Top tips on how to help your clients in a changing environment

Now more than ever it’s important to be thinking about how to help your clients beyond the scope of your ‘normal’ work.

As I’ve mentioned before, I occasionally ‘volunteer’ at my wife’s café, here in Perth. We’re thankful to be still operating and providing some delish foods to our gorgeous and supportive customers!

It’s been an intense month where agility and adaptability has been the key to continuing on.

Our BIG learning

The BIG learning for us has been to do whatever we can to support our local community. We’ve shifted from promoting our own products and services to focusing on how we can promote community initiatives.

A great example has been ‘pay it forward.’

A long-time, beloved customer, Angela alerted suggested we do this.

Simply, customers come in and shout a coffee for a health or emergency services worker. They each write a note of thanks on a post it note and put it up on the flipchart we set up (nice facilitator’s touch!).

The recipients then grab their thank you note and receive their free coffee.

We started with only a flipchart for the pay-it-forwards, now they take up a whole wall!

The recipients have been humble and super appreciative, and the donors have enjoyed the opportunity to show their support in a practical way.

How to apply this

Now I’m not doing this to promote ourselves – that would be unacceptable and immoral.

I’m doing this to challenge you to think of some ideas and initiatives that you can put in place or assist with that will help your clients, even if in just a small way, beyond your normal project or service offering.

A hospitality tip we’ve picked up is to shift from ‘being a provider of food and coffee’ to ‘being a provider of an experience’. We’re big on making sure we have a happy environment where everyone gets a warm welcome and positive time with us.

So there’s challenge number two for you – what’s the experience you can offer beyond your current offering?

I’d love to hear how this goes for you. Tell me what’s worked and I’ll  host a webinar in the first week of May to share your success stories.