Everywhere you go, you’re expected to give a quick review of your experience. You review a restaurant on Yelp or Trip Advisor, you rate your Uber driver or AirBnB, the list is endless. It’s a good thing. 

But have you ever reviewed your customers?

Not publicly, of course, but privately – for your own records and analysis. 

There are businesses who take a few moments to record and summarize the happenings of the day or a particular project. But one important part of the picture is missing – your person-to-person interaction with the customer. 

Why Would You Do This? 

You’ve heard me talk about discovering your ideal client here and here. Working with me, my clients use a Pumpkin Plan tool to assess their clients. But at the time we’re working on this, they have to rely on overall memory and gut reactions to list the components of working with someone and how they would rate it. 

So to mitigate this and give you a more dynamic tool to capture how you feel about working with your clients at that moment, I’m advocating rating each and every interaction with your client, immediately after. 

  • If you work in an environment where you meet with the same client on an ongoing basis, like weekly or monthly, (coaches, consultants) you would fill this out at the end of every session.   
  • If you work in an environment where your work is project based – you may work with a client once and not again for months or years from now (realtors, architects), then filling it out after each day that you interact with your client during that project would work best, even if you’re meeting that same client daily for a week. People shift moods day to day! 

Why All This Data? 

Looking at the history of your interactions will allow you better decision making for the future. It may surprise you to discover whether your relationship with your client changed dramatically over time.  

  • Perhaps you have a one-year contractual relationship with them and the first few months they were a 4-star client. But mid-way, it starts to slip – they’re at 3 and even 2 stars. Perhaps by the end of your year’s contract you’re struggling with rating them higher than 1. This is powerful data for you to analyze – what happened here? Is this a situation you can avoid in the future? Is it worth pursuing their renewal for another year?? 
  • Alternately, you can have a situation where you’re not sure if this is your ideal client at the start, because their they’re only earning 2 or 3 stars in the first few interactions. But as your relationship deepens, you see the positivity rise, and at the end of the year, they are a 4 star client. Again – what happened there? Is this a situation you can improve with a future client who doesn’t seem great at the start? 

This Seems Like a Lot of Extra Work 

Every new process seems fussy at first, but getting into a routine gives you a huge benefit for just 5 or 10 minutes of filling out 1 sheet of paper. 

The benefits of collecting and looking at all these reports over time could be quite eye-opening. And most importantly, it will provide huge insight as to WHO exactly is your ideal client and who you should avoid. 

Many years ago as a software trainer, I went to a client’s home and had a fabulous session! I couldn’t wait to return. The next week I went for our 2nd session and was astonished to see how drastically her personality had changed. I never found out why but it was clearly something that stayed in my memory for more than 10 years! 

Whether you fill them out online in Word docs or Google docs, or you create a fancy new customization in your CRM, or just use paper forms on a clipboard – it doesn’t matter how you capture that information, just do it! 

Make your own form or use mine. If you’d like a copy of what I use, just email me and I’m happy to share.