The number of coaches who offer their services online has grown steadily during the last few years. When Covid-19 hit the world, this trend accelerated like never before. Online coaching is here to stay, no question about that.

We have in a previous article gone through the basics on how to coach online, and in this article we try to take it one step further. For a coaching company looking to make a living on coaching clients online, the growing amount of competitors makes it harder, but more important to stick out from the masses.

First of all, you need to have the basics covered. Like we wrote in the how to coach online article, you need a business plan and a client path. You need a place to sell your services and an online platform where you actually offer the coaching. It would help if you also had visibility, and in the long run, make more money than you spend.

Let’s assume that you have the previously mentioned pieces somehow covered, or at least a plan for them.

Define your unique selling point, USP.

Try to describe your target customers, and pin-point their most common problems. Then write down how you solve these challenges. Highlight the benefits of your service that can assists your customers to reach their goals.

Also, make sure to get to know your main competitors. It can be a good idea to do a basic analysis by writing down the things your competitors do well, but don’t spend too much time on this. The focus should always be on you and your development.

One of your unique selling points could be a competitive price. The price will always be a factor when buying pretty much anything. But that doesn’t automatically mean you should discount your prices. The pricing model and terms are just as important as the price itself.

Consider what kind of solution would fit your customers best. Is it a single purchase? Or is it subscription-based? What exactly do they get for the money? Should you have low price strategy and earn additional income from other sources, like co-operations? Or should you charge a high price to differentiate yourself through signifying quality and exclusivity?

However, it’s the value for money that defines your price strategy. And that’s what you should focus on the most, the coaching service itself.

In a narrow market, it might feel that what you are doing is the same as 10 other coaches. But remember, one single thing can make all the difference. It doesn’t need to be something magical and ground breaking, and sometimes the most simple thing is what makes you and your company successful.

When you’re happy with your USP, make it your number one communication and marketing message, and spread it to your potential customers. Remember, you can’t buy something you don’t know exists.

It might sound that it’s all about marketing. And in one sense yes, it is. But let us all remember that the most powerful marketing is word of mouth. Focus on really making your customers satisfied, and they will, without a doubt, share the word. Plus, they will probably stay as a customer for a long time to come, which is essential for making a living as an online coach. Make sure to check out our article on this subject, 10 ideas on how to retain your clients.

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Explore your new online coaching platform today.

On what grounds are customers selecting coaching- or wellbeing services? There is often public information available, advertisement material, blog texts, service description and so on.

On top of this, friends might have told about their experiences and recommendations about the service. The reputation and credibility of the personnel providing the service is also influencing the expectations of the customers. Exactly for above mentioned reasons the expectations tend to vary significantly.

Let’s next look the things from a service provider point of view. How does the service provider know what kind of service he or she should provide?

Often the service provider has a long experience and knowledge on what are the customer needs and what kind of services they are demanding. This is a good starting point, but is this kind of approach based on experience adequate?

Could we find out the expectations of the Customers?

Ask

One way to improve the quality of the service, is to prepare a questionary in the beginning of the program where the situation and needs of the customer are found out. Using this method one can tailor the program according the findings. However, the expectations of the customers can vary even if they are executing the same program.

Best way to get rid of guessing, is simply to ask the expectations from the customer. Here we however encounter another problem, what and how to ask? Questions we use in finding out the expectations should not be too specific nor too generic. Let’s think about the dilemma.

We can narrow down the questions to cover remote coaching. We can ask about the quality and quantity of the feedback, is there enough interaction, does the coach give support and encouragement and the quality of material and instructions.

One has to formulate the questions properly, so that the expectations can be found out. An example: “ I want to get regular feedback from the coach” or “I want to get weekly feedback from the coach”

The formulation of the questions  depend on many things (contents of the program, duration of the program, number of coaches etc.), but with a small effort questions can be found out.

Questions should, however, be such that we can use them in all similar programs. This enables us to compare different programs and develop them based on feedback.

If the expectations are asked already at the start of the program, answers can be analysed immediately and if needed, program and interaction can be adjusted accordingly. For example, if we find out that there is a group of customers that require a lot of feedback, we know it and we can give them more feedback than the rest of the group.

Ask again

Now we have clarified how knowing the expectations can improve the quality of the implementation of the program. At the end of program we are essentially using the same questions, but formulated so that we are asking the perception of the customer. An example for this kind of expectation-perception question pair:  “ I am expecting to get lot of feedback” – “I got lots of feedback”.

Combining answers to these questions we find out whether customer expectations were met or even exceeded. We can call this as ‘subjective quality perceived by the customer’.  From the answers we can calculate the needed indicators (average, median,…) and even investigate the distribution of the answers.

The moral of this story is, that the expectations of the customers should be found out. It opens up a totally new scenery, when discussing about the service quality. It also enables the continuous development of the service. We can compare this approach to the question by Dilbert: “Customer evaluated our quality to be 3.7. Do we have quality or not?”

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In this article we explain what this magic word, digitalisation, means when we speak about wellbeing services and preventive healthcare.

Let’s start with digitalisation on a general level. Usually digitalisation means that we are using computers and software one way or another. Why this is done is actually pretty straightforward. You have no other choice. It’s where the world is heading whether you like it or not.

The goal of digitalisation is to improve something. We might want to improve quality, minimise costs, improve efficiency, provide easy access, improve communication and so on.

Before we dive deeper into digitalisation, let us first take a look at how wellbeing services without any digital platform might look.

Typically in a non-digital wellbeing service, the customer gets a printable program, tasks or exercises, which they are supposed to follow. This can be considered as self-service. Non-digital wellbeing services can also be instructor-led, either individual or group sessions.

Common for all non-digital wellbeing services is that there is no trace or history of what has happened, and usually very limited feedback. 

Service digitalisation

So, what happens when we start to incorporate digitalisation, in this case by using a software platform to delivering self-service or instructor-led services?

Well, first of all in a well-designed platform, the service content like programs, exercises, tasks, meals, messages, questionaries etc. should be easy to modify and re-use. This means better efficiency, we get more done with less work.

In our experience, one instructor can remotely serve more than 100 clients. 

The key benefit is however, that digitalisation allows tracing and recording of what has happened during the service, historical data.

With data, a well-designed platform can provide useful information for the instructor about what’s going on, as well as provide feedback and indicate the need for intervention.

The instructor can also look at historical data and figure out what in the service worked well and what didn’t. This will undoubtedly lead to a better service quality and customer satisfaction. 

From the data we can also check if something can be automated in the service. Automation means better efficiency.

It’s important to mention that the instructor should not draw conclusions based on historical data alone, but  also ask feedback from everyone involved. Preferably in every stage of the service. This can easily be done with a digital platform.

When putting these two things together, historical data and feedback, that’s when the real magic happens. We can compare what we delivered and what was expected by the customers, and modify our program based on feedback.

In this article we opened up what digitalisation means and what the available data enables us to do. In coming articles we’ll introduce good practices when designing and implementing digital wellbeing for preventive healthcare services. 

And yes, the magic word digitalisation is now defined in our context. It means that we have access to data!

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Explore your new online coaching platform today.