I got introduced to the concept of “client astonishment” by my coach Steve Chandler many years ago, and I thought I understood what this meant.
It seemed fairly obvious to me that client astonishment meant delivering great customer service and this was totally in alignment with my philosophy of doing business. I’d worked in retail, and my grandmother owned an Indian clothes shop, so this just seemed like something I already knew as customer service was ingrained in me from that retail background. However, it was only when I was coached by Steve that I saw his bar for client astonishment was much higher than I had imagined.
I’ll never forget back in 2015, when I was getting ready to run my second Powerful Men’s Immersion, I asked Steve whether he’d recommend a book that I could gift to my clients. At the time, Steve had just released his excellent book called Crazy Good, which he suggested could be a great gift for them and would send me a whole box of them. I wasn’t sure whether he was giving them to me, so I offered to pay, and he said no, they would be a gift from him. Not only that, he asked me for the names of every one of my clients and individually signed the books.
I was absolutely blown away that Steve would do this, and it was the first of many examples where I was deeply impacted by how Steve showed up for me.
Many years later, when I released my book Sweet Sharing, Steve offered to purchase over 40 copies of the book to gift out at his school for coaches. Learning from Steve, I gifted them to him as he had done so much for me. But once again, I was blown away by what he did next. He had everyone in his school hold up a copy of the book while he took a photograph of it and shared it on Facebook.
To see that photo on my Facebook wall was incredible. Especially since at the same time I had offered to gift my book to another coach who ran a school who had declined because he thought it would result in his clients hiring me.
Steve has consistently shown up in a way that’s had me feel he has my best interest at heart and I’ve done my best to model this with my clients. When I’m working with coaches, I often look at how they’re showing up with their clients and find ways that they can astonish them and go over and above what we might call client satisfaction.
With love and appreciation,
Ankush Jain
Coach and Author of Sweet Sharing – Rediscovering the REAL You
P.S. If you want to learn more about building a sustainable 3P coaching business, check out the self-study course I did with Dr Mark Howard.
