Get off your knees. Imagine a Better Standard. Get to work.
“Client Service” for professionals. It got to be a joke almost right away, don’t you think? But it doesn’t have to be a joke. Client Service. In our view, that huge gap between the promise and the reality has rendered the term nearly meaningless. Even for those who deeply care about the crusade of delivering “it”, and see its value for client retention, “client service” eludes the best of us.
We had no idea that building a client service culture and keeping it would be so hard.
It’s a mantra we repeat to ourselves, to our employees, and to our customers. We believe that if we say “it” enough, “it” will come. With the best intentions, service providers really do institute–but rarely work at and enforce–regime after regime of Client Service.
The reason: Client Service is much much harder than it looks. You weave your skills into a buyer’s “experience” of them, and deliver them together as One Thing. CS is a hard-acquired habit. It never was easy. Never supposed to be easy.
Most of us gave up. So we just talked about “it” in promotional materials and at meetings. We didn’t establish and enforce it. (And lots of the time, if we were honest, we’d admit to ourselves we really didn’t know what it was. It’s just “being nice” to clients, right?)
What if the services sector, now King, competed for clients and customers on the basis of “Ease-of-Use”? Develop and apply ease-of-use concepts for products and goods to pure services? To our clients’ services?
And to our services? Law. Accounting. Consulting. Advertising. Newer and non-traditional services, too. Anything where a service (something valuable but “invisible”) or product-service mix is part of what you pay for.
In other words, Ease-Of-Use for services.