Their clients were NOT happy

But this new process made the complaints disappear

No matter what the size of your company, or what your growth plans are, there’s one thing you have to have:

Happy clients.

No happy clients mean no cash flow, and no cash flow means you can’t run a viable business.?

So when I onboarded this marketing agency and asked them what their main problem was, they answered: “Our clients are complaining about things falling between the cracks, and we have no idea where and when it happens or who’s responsible.”

It’s not my job or my expertise to fix what made clients complain in the first place, but what I could help them with is making sure that things were no longer falling between the cracks with better systems and processes.

This agency has a team of 6 account managers, and to get to the root of the problem, I needed to talk to them and understand HOW they were working.

Here’s what came up in my deep dive:

?? They loved working with Excel sheets

?? But hated using their project management system (ClickUp), and barely used it

?? Their ClickUp was also set up incorrectly, which made it harder for them to use or keep consistent with

?? They had periodic and repeating tasks (some on a daily basis, some weekly, etc.) but their dashboard just said “daily task” with no context or further description

?? And even worse, once the due date of a certain task had passed, a new duplicate task was created even if the previous task hadn’t been done. Thus making a mess of the task list and the project management system.?

As a result of that, there was no real reporting of what was done for each client, when, and what was still needed to be done - and the managers couldn’t track the health of the relationship with each client.

Once I understood all of that and what the objectives were, I came up with a plan.

I moved them to Airtable (affiliate link) and created a database there that looks, feels, and functions similarly to Excel. This gave them the power of the database, but with the ease of use they were already used to.

Then we put in the list of all of their tasks, from onboarding all the way down to the daily tasks.

Each account manager got their own dashboard, with a view for each client and all of the tasks that needed to be done for them.

I also created a frequency formula, so if they had a weekly task to be done, for example, it would appear on a certain day every week - but with one condition. Only when the account manager marks the task as “done” that the same task will be created in the following week.

On the executive level, the managers of the agency could finally see how many tasks were done every week for every client, and based on that, there’s now a traffic-light system to indicate the relationship status with each client.

The beauty of this process was that they can now see the data in different ways, segmented or filtered according to many different variables. Making it easier for different users to build their workflow in a way that suits their methodology and way of thinking.

And thanks to the fact that it was built with the account managers and how they work in mind, they were finally on board with working with this new project management system.

The best part of it all?

Clients stopped complaining!

That’s why I love processes and systems so much - they can be the turning point for a business, present so many opportunities for growth, and eliminate unnecessary friction.?

It’s just a matter of finding the right processes and tools that suit you and your needs.