Communication the Key to Compliance

Centralized Communication

I was researching the best way to set up a client referral program for Action Card yesterday and read an interesting statistic. Over 80% of your clients are willing to refer you to a peer but less then 20% do. It’s well established that customer referrals tend to be the best clients form a longevity and retention standpoint so companies like ours are very interested in leveraging client satisfaction to acquire additional customers. However, customers need to know to give the referral. Communication is at heart here, not intent.

It’s funny the correlation between this principle and one of the larger outcomes our clients gain through using the app. What began as a basic location compliance review tool has evolved over the course of several releases into a nice, centralized communication tool where important, time-sensitive messages can be sent, read, acted upon and tracked through the web-based application. The store managers and franchisees who interact with Action Card want to hit their targets, but sometimes it takes prompting and putting the message out there to illicit the desired outcome. I want to write content for our clients with regularity but it takes the calendar reminder or gentle nudge from our company partners to prompt the action in the midst of all of the things with which we’re involved.

Getting all of your locations to look and act like your top performers is not simply a matter of identifying their deficiencies and correcting them, it’s going to the next level and finding out where there are deficiencies to begin with and how can the root-causes of those things be addressed. This is a function of open and clear communication. And e-mail is not good for that.

Our clients wanted us to take the concept of flagging action items on a review to the next level. We recently gave our customers the ability to send non-review specific action items (we call them “location items”) to their network, a region or a specific store. So now our app has gone beyond driving standards through automated site reviews and gotten into tracking understanding and acknowledgement..