Last updated on June 6, 2023
Engagement is essential to improving a client’s health and wellness outcomes.
This key to realizing lasting change is also among coaching’s greatest barriers, especially in a noisy, digital world.
Let’s start with a question: how are coaches to compete with unlimited options for entertainment, fitness, and wellness content to keep clients interested and actively involved in improving their health and well-being?
The answer: by leveraging the right technology.
In this article, we’ll look at three common coaching challenges and explore how life coaches can utilize technology to overcome these roadblocks and build steady engagement with clients.
Coaching Challenge #1: Onboarding Can Slow Momentum
Participants in health, life, and wellness programs want to get to the good stuff, fast. They want to dive in, start learning, and see results without too much downtime or hang-ups along the way. For coaches looking to capture clients’ attention, that means onboarding needs to be quick.
Traditionally, the new client onboarding process can take one to two full sessions. This lengthy process to set wellness goals can result in a loss of engagement and motivation. Coaches have to strike while the iron is hot to ensure tedious housekeeping tasks don’t slow client momentum.
Utilizing technology, you can set the pace for your client-coach relationship by getting things off to a quick start. With the help of a digital wellness solution, coaches can swiftly and seamlessly onboard their clients.
Let’s say you’ve secured a new client. Now, you can set them up with an automated coaching solution that will personalize the entire onboarding process, allowing participants to fill out forms and answer initial intake questions at their own pace and convenience.
Coaches have to strike while the iron is hot to ensure tedious housekeeping tasks don’t slow client momentum.
Automating administrative tasks during the onboarding process also helps streamline your coaching experience—ensuring you can focus on what you do best, coaching! With the right technology, you can onboard, set goals, track notes, oversee health data, and communicate with clients from a centralized dashboard. Technology also boasts automation that can support the:
- Scheduling of coaching sessions
- Collection of client feedback
- Management of missed coaching sessions
- Sending of automated coaching check-ins
- Utilization of templates and assessments
- Creation of custom workflows tailored to the individual’s needs
- Goal setting for unique health journeys
What’s more, these check-ins can include supplemental health and wellness content such as relevant videos or timely articles that spark continued learning and increased engagement.
Coaching Challenge #2: Custom Experiences Are Difficult to Scale
We live in a time when customization is everywhere. People are empowered and driven by personalized options.
Open a restaurant’s mobile app and your favorite lunch order is already populated. Visit an online retail marketplace and product recommendations magically fulfill your current needs. Hop on interactive exercise equipment and classes with your favorite instructors and music genres are cued up. Across retail and news sites, social media, and video and audio streaming services, we’ve grown accustomed to individualized product and content options.
Automating administrative tasks during the onboarding process also helps streamline your coaching experience—ensuring you can focus on what you do best, coaching!
In this era of personalization, coaching has to follow suit to keep participants engaged. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t make the cut. But crafting a totally custom experience for each client is undeniably challenging to scale. Here’s where technology comes into play once again.
It’s mission-critical that coaches remain focused on building a unique experience that understands the individual goals of participants, offers content that fits their lifestyle, and meets each and every client where they are. Creating a 100% personalized client experience is a heavy lift for coaches, but they can leverage digital tools to support personalized care at scale.
For starters, coaches can utilize online platforms to supplement one-on-one coaching sessions with bite-sized digital lessons, videos, and articles that support their client’s individual challenges and goals. With access to curated content libraries with the latest trends and information, you can deliver clients high-quality, personalized content without having to create it yourself.
Now, you can also automate client touch bases, sending out personalized reminders and more interesting, relevant content that can help boost program engagement and improve outcomes.
Coaching Challenge #3: Keeping Participants on Track is Time Consuming
For both clients and coaches, life doesn’t always afford enough time. We know that it’s often challenging for clients to find an hour (or more) for a conversation with their coach. One-on-one coaching requires extensive time and resources on the coaching end too—both of which may be in short supply. This leaves some to wonder: How can I coach effectively when time is short?
Creating a 100% personalized client experience is a heavy lift for coaches, but they can leverage digital tools to support personalized care at scale.
You guessed it: technology. In today’s world where everything is just a click away, people have grown to expect immediate help and answers from anywhere and at any time of the day. And it filters into the coaching realm.
Program participants simply want the flexibility, and ability, to access the resources they need when it’s convenient for their life—be it while watching their child’s soccer game, traveling for work, lounging on a weekend, or at any moment when they are needing extra support.
Coaches can integrate virtual coaching tools into their practice to deliver personalized care, engage clients with sincere, automated conversations, and provide access to helpful content at any time that works for their clients.
You can deliver effective coaching that’s convenient for both you and your clients virtually, but it has to be conversational and personalized if you expect clients to adhere to programs and change their behaviors. This ability to meet clients where they are, when they need and want to be met, with highly individualized content and communications can help ensure that they stay engaged and continue making strides to achieve their goals.
Technology is the key to overcoming coaching challenges in order to engage participants.
Leveraging digital coaching solutions, coaches can smooth out the onboarding process, create personalized care experiences, and ensure clients remain on track and engaged. With the right technology, you can both scale your businesses and gain a deep, personal understanding of an individual client’s needs and goals to build a successful and engaging coach-client relationship.
Clark Lagemann
Clark Lagemannis a seasoned entrepreneur and innovator on a mission to change lives by fixing the biggest problems in healthcare. Currently, as CEO ofAvidon Health, he leads a team of behavior change experts who are passionate about providing health strategies that empower people to make positive life changes.
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