A standard client experience process can help you meet your clients’ expectations and strengthen your business relationships.

“Your business is a lot more about the relationships that you will build with your clients than it is about the actual products,” says Sara Gilbert, founder of Strategist in Montreal. When people have a consistent experience with you, whether it’s in meetings or through quarterly newsletters, they will trust you as a professional.

Yesterday’s article discussed creating a standard client experience. Once you have a developed such a process, you must ensure it is usable. Here are four ways to keep your process manageable and up to date:

1. Stay focused
Keep your process manageable by focusing on a few key interactions with clients.

“Start small and then grow from there,” says Gilbert. Focus on one to three interactions in the client experience first, and then add to your services.

For example, start by creating the personalized and detailed client reviews and promise to call every client, based on a set schedule. Then, once you have perfected those experiences, work on crafting a newsletter.

2. Involve your team
When creating a standard client experience, ask your team members for their opinions.

The client experience process must be created as a team project, Gilbert says, because you, as the team leader, will not always know how much time each task in the process takes.

3. Adapt to changes
Creating a standard client experience process is a learning experience. You will make mistakes and improvements to the process along the way.

You are going to have to experiment with the process when you first create it, says Gilbert, to make sure everyone understands the process and that it captures every detail.

4. Evaluate the process
Review your client experience process each year.

When doing a yearend review of your business and marketing plans, take a look at your client segmentation and service-level commitment, Gilbert says. Look for actions or responsibilities that no longer work or hold any relevance to your business.

“When you first make the commitment [to create a standard experience], it’s going to be time consuming,” Gilbert says. “But you’ll gain client loyalty.”

This is the second installment in a two-part series on creating a standard client experience.