The CoachAccountable Blog

Zoom is a popular platform for conducting coaching sessions, and for good reason!  If you’re not meeting in person, it’s more or less the next best thing: face-to-face video calls that are easy to set up and easy to join, for you and your clients.

CoachAccountable now allows you to connect your Zoom account, which means the system can automatically set up Zoom Meetings for your appointments.

Here’s the gist in one minute:

Let’s see how it works!

Connecting CoachAccountable to Zoom

You’ll find the place to connect to your Zoom account under Settings >> Appointment Config >> Zoom Meetings.

The in-app verbiage makes it pretty clear what’s going on and what to do next:

Use Zoom? Already logged in?  If so, you’re literally 2 clicks away from connecting your account.

Clicking the big “Let’s go do that!” button brings you over to Zoom.  If you’re not logged in already, you’ll be prompted to do so (or have the chance to sign up for a new Zoom account).

Once logged in, you’ll see the following prompt asking for your authorization to allow CoachAccountable to connect:

All CA needs, permission-wise, is the ability to read and write to your Meetings.

Assuming you click “Authorize”, you’ll be whisked back to CoachAccountable and presented with the opportunity to set your preferences for Zoom meeting.

Set Zoom Meeting Preferences

This selection essentially amounts to letting CA know which of your Appointment Types should typically entail a Zoom Meeting:

Here we answer the (hopefully) simple question: which types of appointment do you generally conduct via Zoom?

The “Always” and “Never” tell CA that a Zoom meeting (or lack thereof!) should be taken as a foregone conclusion for all appointments of that type.  Choosing the “Usually” or “Usually not” option means CA will present you with a checkbox option that you can check or not check (in order to set up or not set up a Zoom meeting) when scheduling an appointment.

The other settings mirror the usual Zoom Meeting settings:

• Enable clients to join before me
• Enable waiting room
• Set passwords for meetings (great for security concerns)
• Start meeting with video enabled
• Record meetings automatically

(Note also that here, at the bottom, is where you can disconnect CA from your Zoom account, should you ever wish to.)

Here’s what scheduling an appointment looks like for an Appointment Type whose Zoom meeting preference is set to “Always”:

Note how it says “A Zoom meeting will be scheduled for this appointment.”, the “Always” setting in action.

When your clients schedule with you, they’ll never see controls related to Zoom.  Instead, the system will automatically create those meetings for Appointment Types that are set to either “Always” or “Usually” have Zoom Meetings.

Once an Appointment is scheduled with a Zoom Meeting, you’ll be able to see it’s been added to your Meetings over in your Zoom account:

Looks about right! Though in general you’ll not need to keep up with things scheduled over here, since it’ll be in CA.  Also, beware that Delete button: if you delete it there, CA won’t know about it.

Zoom Meetings for Already-Scheduled Appointments

Add a Zoom Meeting

If you didn’t do so when originally scheduled, you can add a Zoom Meeting to already-scheduled Appointments.  Just click to modify an Appointment and, so long as it’s of a type that is set to usually or always have a Zoom Meeting, you’ll find a button by which to do so:

Quickly add Zoom Meetings to your already-scheduled appointments.

When modifying an already-scheduled appointment, you can see the corresponding Zoom Meeting that has been scheduled:

If you have a change of heart, you can remove the Zoom Meeting with a click.

Note the “Location” field has been set to the exact URL by which you and your clients will be able to access the Meeting.

Where to Access the Zoom Meeting Link

Having the Zoom URL as the location for an appointment means it will be easy to find (and thus the meeting easy to join) for both parties.  It can be found in:

Notifications – That exact meeting’s URL will be present in the Appointment notifications and reminders you and your client get.

Client AND Coach Calendars – You’ll also see the URL automatically as part of the event in any calendars that you or your client have synced with.  That means the meeting will be super easy to join for both parties.

In-App – Appointments that have Zoom Meetings set will also show the “join now” link in-app; just click on the calendar icon or name of the appointment as found in the upcoming appointments listing:

One click from within CA to join… nice!

Deleting Zoom Meetings

You might have CA schedule one for you but later decide you don’t need it.  You COULD delete it from within Zoom, but don’t.  If you delete it there, CA won’t know about it and with blithely go on showing the “join now” link to you and your clients.

But more to the point, there’s no need (after all, the whole point of this integration is to have things all in one place!).  You can delete a Zoom meeting from within CA; just go to modify an appointment that has the meeting set and click the “remove this…” button.

And that’s it!  Just connect your Zoom account, choose which appointment types should have Zoom meetings, and set those meetings automatically when scheduling your appointments as usual.  The “join now” links will be readily presented to you and your clients.

Zoom meetings are a best-in-class way to conduct your remote coaching sessions.  By integrating them in with everything else that CA appointments provide, you’ve got an even more powerful system for scheduling with your clients with the least work possible.  Enjoy!

Ready to supercharge your appointments with automated pre- and post-session Worksheets, client scheduling with reminders, Google & Outlook calendar sync, and now integrated Zoom meetings? Sign up for CoachAccountable. It’s free for 30 days – click here to begin. 

The source file for this image is the first PhotoShop document that I could ever count as a 6+ year work in progress.

What a year!

What a delightful year.  When I reflect on the last 12 months of playing the CoachAccountable game, what’s most strongly there for me is a sense of calm effectiveness.

Morgan and I have forged a really strong stride of GETTING. THINGS. DONE.  Morgan’s expert handling of customer love and support, coupled with the elevated focus on heads-down work that I’ve taken on (it’s a little harder–though not too hard–these days to get access to me these days, sorry!) has led a lot of meaningful and creative output this year.  Fun things like:

• The monthly Webinar series, with which we’re teaching powerful distinctions around how to be a better coach (with the aid of CoachAccountable, of course) that you won’t find anywhere else.  The growing repository of webinar recordings (available in-app) is proving a valuable resource for many.
• Video riffs: me on camera riffing about a few topics around and behind the scenes of CoachAccountable, of interest to CA users old and new.
• Interviews: we produced a few in depth interviews exploring ways CA elevates coaching work (and other topics), including Greg Bennett (“I close deals thanks to this thing”) and Joe Arioto (“I wish I had this a decade ago”).
• Being an exhibitor at the St. Thomas Executive Coaching conference and a sponsor of the ACTO conference.
• Some exercises in copy writing our marketing website pages that seem by and large responsible for nearly doubling our signups (seriously).
• We’ve amassed a lot of love in the reviews posted about CA (big thanks to those who have so generously shared about their experiences with us and CA over there).

Plenty of new goodies to the app itself, as well.  Many expanded CA’s capacity to help you run a better business, but still also plenty of other features that make the coaching itself better (and give your clients more):

• Engagements, CA’s system for managing coaching packages that entail appointment allocations and/or recurring billing.
• Client Agreements, CA’s way to let you issue and manage formal agreements (legal and otherwise) with your clients (including collecting signatures, allowing you to drop services like DocuSign).
• Full-fledged sync with Microsoft Outlook calendars.
• New reports: Coach Touchpoints and ICF-style logging of coaching hours.
• Group Whiteboards, Group Action Projects, Group Files area, and Group member profiles.

Plus the usual bevvy of other tweaks, enhancements, little additions, and bits of polish as we continue our usual march towards a more perfect CoachAccountable (and my usual thanks go out to the many CA users to continue to share their insight and perspectives to inform that march!).

It’s all been (and continues to be) a lot of fun as we fire creatively on most or all cylinders.  On top of that, it’s been very calm as we’ve gone along doing so much, even amid doubled sign ups.

I know I say this every year (but in my defense it always turns out to be true, per subsequent year-in-reviews like this), but there’s still plenty more up our sleeves as we continue to build the best darn coaching platform we can.

Thank you to all who have joined us on the journey.  That you’ve done the work to find your way around CA and wield it in your work means the world to me.  Onward we go!

Cheers,

Joe Arioto of MetaGrowth Ventures has done 16,000 coaching hours and has at times coached 90+ individuals on a rolling basis.

Early on as a user of CoachAccountable he reached out to let me know he was pleased with the system, and wish he’d had it a decade ago.

Given that, you can imagine I was quite keen to talk more, figuring Joe’s insights and perspective from such a seasoned career would be worth sharing.  He did not disappoint!

Some of the topics we covered:

• Challenges with coaching 90+ individuals (1:52)
• On charging a higher fee (15:15)
• Goal Setting and Planning (22:18)
• Why accountability & tracking is important (29:02)
• What makes a compelling coaching offer(34:20)
• Better client rapport with personality profiling (46:10)
• The difference CoachAccountable makes (52:42)

Thanks Joe for meeting with me in the studio and sharing your expertise!

Every week we hear a few requests for some sort of users group, some opportunity to connect with other coaches.

While our monthly webinar series has proven a successful time for education and group contribution, there’s still more room for community.

So we’re trying something new: an in-person coaches meetup in Los Angeles, California.

Why Announce Our Meetup to Everyone?

We realize an in-person Meetup will only be feasible for a small segment of our global community of users.  Nevertheless, there are some good reasons to share this more broadly:

• Putting this out here gives us the chance to suss out interest from coaches in other places: “Hey, can’t make the LA meetup, but can you do one in my city?” (if you’re thinking this to yourself right now, let us know!).
• We’ve heard from coaches worldwide who periodically visit Los Angeles or have long layovers in LA.
• This meetup isn’t just for CoachAccountable customers. All coaches are welcome, and we know many of you have wide networks of coach friends who might be in the greater Los Angeles area.  I was shocked to find that there wasn’t already a coaches and mentors group happening in LA (given how many coaches live here), so we’re happy to be organizing what may be the first one.

This is a Test

Arguably, an in-person meetup for an essentially virtual company is an odd fit.  Yet there’s something so powerful, so enlivening about making connections in person, especially when virtual is so thoroughly the norm.  Plus it’s fun. :)

So we’re going to give it a real try, and just see how this goes.  We want to see what kind of interest there genuinely is in an in-person meetup.  We’ll host an event monthly, and do it for six months.  By that time, we expect to have a good read on whether this is worth continuing with.

Ultimately, what we’re up to as a company is making the entirety of coaching better, for both clients and coaches.  To that end, an in-person meetup is worth doing.

Here’s a blurb from our meetup page itself:

If you’re like most coaches (everyone from brand-new to seasoned pro), you crave community. You feed off the enthusiasm of other people causing breakthroughs.

And if you’re like most coaches, you want to know what’s working and what’s not working out there. How are other coaches running their businesses? Strategies for working remotely? Hosting live workshops? Squarespace or WordPress?

–> Come to our monthly Los Angeles coaches gathering. <–

No matter your area of focus (life coaching, business coaching, finance coaching, leadership coaching, relationship coaching, mentoring, and so on), come to learn (and share) best practices.

“But I’m afraid someone will steal my worksheet idea!” Guess what? People aren’t signing up for your worksheets and materials. They’re signing up to work with YOU. Nobody else can coach in the exact same way you can. And, let’s not forget why we started coaching: to make a difference. The more coaches, and the more people getting coached, the better off the world is. Share only what you’re comfortable sharing.

So Far So Good

Our first meetup occurred in early August. Attendance was light compared to the 16 who’d RSVPed, but we had a great mix: a fitness coach, an executive coach, and a sales coach, all at different points in their careers. We bonded over shared stories of how we entered the coaching world and what we’d each gotten in our own lives from coaching, and shared tips on keeping clients longer (the loose topic of the meetup).

The attendees each sent passionate messages afterward and added suggestions for future incarnations, all of which have been implemented.  It feels like we’re on the right track!

The scene of our August coaches meetup – the magic 8ball said “good idea”

Find Our Los Angeles Coaches Meetup

In the LA area and want to get out and connect with some peers?  Join our meetup group.

Our next event is Thursday, September 12 from 6-8PM Pacific Time. The topic is “Mastering Client Referrals.”

Can’t make the coaches gathering but want to see what we’re all about? Start your free CoachAccountable trial now.

Common to many coaching relationships is the need to lay out specific terms, agreements, or contracts between coach and client.  Even though periphery to the real work that gets done in coaching, these agreements are often essential in laying down a foundation of trust, workability, and clear expectations.

Time to upgrade from this method, eh?

Such agreements typically include:

• Payment terms
• Cancellation & refund policies
• Confidentiality provisions
• What is expected of the client
• What can be expected of the coach
• Terms of engagement
• Disclaimers, dispute resolution, and other topics of legal significance

A clear understanding about all of these protects the interests of both parties, and a clear record of what exactly was agreed to (and when!) is handy in the event of a dispute.

To make managing the coach agreements that your clients enter into (as part of working with you) easy and effective, we are proud to present CoachAccountable Client Agreements.

Here are the broad strokes of what these provide:

Signatures, check boxes and more.  When a simple “I agree to the above” check box won’t cut it, you can add various inputs to your agreements for your clients to fill in.  Think places to type their initials or full name, check boxes to acknowledge agreement to essential terms one by one, and even signature pads that require clients to physically sign with their mouse, stylus or finger.

Multiple, customizable templates to suit your various client types and engagements.  Create one or more agreement templates with dynamic tags like [clientFirstName] and [dateOf], each one tailored to the various types of clients and programs you offer.  For instance, your group coaching clients might have different rates and terms than your one-on-one coaching clients, which are different still from your in-person weekend mastermind clients.

Issue with ease.  Issue agreements for new or established clients with a few clicks.  CoachAccountable handles the rest by presenting the agreement to your client to complete (at registration for new clients, and upon next interaction for those already established).

Clear and readily-accessible records for both parties.  Coach and client can both see the clear (and time-stamped) record of what was agreed to and when.

Integrity and immutability.  The existence of an agreed-to Client Agreement is strong evidence that a client ACTUALLY did agree to it.  Coach can’t stuff a client account with Agreements that weren’t agreed to, and coach can’t alter agreements that were agreed to earlier.  Only client logged in as himself can agree to a Client Agreement, and the IP address from which they made the agreement is recorded.

Effective replacement for document signing services. With a robust and flexible system for issuing and securing agreements for your contractual needs with clients, these allow you to retire services like HelloSign or Docusign; CoachAccountable is one step closer to being the only system you need to run your whole coaching business.

Let’s see them in action!

Creating Client Agreement Templates

The first step is to create one or more Client Agreement Templates.  You’ll find the place to do this in Settings >> Agreements.

Click +Agreement Template to create a new one.

Composing an Agreement Template entails using the typical WYSIWYG editor.

Notice on the right there are several magic tags available for automatic customization.  These include [clientFirstName] and [clientLastName] (to customize to a given client), and [dateOf], which will set itself to whatever date your client executes the agreement.

If you’re on Team Edition you’ll also see [coachFirstName] and [coachLastName], allowing you to insert the name of whomever is the client’s primary coach.

Finally, in pre-loaded Agreement Templates you may notice [businessName] present as a magic tag.  This pulls from the name you’ve supplied in Branding (Settings >> System >> Branding >> System Names >> Name of my business).

To make a more interactive (and even more legally robust) Agreement you’ll want to include one or more form inputs, using the “Insert Form Input” button of the WYSIWYG toolbar (5th in from the right).  Form inputs are the check boxes, text inputs, and signature areas mentioned above.  Having a signature area at the bottom of your agreement preceded by something like “I, [clientFirstName] [clientLastName] hereby agree to the above as of [dateOf]:” might be a nice way to wrap up.

Check box AND a signature area… thorough! And the “Dated” line fills itself in automatically.

Issuing Agreements

Once you create one or more Agreement Templates, they’re ready to issue to your clients, new and old.

For new clients, you’ll see Agreements as part of the dialogue for adding a new client. Like with established clients, you’ll be able to choose from your Agreement Templates and customize as desired.

If the Agreements portion is missing for you, it’s because you don’t have any Agreement Templates!

The Agreement you issue to a new client will be presented as part of their account registration (i.e. when they choose their username and password).  If you issue multiple Agreements (see the “For existing clients” section below for how), the first one you issued will be presented as part of the registration process and subsequent ones will be presented right after.  That said, multiple agreements for a new client just getting started might be a bit overwhelming… so even though you can do it, we don’t recommend it!

For existing clients, go to the client’s Settings (gear icon found in the lower right for a given client in the “My Clients” listing) and you’ll see a section called “Agreements”.

Click “Issue New”, and you’re presented with a dropdown menu of your Agreement Templates. Clicking the customize button allows you to add or change anything that’s specific to this one person.

Issue it, and the client will be presented with that Agreement the next time they access the system.  They’ll not be able to do anything else in the system until they complete the Agreement.

If you’d like to change something in an already issued Agreement, you can do so up until the client has completed it by deleting and re-assigning a new version.  For an unimpeachable record, no changes may be made after it’s been completed (though you can delete and re-issue if needed).

Once the Agreement is completed, you’ll see the date and time the client acknowledged your coaching terms and conditions, as well as the IP address.

If a client switches subscriptions, moves to a different type of coaching, restarts coaching after a hiatus, or for any other update to your coaching terms and conditions, you can issue an additional Agreement reflecting whatever new arrangement is in effect.  They’ll be added to the record of past Agreements.

Reviewing Past Agreements

You and the client are both able to see all previous Agreements, including when they were accepted by the client. As coach, access this record via a given client’s Settings >> Agreements.  Your client will find the record of their agreements with you by clicking on their name in the upper right >> My Account >> My Agreement(s).

Agreements in Offerings

When someone signs up for one of your Offerings, they become a new client in your account.  When configuring your Offering you can designate one of your Agreement Templates to be the one that applies to those clients (i.e. they’ll be presented with that Agreement when they register their account, and will be required to complete it before entering the system).

And there you have it!  Client agreements, contracts, terms and legalese are often a pretty dry, boring, and perhaps even unpleasant part of running a coaching business, but with CoachAccountable Agreements you can get those terms right once and then have them handled for all clients with negligible effort.

Bonus: Looking for some inspiration on what your Client Agreements should look like?  Click here to install 5 samples we’ve provided.  Pick the best one for you, tailor it to suit your business and you’ve got another thing handled!

Ready to drop HelloSign or Docusign and do all your coaching client management through CoachAccountable?  Try us out free for 30 days and let us know what you think of the new Client Agreements.

If you’re a coach who uses CoachAccountable, you likely already know that you can have a freebie client: a client account you’re not billed for, useful for testing out content and coaching yourself.

If you’re a coaching organization using CoachAccountable’s Team Edition, each one of your coaches is also entitled to a freebie client.

Why Use a Freebie Client?

Most coaches find freebie clients useful for two types of activities: testing out coaching material and self-coaching.

Test Out Coaching Material

When you send an item to a client, you probably wonder how it lands. Using the freebie client to test your coaching content can help you adjust assignments’ timing, frequency, difficulty level, and more, based on your actual experience engaging with your content. If you’ve been with CoachAccountable a while, you may have already learned the benefits of ironing out content delivery with your freebie client first. Consider that the same benefit will be instrumental in your coaches’ grasp of and usage of the system.

Self-Coaching

Coaches want development, too! Your coaches can use their freebie clients for self-coaching. This is a great spot to keep that certification to-do list, measure progress on a daily meditation goal, journal about learnings gleaned from sessions, and, well, everything else the system does.

How to Set Up Freebie Clients for your Coaches

As an administrator of a Team Edition account, you can set up the freebie client for your coaches.

When you first create a new coach account, you’ll be presented with the Manage Team Member screen by which to further customize their permissions.  If you’ve opted for this team member to be a coach (rather than admin only), you’ll see the “Freebie Client” section as part of this manager screen:

That does sound great, doesn’t it?

Simply click the big button and it’ll be done.

To see the result, go to the team clients list and refresh. You’ll see the new client with the blue “freebie” banner.  This new client will be automatically paired with the original coach account, making it the perfect setup for that new coach to experiment.

And if you skip doing this bit of setup when first adding a new coach?  No problem: at any time you can bring up the Coach Manager screen for a given coach.  Provided they are an active coach (and don’t already have a freebie client), the “Freebie Client” section will be there, putting you two clicks away from adding it.

Bonus: Train Your Coaches with Freebie Clients

You can also utilize these freebie clients for coach training. One way to do this is set up a Group for all the coaches and enroll all their freebie clients as members. That way you can assign items to the group, have a discussion between all the coaches, have some friendly competition tracking a Metric, and all the other benefits of Groups.

If you use CoachAccountable’s Team Edition, we highly recommend giving each of your coaches a freebie client. Your coaches will thank you, and you may even find yourself surprised by some great suggestions for usage of the platform as the coaches get familiar with both sides!

With CoachAccountable’s Team Edition, all your coach accounts are free, and they each get a free client, too. Try it out for 30 days at no charge.

“I close deals because I’ve got this thing.”

So said Greg to me when we’d met up for a beer some two years ago, referring to how having (and proudly touting) CoachAccountable as part of his deal really works as a selling point.

Hearing this gave me an idea: we should sit down and riff about it some time in the studio.  I finally got my act together and made that happen last month.

Some of the topics we covered:

• Keeping info straight & first impressions (02:30)
• Visibility & Accountability (06:53)
• Increasing perceived value (14:45)
• High touch interaction (17:08)
• Common struggles for coaches (20:56)
• Beyond the 2-day Workshop: value that lasts (26:16)
• Coaching at higher volume (31:20)

If you’re not sure you want to commit 42 minutes¹ to watching this, maybe the 2 minute teaser will help you decide.

Thanks Greg for taking time to chat and share your insight with others.  Greg’s a bit of a badass himself: he’s a Growth Coach franchisee and has set the organization record for fastest start, as measured by sales, in his first 2 years.

In other words he’s a pretty good source on how to build and run a thriving coaching business.  To apply his wisdom to running a better practice for yourself go get your 30 day trial.

Wondering if there’s a CoachAccountable app, or if we’re gonna make one and get it all up in the app stores?

The answer is no, and here’s why.

CoachAccountable will probably never have an app, because, on balance, we’ve come to the conclusion that investing the time and energy to create one would be a TERRIBLE idea. It would entail a lot of extra engineering work to build and maintain multiple versions of CA, but admittedly that’s more our problem than it is yours as a user.

Your problem as a user is that an app causes you to ask your clients to bother with the intrusive hassle of having to find and install an app (and worry about updating and troubleshooting things like “Do I have the most updated OS installed on my phone?” or “Did I install another app that’s breaking CoachAccountable, or vice-versa?”).

By contrast, they’re gonna get into CoachAccountable by simply clicking a link in an email the system will send them.

Wisdom from my favorite comic, XKCD.

An app also means it would be branded as CoachAccountable, rather than as your own thing (because submitting a white labeled version of CoachAccountable for each one of our customers is both impractical and explicitly disallowed).

What we’ve done instead is made it so that you and your clients can “install” CA on any device as a home screen app with just a few clicks, and THAT is branded and named as your own–far better than them having a CA app (find more about this here and  find the share-ready instructions here).

Apps also can (and do) do lots of crappy stuff that is invasive and disrespectful to users (see for example this article published just last week), meaning users (ahem, your clients) are well within reason to be leery of installing “just one more app”.

CoachAccountable, as a web-only experience that JUST WORKS(tm) on all devices, doesn’t entail any such burdens:

• No permissions to grant.
• No update notifications.
• No silently taking up space on your disk.
• No running in the background eating your battery or raiding your contacts or listening in on your microphone for who knows what purpose (did I mention apps do crappy things?).

So those are the reasons against it, and I haven’t heard any great arguments for the upsides of an app, none that stick, anyway:

Offline access? Rarely happens, as, if you have an smartphone, cellular service at minimum can be generally assumed.

Push notifications? They’re intrusive and of little marginal benefit over already-supported SMS and email (to say nothing of their engineered addictive qualities).

Looks slick and professional? Not as much as having your own branded app icon on a home screen.

I shared this reasoning with a customer a few days ago, and promptly got this reply:

Thank you, John, for the thorough response. … It’s funny how sometimes we can get caught up in the shiny things, like apps!  You’ve really shown me that CA has the true user experience in mind.

That strikes me as a good observation, and I hope you agree.  I don’t begrudge anyone’s desire to see CoachAccountable in slick and shiny packaging.  There’s no CoachAccountable app to be found in any app store, but it’s not because we’re asleep at the wheel or falling behind.  It’s because it’s a bad idea and we’ve taken an approach that better serves you and the people you coach.

One of the biggest reasons enterprise coaching organizations sign up with CoachAccountable is to have better oversight of team coaches. Are your coaches doing what you’ve asked them to? Are they delivering on what you’ve promised your clients?

CoachAccountable helps keep track of your coaching team:

• Share your content, files, Courses and more with them
• Set the types and lengths of Appointments each coach can offer
• Pair coaches with clients, limiting or enabling a coach’s visibility of your entire client roster
• Approve various permissions, for example to allow more autonomy for head coaches or admin users

And for reporting, you’ve already got several options:

• Client activity report, which can often be an early indicator of someone who’s struggling and could use a little intervention
• Appointment reports, which gives a window into appointment hours logged and basic stats
  
• Data Lab, where you can run a report on, say, a client satisfaction level question or see trends across clients over time
  
• Happenings Report, a regularly scheduled snapshot of interactions

And our newest addition to your team management tools: the Coach Touchpoints Report.

The Coach Touchpoints report allows you to see, at a glance, how often your coaches (or just you yourself!) make contact with every one of their clients. Here’s how to set it up.

You’ll find this in Reports >> Coach Touchpoints.

Generating a Touchpoints Report

The real essence of a Touchpoints report is the date range you’re interested in and what kinds of interactions you want included.  Clicking on the “Include” button reveals the types of interactions that you can choose from.

In this case, for example, we might only care about appointments completed and comments posted.

There are also a few less essential (but handy) settings to be found by clicking the gear icon:

The “Good if”/”Bad if” settings are a little esoteric, but…

For Team Edition accounts, you can choose to include secondarily-paired clients (in addition to primary ones) when visualizing who coaches have (and haven’t) been active with.

The “Good if within” and “Bad if over” settings affect how things are color coded.  Ultimately this report is meant to give a visual look into how often coaches are interacting with clients, and if it’s frequent enough.

The resulting colorful graph will show trends in your interaction with clients, broken down by coach for Team Edition users, or just you if it’s, well, just you.  This can help you keep tabs on how you and/or your coaches are doing, and who might need a little more rigor in their outreach and upkeep.

Let’s take a look at one.

Wow, look at all those touchpoints–that Patrick Leonardo won’t leave John Larson alone!

Notice the setup here: good within three days, bad if over five days. That means that all of these green dashes say “great, this coach has been in contact with this particular client within three days”, red ones say, “whoops, they were finally in contact but it was more than five days since their last connection”, and yellow shows contacts that occurred between three and five days.

Also notice the trails: they show the progression from “we’re fine” to “not so good, it’s now been a while” to “yikes, we’re really letting this client down, interaction-wise!”

Drill Down

From here, you can hover over a date to see what particular interaction(s) occurred on that date.

You can then click on the item in question (a Worksheet, Session Note, etc.) to view it.

Added Bonuses

In the example reports above, you might notice that certain coaches aren’t interacting with certain clients at all. That might be an easy indication to update the coach’s client pairings.

Also, perhaps you’ve got a single coach account, rather than a Team Edition account. You can still use the Coach Touchpoints Report to track your own interactions with clients to see if you’re delivering on your promises. Here’s how it looks for a single coach’s account – notice you’ll see the same indicators as far as “it’s been too long”, “pretty good”, or “great job.”

From here, you can use this data to help train and develop your coaches, give gentle nudges, proactively reach out to clients, and find reasons to acknowledge your coaches, too.

Looking for a good way to manage coaches in your organization? Give the Coach Touchpoints report a try with your free 30-day trial of CoachAccountable.

It was back in 2013 when I publicly declared my policy of maintaining oblivion around other coaching platforms, and here in 2019 I’m happy to say that policy still holds.

These six years later folks still ask us how CoachAccountable stacks up against other platforms, and we remain unable to give any substantive answer to the question.

This may seem a flippant (if not outright ignorant!) position, but this 2-minute video riff explains:

As I say in the video, there are a lot other people doing great work in the space, each working to forward the institution of coaching through platforms that might operate in ways comparable to CoachAccountable.  We hear now and then someone’s comparing us to CoachLogix, or that they’re looking for an alternative to FinishAgent, or someone will ask “Hey have you heard of Coachmetrix… or Coaching Lobby… or…”.  We used to hear some folks preferred Satori (though much less since we released Offerings).

These are all just glancing understandings of the competitive landscape, and that’s good enough.  We remain content to stay out of any features arms race, and are happy instead to continue taking our lead from our customers when it comes to insight and direction on how to better CoachAccountable.

We get hints often enough that we’re on the right track.  People seem to like us enough on Capterra and just this morning ago I got an email that mentioned “Upon first glance your software seems to be the most comprehensive for coaching that I have seen”.

But ultimately it’s up to you to explore and come to your own conclusion: the choice of platform that powers your coaching practice is important enough to get right.

Be it with CoachAccountable or something else, we hope you find what will best serve your coaching!