Start with service

At Rotunda Software, we deeply value our connections with our clients and build every relationship on a foundation of service. Our mission is to help people do good things, and we’re proud to support over a million users in their endeavors to positively affect their communities. It’s our relationships with these individuals and their organizations that motivate us to constantly innovate and deliver new and better services for our clients.

We’re grateful to our clients for their trust and support. That’s why we prioritize building and strengthening our relationships as we work to offer the best organizing software available. Over time, we’ve learned a thing or two about developing strong connections with our clients, and we wanted to share those things with you as you build relationships with your team and community. It comes down to one key factor: start with service.

Work Hard to Serve

Service comes before success. By attending to the needs of your team and community, you’ll set yourself up for sustained success over the long term. We’ve learned a few ways to build authentic, service-oriented relationships with both our teammates and our clients: be humble, give more, listen and learn, and give back.

Take the time to ensure your team has the tools they need to succeed in their roles, whether that’s extra training or an additional burst of motivation. When your team is prepared and aligned to your purpose, they’re better able to serve your clients. That means your team can deepen what might otherwise be a transactional relationship. You might even end up hiring your clients! We often hire new team members from our client organizations, and they’re able to provide a unique, deep perspective on our software that allows us to better serve our entire client base.

A relationship doesn’t end once a lead becomes a client, and neither should your care. That might mean reaching out to long-time clients to show them how newly added features can be better leveraged, or proactively checking in with newer clients to demonstrate that your product is backed by real people who truly care about adding real value.

Go Above and Beyond

Clients appreciate a relationship in which you go the extra mile to provide the services they need to succeed. That’s why we’ve developed a Tech Support team for our products that stand ready to help our clients with whatever support they require. Tech Support provides unlimited phone and email support on all licenses for all of our products–even people who are still exploring our free trials can contact support with their specific questions! We take great pride in the quality of the service and support we provide, and the experts on our Tech Support team regularly score top marks with our users.

Another way we go above and beyond to serve our clients has been through our Google Groups. Our Ministry Scheduler Pro Google Group and Volunteer Scheduler Pro Google Groups are places where schedulers can connect with each other to ask questions, share tips and tricks, and engage with our support team on a one-on-one basis for more complicated issues. Not only are these groups great for our users to meet and greet with each other, but they give us valuable insight into the types of challenges our users are facing, and the types of features they may need to solve those challenges.

Ask yourself: how can I engage my clients in ways that simultaneously strengthen our relationship and improve our service?

Listen Carefully to Users

Listen carefully to your team and community, and incorporate their feedback into your development. Attentive listening helps develop trust, fosters stronger relationships, and generates better products.

We’ve found it helpful to minimize the distance between our clients and our key decision-makers. For us, that can look like a product manager doing tech support, or a quarterly review of requested features submitted by our users. During the most recent rounds of development for our newest product, Unison.io, we invited dozens of users to give us critical feedback about the look, feel, layout, and functionality of the product–these feedback sessions showed our clients that we valued their input and kept us in a service-oriented mindset as we worked on the product. As Unison.io continues to grow, our close relationships to our clients and their consistent, detailed feedback will continue to help guide our development. Listening closely and responding quickly to feedback and requests allows us to better serve our clients by delivering a product that meets their core needs and goals.

Our connections with our clients represent the most valued part of what we do, and we always prioritize cultivating those relationships. There are many ways to engage your clients and deepen your relationships. Working hard from a service-oriented mindset, going above and beyond your core responsibilities, and listening carefully to your clients are all ways to strengthen your connection to your clients. Not only can you create stronger connections with your clients, you can also find ways to create a dialogue that allows you to improve your product or service!