Clients 👨👩

In this article, we will discuss clients in detail.

Clients are the people to whom you provide services. You need to remember them, take care of them, and strive to create a product that satisfies them, as they bring in the money that forms your revenue.

Client Life Stages

Why aren't all clients the same? Every client in your company goes through a so-called client life cycle, which includes the stages of birth (signed up for classes), active existence (actively attends classes), and death (finished the course or quit). These terms are an analogy to ordinary life and are used for ease of understanding. Let's try to explain in more detail. Every client is born when they show interest in attending your classes (this could be a phone call, an application from a website, social media, or promotional campaigns). This potential client is called a Lead (a common marketing term). In our system, any client added to the system receives the status Lead.

After working with a lead, selecting a program, attendance group, and schedule, we schedule their first (trial) lesson, and at this moment, they transition to the status New client.

After the client attends the first lesson, they receive the status Active. They retain this status throughout the period they attend your classes. This could be a month, a year, or 5 years. Throughout the period of active attendance, the client brings you revenue. The longer a client stays with you, the better; you don't need to find new clients to replace them.

When a client does not plan to continue attending classes and stops coming, they are sent to the archive and receive the status Archived.

Thus, the client's life in the system consists of four stages: Lead, New, Active, Archived. They are always displayed as a special badge next to the client, so determining a client's status is never a problem.

Some systems offer additional life stages and statuses, but based on our experience and feedback from businesses, we clearly understand that these four client life stages are completely sufficient, reflecting the specifics of group accounting businesses.

Why is this needed? The client life cycle represents the stages of the sales funnel (another common marketing term). Losses at each stage of the sales funnel for various reasons lead to a decrease in overall revenue. Thus, one of the most important tasks of management is to optimize losses at the stages of the client life cycle (sales funnel stages), and the task of automation systems is to assist in structuring and systematizing this business process. We should strive to turn people who show interest into leads. To get more leads to sign up for the first lesson, to get more clients to become active clients after the first lesson, and to keep them in this status for as long as possible. The methods by which this is achieved at each stage are different (some are effective, some are not), but they all lie outside the scope of automation systems.

It is worth noting that in our application, you do not need to manually track the client's status; the system does this automatically.

When adding a new client to the system, they receive the status lead, this happens automatically. See below.

When scheduled for a trial lesson, they receive the status New. Also automatically. A trial lesson in the journal is marked in blue.

We mark the first attendance in green, and the client receives the status Active. In addition to the status, all active clients are always and everywhere displayed in a bright contrasting color (e.g., in the journal) and are always shown at the top of the list. Each time we mark a green cell in the journal, the client is recognized as active because they attended the classes. This can last a week, or it can last 5 years, depending on the specifics of the business and the client's commitment to attending classes.

A client "dies" when they stop attending classes. We need to right-click on the client and select send to archive from the context menu. After this, the client's life can be considered complete.

Sales Funnel

To track clients in different statuses in the company, you can use our tool called Lists. This tool allows for a quite flexible approach to working with leads, new clients, etc. Depending on the number of clients and branches, you can create one list or several depending on the status, branch, etc.

To set up such a list, you need to click the add button and then click to add clients automatically. Set up a filter for who you want to see in the list. The connected GulliverBot will periodically search for all clients who match the criteria and add them to the list – cool, right! Each administrator has up-to-date information on leads who have not been assigned to groups, planned new clients, and whether there is dynamic movement in the sales funnel. Lists are good because you can create your own set of customizable columns with different properties, which allows you to satisfy any marketing tasks and ideas.

System Clients Window

The system clients window provides access to all clients throughout your company's history. From this window, you can filter and create a static list for further work, such as sending out information. At the time of writing this article, clients can be filtered by branch, program, age, and date of birth. You can also select the client status (leads, new, active, archived) and the presence of open invoices.

From the filtered clients, you can create a list for further work with them or export them from the system for analytics.