What Message Are You Sending To Your New Clients?

by: Kristin MacRae

What message are you sending to your new clients?

If you have clients that visit your office, this article is a must read. I want this article to make you think about some important issues relating to disorganization and the presence of your office. Think about how your new clients will react to the chaos in your office. Some may be thinking about turning around and walking back out the door.

If you want to create a great first impression, here are 5 areas of your office that will need attention:

Phone receptionist. This is actually the first person your client will have an interaction with so this person needs to have their stuff together. If your receptionist doesn’t represent your company well, you may be losing customers. This person should be organized, efficient and have a pleasant phone manner.

Waiting room. If you have a waiting area in your office, be sure this area is kept clean, free of clutter, and organized. Have a few decorative pieces and a few pictures on the wall and keep a matching décor. Keep magazines contained and organized in a wall organizer. Weed through them on a regular basis and get rid of old magazines. If there is a TV or radio in the room, keep it at a volume where people can hear it, but please don’t blast the volume.

Front office reception desk. I can’t stress this enough. Be sure that your front office person is organized. Aside from the phone receptionist, this is the second person they will connect with. You could be super organized, but if the front reception desk is disorganized, customers will have already formed an opinion about the company. This desk will also set the tone as to how the office runs.

Think about what’s going through customer’s minds. Do you ever think about how new clients feel when they walk into your disorganized office? If you have paper piles, clutter all over your office, or don’t have any working organized systems in place, your clients will take notice. You may find that as you are speaking with them, they are distracted by your disorganization. They will be asking themselves if they should go with another (more organized) company.

Efficiency and productivity. When a new customer walks into your disorganized office, they will think about the company not returning their calls on time, misfiling their information, or even worse, their information getting mixed in with another client’s information. They want to know the company they are dealing with is efficient, focused, and productive.

Do you find yourself distracted by your disorganization? How long does it take you to find a file, or important information when a client is in your office? Are you embarrassed when they have to sit there and wait for you to search for information or try to remember where it is located? If so, you need to think about getting organized before you start to lose clients.

Walk into your office and write down all the things you want to change. Do you want to re-organize your physical space to make it more esthetically appealing to the eye? Do you need to re-structure your filing systems? Can you see the top of your desk? Get the piles off your desk and into working filing systems and try to keep as little as possible on the desk. Does your front office need some new working systems? It’s time to re-evaluate your office on a whole and make some changes that will allow you to save money, have more free time, be more efficient and productive, and allow your clients to have more confidence in you and your business. Don’t let a chaotic, disorganized business be the reason your clients choose to go elsewhere.

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