I write this post for coaches who want to help their clients to the best of their ability.
Coaches who know that their impact is directly dependant upon the successful behavioral change of their clients.
Coaches who know that behavioral change is one of the hardest things in the world, especially if you’re in the business of getting others to change their behavior.
Let’s start with the TLDR version…
There are online coaching tools out there that will help you to engage your clients in between sessions on auto-pilot. These tools, like the one I’m going to show you, have the power to save you lots of time, increase your effectiveness and allow you to scale and grow your practice.
Before we dive in, I want to stress that no online coaching tool will ever be able to replace real, one-on-one connection between coach and coachee.
A coaching tool is not about replacing human contact at all, it’s about making your life as a coach as easy as possible.
It’s about supplementing your care, not substituting it.
What are online coaching tools?
There are different kinds of online coaching tools out there on the web, but most are practice management-related.
A practice management tool typically has the following features:
- Scheduling of appointments
- Billing and invoices
- Teleconferencing (HIPAA-compliant)
- Client notes
- Chat
- and all your other run-of-the-mill features
It’s not just advisable to work with great practice management software, it’s a must.
If you want to be efficient, that is.
Practice management software allows you to have one central place to run your practice from.
Imagine the horror of having separate spreadsheets, a CRM-system, a billing software, Zoom/Skype for calls, and text messaging clients from your own mobile phone.
Eek!
Going beyond practice management tools
As much time as a practice management tool can save you, it won’t help you with the actual client work.
Of course, you can decide to limit your work with a client to a weekly or bi-weekly session.
Perfectly fine.
But what if you could use the time between those sessions to help the client make solid progress towards the things you’re working on?
What if you would leverage the rest of the week, when both you and the client are ‘out of sight, out of mind’ to each other?
This is where client engagement tools can be of help.
Client engagement tools
This is what you can use a client engagement tool (like our very own Quenza) for:
- creating beautiful coaching activities to send to clients for them to complete
- sending or scheduling homework exercises to keep them engaged and on track
- creating your own digital care paths that prime, motivate and inspire
- sharing micro-learnings or psychoeducation with clients
- sending automated reminders and follow-up for uncompleted activities
- assessing clients with surveys, scales, or quick feedback forms
- collecting all your clients’ responses so you can discuss them during the next session
- tracking your clients’ progress by seeing how they engage with what you send them
As you can tell, client engagement tooling goes way beyond practice management.
It’s concerned with the actual coaching side of your coaching business, not the business side.
Whereas practice management tools help you with the business side of your coaching business, client engagement tools help you with the actual coaching side.
How to use client engagement tools in your practice
Before you blindly subscribe to a tool and start clicking around, it’s good to ask yourself the following:
What kind of tools am I already using with clients?
If you like, you can make a list with any sort of document (physical or digital), link, email, or resource that you typically share with clients.
Think of the following:
- client intake form with questions
- coaching contract for the client to sign
- a mental well-being assessment
- asking them to complete the VIA character strength survey
- sharing an Alan Watts video with them (Hugo typically shares this one)
- a list of your favorite books with images and links to Amazon
- a piece of psychoeducation about the problem a client is facing
- emails or messages that keep your clients accountable
Whatever kind of tools, resources, or homework exercises you typically share with clients, using a tool like Quenza, you can create digital versions of these tools that can be shared with clients with a click of the button.
Example of an online activity to share with clients
In the above example, we have built the popular Best Possible Self exercise by dragging and dropping text fields into the activity builder.
In the following video, my colleague Hugo Alberts shows you exactly how you can use the activity builder to do the same for the tools you use and share with clients.
Why send out these tools digitally?
Now that you have a list of the tools you use with clients, you can start to create your own digital version of them using a tool like Quenza.
Sending out digital versions of your coaching or therapy tools allows you to:
- gather responses and data
- track your client’s progress
- maximize the chances of your clients engaging with what you send them
The truth about engaging clients
In this day and age, if it is not convenient for a client to complete the form or worksheet you send them, or to perform a certain exercise, they just won’t do it.
The most convenient way for your clients to engage with your content or homework exercises is to receive and complete them from the comfort of their smartphone, via a mobile app.
This is exactly why we have built the Quenza mobile app; one app that both you and your clients can use to work together.
Here’s what that looks like:
For every activity that you send out, your client will receive a push notification.
Clicking that notification will open the app and prompt the client to complete the activity you have sent.
Your client completes the activity and presses ‘Finish’.
In your practitioner account, this activity of the client will be reflected.
You can see exactly what they have completed, are still working on, or which activities are overdue.
As you can see, this client has completed only the first step of the exercise I sent her, accounting for 17%.
By using digital activities like this, instead of emailing PDF or Word files around, you can effortlessly keep clients engaged and on track and see exactly how they are engaging with what you send them.
If this sounds useful to you, I highly recommend you to sign up for the 1-month Quenza trial at: https://quenza.com/pricing/
For just $1 you can try it out for 30 days.
And please let me know if you have any questions below.
I’d love to help you get started!
Does Quenza ALSO include/offer the practice-management tools mentioned in the blog?
“A practice management tool typically has the following features:
Scheduling of appointments
Billing and invoices
Teleconferencing (HIPAA-compliant)
Client notes
Chat
and all your other run-of-the-mill features”
I will be starting a practice and will be looking for both practice management and client engagement tools, preferably all in one application.
Hi Janet,
I completely understand what you mean.
As of now, Quenza does not yet include most of these practice management features. It includes client notes and within the next two weeks we’ll release Messaging/Chat.
We’ll build the other features in order of popularity, as requested by our users in our in-app community. Users have requested Groups (sending activities to multiple clients at once), Group Chat, and White Labeling. We’ll build those features first before we move on to the others I mentioned in the article.
Quenza is, in its core, a client engagement app. As soon as the core is finished, we’ll make sure you can also run your practice with it.
Please let me know if you have any other questions or would like a personal demo. 🙂
Cheers,
Seph
Hi guys
Will you add a yearly payment option with discount for doing that?
Would be great. This tool looks awesome.
Hi Gabrielle,
There already is. From your account, you can change the monthly billing to yearly and get two months free.
You can do this under Settings > Subscription > Change Plan > switch to Annual
Cheers,
Seph
Don’t confuse Quenza with other one stop solutions!
In an ideal world, Quenza would have already met all of a practitioner’s desires. However, what the developers have done is to provide a client centric solution, and that is the ultimate focus for any professional coach or therapist.
Take a moment to prioritize what a therapist does. He/she ultimately wants to inspire transformation in a client. Accordingly, Quenza has been developed to provide the necessary work flows and tools, to allow the practitioner to realize that transformation. With an arsenal of tools at hand, any consultant or coach can provide on going, valuable support. And that is the Key.
Nothing like this is available from the competition.
I read your roadmap and a little bit excited! I have one question. What does Quenza look like for coachees? Do they also login to Quenza and its app?
Hi Junya, absolutely.
Clients can download the app in the Google or Apple App Store, just like you.
Quenza is smart 😉 and depending on a person’s login details, automatically logs a person in as a client or a practitioner.
If you have both a client and a practitioner account registered under the same email address (because you want to try and see what your clients get to see, for instance), you will be presented with a choice between both roles.
Hope this helps. We’re excited too!
Thank you! It sounds great. I’ll try it.
Hello:
I love all the features of Quenza. I am wondering if the main page of the platform is set up like a landing page or home page with the sign in option. I was thinking of personalizing my web domain and just wanted to know. The landing page can be for marketing purposes. Just a thought to ask as I have seen other platforms have a landing page with several theme options for setup.
Hi Nick,
I understand exactly what you’re looking for.
Quenza does not yet offer this feature, but it’s been requested before and it’s certainly something we’ll add to our roadmap: https://quenza.com/roadmap/
Cheers,
Seph
Greetings!
Quenza looks like a great solution. A question, does it have the ability to track KPIs and measure results v. targets?
Thanks!
Hi Gregg!
How are you doing? I remember we were in touch before through PositivePsychology.com 🙂
Great question. We are currently wireframing a feature called ‘Trackers’ that will allow you to set goals, habits to be developed, and task reminders with clients. Clients will be able to follow their own progress on the client dashboard.
Should you want to pitch in your ideas, please send me an email at seph@quenza.com. I’d love to get a concrete picture of what you would be looking for exactly.
Cheers,
Seph
Hi there,
Question: can one create paid courses or programs in Quenza? Also, is there a CRM in place?
Thanks in advance,
– Jacqueline S.
Hi Jacqueline,
There is a CRM in place and it’s currently possible to create courses (in the form of pathways), but not paid courses.
Of course you can have your clients pay through another system (or just put it on your invoice) and give them access to your premium content using Quenza.
Hope this helps!
Seph
Hello,
Can someone better help me understand how this application works? Will this be a third-party application? Will I need to use a website builder to build my website in addition to this application?
Hi Stacey,
Please check out our Youtube channel for short, instructional videos that will show you how Quenza works: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCho5lHFCtoDRNsPXt5KjpyQ
Quenza is not a website-builder, it’s purpose is aimed at digital client engagement and what we call ‘augmented coaching’; a way to be of extra value to clients without spending extra time.
As a coach who is just getting started Quenza will simplify the most important part of the practice – client engagement and meeting their needs. Thanks, guys.
My question is how to marry an existing website with Quenza, or it must remain a separate stand-alone facility I transfer my clients onto?
Thanks a lot for saying that Frank!
What you will be able to do in a couple of weeks from now is set a custom subdomain. This means that you can send your clients to example.quenza.com so your URL can be branded with the name of your coaching practice. That will bring more consistency to the experience of your clients. Also, did you know that you can already set your own colors, sending email address and logo? 🙂