How Online Coaching Tools Can Maximize Your Value to Clients

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:

1. gather responses and data
2. track your client’s progress
3. 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!