or mobile carrier because they’re effective, reliable and affordable. Or, you might call out certain unique features. What you could fail to remember is the impact of the brand itself.

83% of consumers pay as much attention to how a brand treats them as to the product they sell.

Even if you would forget about this factor in the moment, it makes sense when you think about your perceptions of certain companies from the consumer side. Yet, it’s easy to overlook how important client relationships are when you’re juggling all the tasks necessary to provide high-quality services and maintain your margins.

We’re here to show you it’s possible to balance the two priorities by looking at:

• Why dedicated attention is vital in professional services 
• The most common reasons service businesses neglect clients
• How seemingly small adjustments can result in noticeable change

Attention Is Fundamental 

“If you respect the customer as a human being and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.” – Doug Smith

All kinds of human relationships thrive and grow from attention. Like plants that need to be watered frequently, your connections with your spouse, your kids, your friends and your extended family require a lot of effort. If you neglect them for too long, they weaken. 

While clients are in a different category, the core principle is the same.

Barriers to Giving More 

To have brought your business this far, you have to have happy customers. So, you’re doing a lot of things right already. But you may still feel it’s impossible to give more of yourself — or your team’s attention — to your clients.

There are a few common things that might be blocking your business’s chances of becoming that brand people love because of how they’re treated.

• Overwhelm: Your team may not have specific strategies for preventing burnout. If they’re barely keeping their heads above water, the thought of carving out any availability to spend more quality time looking after clients is intimidating.

• Lack of standardized processes: Sometimes, people are frazzled without knowing it. You need to free up everyone’s time and energy with better processes on a collective level if you hope to pay closer attention to your clients.
• Limited team size: You may have managed to avoid layoffs thus far, but you could still be making do with a smaller team than you’d ideally like to have. There may simply not be enough headcount to handle your client base. 

Relate to the small-team struggle? Our latest guide has tips for how to thrive regardless of size.

There’s Power in Minor Correction

No doubt, you have big goals and dreams for your business, but the little things matter too — maybe more than you think. (Just look at the success many businesses and teams have had applying the marginal gains theory.) Offering even more to your clients starts with taking back the tiny moments your team is unconsciously giving away to things like double entry and manual updates.

A few minutes recovered here and there are like pennies in a piggy bank. They seem like nothing alone, but add them together and they’re powerful.

Big change starts with small improvements in efficiency. Let’s consider some small but impactful ways to improve how you interact with your clients. 

Standard approach

A better choice

The Accelo way

Conflicting contact information stored in different platforms

A single client or company record

An integrated CRM that automatically ties everything back to a client record

Endless email threads

A real-time record of client communication

An Activity Stream that serves as your source of all client history

Notes about client requests in multiple places — across multiple departments

A streamlined source of all client requests

A shared request inbox that alerts your team to incoming issues

Manual emails about each new stage of the client journey

Automated emails to notify clients about key happenings with their account 

Customized trigger automations to simplify quoting, project communication and billing 

Disjointed and irregular communication about account updates

A client portal that displays status updates, invoices, documents and more in one place

A client portal that’s connected to your CRM, project management, billing and reporting platform

Consider the above examples and more ways you already connect with clients throughout their journey. How might you tweak micro-actions behind the scenes to generate a more personal, attentive feel? 

One MSP Solves the Attention Dilemma With Streamlined Processes 

The team at Core IT found it difficult to provide quality managed services to clients when they were using ConnectWise. They’d receive the same request through multiple avenues, then spend far too much time working out who said what.

By switching to Accelo and taking full advantage of the power of its Tickets product, Core IT has saved its clients the headaches brought on by endless emails. They stay alert to client requests and resolve them more quickly. BONUS: Their client base now gets more attention in the form of helpful automated emails for common issues — something they didn’t have time to set up before.

See how much more you can do for your clients with less effort! A free trial or demo of Accelo can strengthen your connection to the people who’ve trusted and invested in your business.