CARE for Your Clients

Chapter 2 – CARE FOR YOUR CLIENTS A better experience can be part of the brand that you build to set your company apart from your competition. We’ve already discussed how such a brand requires your client-facing employees to adapt and accept this as their personal brand. What exactly are you asking them to do? You have to ask them to do something. Simply telling all staff to be “friendly”, or that the “client is always right” is not sufficient to build a sustainable and sufficiently differentiated brand. Over 40 years in engineering and construction, I’ve been involved in some of our company’s biggest marketing campaigns, and I’ve asked dozens of clients how they have made purchasing decisions. I also know a little bit about how individuals buy professional services to meet their own needs. In just about every major purchase decision, the two overriding factors are “best feeling” and “trust.” That’s for big stuff. What about for other things that we buy. Can “best feeling” and “trust” factor into these purchase decisions. I think it can. Sometimes we need an energy drink at 7 am from a convenience store conveniently located in San Clemente – this is a convenience decision. Other times, we have options and when you have options, many other factors can be part of your decision-making process. Consistently providing a great experience requires some general guidelines that drive employees’ mental models with respect to client interactions. I developed a simple, and (I think) memorable set of guidelines that fits into the acronym CARE. This is a set of general principles that employees can use to establish a baseline for client experience. Here’s a quick summary: C – Communication: This is about face to face and electronic communication with a client. How do you communicate with a client or potential client? How do you provide information to them? How do you speak with them? Communication is one of the ways that clients form opinions of your products or services. A – Attention: This is about listening to and showing respect to a client. How well do you listen and understand a client’s needs? How do you show them respect? How do you make them feel important? R – Responsiveness: This is doing what you said you would do, when you said you would do it. It’s also about answering the phone. Are you on time? Do you value your client’s time? Do you respond promptly to texts or emails? Do you answer your phone when the client calls. E – Excellence: This is about providing excellence, as your client defines it, to your clients. Do you know how your client would define excellence in the products or services that your company provides to them? There is a lot more to be said about each of these. We’ll address them one by one with lots of examples. C - Communication Communication is the art of conveying and receiving information. This is what you do with clients. You interact with them through some mode of communication. It could be verbal, non-verbal (like a nod or a smile), electronic or nothing (that’s also called ignoring people). If you communicate well, you’ll enhance your client relationships and begin to build trust with that client. Every person on this planet has preferences for how they like to communicate with others and how they like others to communicate with them. Those preferences are, at a minimum, situational and temporal – they depend on the specific situation and the time within that situation. There are undoubtedly other factors involved, on top of these. This is what makes great communication with your client so difficult. In the marketing world, promotion and pricing are two significant means of communicating information with clients. We aren’t going to talk about these aspects of communication. We’re going to focus on interpersonal communication. Person to person – the hardest kind of communication to do well. It’s also one of the most significant ways you can convey your company’s brand to your client. Are you appreciative when a service provider communicates with you? Do you recall an instance where your doctor, dentist, nail salon person or some other service provider took the time to talk with you about details? Perhaps you appreciated a clerk in a department store telling you, “I’ll be with you in two minutes.” Maybe your electrician called you to make sure that the new fan that they installed is working well, giving you an opportunity to have them come back to your house because it wasn’t working well? Communication is a big part of service and a fantastic mechanism for creating great client experience. Communication is about two-way communication with your client. It could be verbal - phone conversations or face to face interactions. It could be written – text messages, emails, or letters. It can be nonverbal – a nod, a smile, or a wave (or sometimes it can devolve into a select part of the hand). It can be “third party” – the main service provider sends an intermediary to deliver a message or collect information necessary to the completion of the transaction. It can be a noise – a cough, a grunt, a laugh. Communication may start with client preferences. In many situations, you will have a client who will indicate (through some type of communication with you) their preferred method of communication. Another aspect of communication is simply – What are you communicating? Finally, the least appreciated element of communication is explanations and excuses. Let’s explore multiple aspects of “client communications.” We’ll stay away from “inappropriate communications” because you have likely had some corporate training on things that you shouldn’t say or do (commonly known as inappropriate behavior). If you haven’t suffered through these training videos, you, as a human being, know that there are things that are inappropriate and that shouldn’t be said or done when dealing with clients. Let’s leave it at that and focus on the positive ways of understanding client communications.