Tracey Dean looks to the future of Keeping Clients

After managing a national award-winning brokerage for fourteen years, Tracey started Keeping Clients in 2014. Keeping Clients has helped brokers from many different aggregators all over Australia by talking and listening to their clients. These conversations help clients feel valued and respected so more likely to be loyal for retention benefits as well as repeat business.

In 2020 with Covid restrictions keeping most business from personal contact (face to face), this created a boom for customer support as remote or outsourced opportunities. Keeping Clients saw a significant influx of queries from non-broker businesses and has been developing their customer contact model to deliver expanded contact services.

Q: With your financial background, how do you see yourself moving into non-financial customer contact engagements like education, travel or NFPs?

A: First and foremost, we want to stay true to our strengths. We’ve built the business on serving financial clients and will continue to favour their business. Yet there are universal truths to the client contact we do: be warm, be helpful, be specific, get results. We can bring that to many other business segments as well.

Q: So will your success with brokers and financial advisors work with other types of business as well?

A: We’re exploring that right now and so far the answer is YES. Certainly much depends on ROI or what our clients expect from our contact services. But for the most part our service model works well in most industries where follow-up can make a big difference. With segments like travel, trades, education, law, hospitality or seasonal services, there are great opportunities to reach out to people with a call to say ‘How can we help?’ You’d be surprised how a personal touch like that gets things moving.

Q: Your success statistics are impressive both for call volume and dollar results. Given that mortgages and financial products are high-value, can you advocate your services for small business?

A: Absolutely! SMBs need time to focus on their business, not follow-up with past customers even though that’s often their best source of repeat business. SMBs can’t help but cater to current customers even though it means neglecting their databases. That’s where we can help, especially with a specific offer or purpose for our calls and with no lock-in contracts, long terms or pricey fees. We deliver ROI. What’s more, apart from ‘selling something’ we get good insights if anything needs improvement or attention.

Q: Your name Keeping Clients clearly sets you up as a relationship manager for customer retention as opposed to lead generation. Any thoughts of expansion?

A: Ha ha! Every small business has an eye on expansion. In our case we’re taking it step by step to ensure we keep delivering on our strongest propositions. We are happy staying in the client retention lane while we see what value-add we can bring to our services. An example of that is providing an 'NPS' or 'Net Promoter Score' service as part of any campaign. One of the things we also like to point out as one of our service strengths is “Who’s talking to your clients if you’re not?” It is easy when you are busy to forget about all the clients that haven’t been in contact with you recently. There is a real danger of them feeling that they are not valued and of them being lured away by the fantastic deals and promises they would be seeing every day. Keeping Clients can help you make sure that you are checking in and offering assistance to all of your clients.

Q: With Covid restrictions still top of mind in 2021, how do you see this unfolding for your business and other industries?

A: From what I’ve seen in 2020 where people take a stronger interest in their financial decisions with regard to mortgages, re-financing, investments and such, this is a very important time to reach out to them as customers. Home loans alone rose 31.4% in 2020 over 2019 so someone will need to stay in touch with that group of people. I think it’s the start of a very strong year.