Your Clients Want You to Read This

You probably already know that the quality of service you deliver to your clients matters. In the age where people can freely (and anonymously) share their opinions about any business, enough poor reviews can drive potential clients away. Clients can easily find information on nearly any business, including white-collar professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, and accountants. You can’t control what people think, but your company can stack the odds in its favor when leaders take a deliberate approach to client service. One oft-quoted approach is to “under-promise and over-deliver.” But wouldn’t it be better to accurately promise and accurately deliver? What I mean by this is that we should not be guessing about what the client wants or what we can deliver.

When clients’ expectations are clear, then we can assess whether we can meet those expectations before we promise anything. End result: accurate promises, accurate delivery, and satisfied clients.

First Step to Providing Excellent Client Service: Get Curious

Our clients come to us because they want help with something. If you are a lawyer, you may assume it’s a lawsuit or to negotiate a deal. If you are an accountant, maybe it’s a tax problem. On the surface, that appears likely. But to stand out as a service-provider, you need to get curious and really understand the journey that brought them to your door. You do not necessarily need to get the life history of every client that walks in the door. But it is worth investing time to see your business through the eyes of your clients — not as you want to be seen, but as you are seen.

There are two tools that I use with my clients to better understand their clients:

Client Personas

It is rare to find a professional who is a generalist in their field. This means that for most professionals, there are typical problems they are being asked to solve. We can use this typical problem as a starting block for building a client persona. I say starting block because I haven’t yet met a client who thinks they or their problem is typical. One persona, therefore, is not enough. To get a full picture of how your company is seen by clients, you want to capture information from several perspectives. Let me illustrate. Here are three personas of clients who are all asking for essentially the same service but have little else in common:

Why do any of these differences matter? Because clients are not just the problem they come to you with. They are whole people, with a human need to be seen, heard and understood. And knowing more about them allows you to provide better service. For example, you might learn not to call Maggie in the evenings, because she’s a single mom and is usually feeding the kids and taking care of all the other end-of-day tasks. On the other hand, you know Brian is a morning person. It is probably fine to call him at 8:00 a.m., but that will not work for Chris, who often works the swing shift and sleeps in.

What these personas do is build empathy for our clients and that causes us to think about how we interact with our clients. In my example, perhaps it means putting a question on an intake form about the days and times it’s best to call. This means that you are more likely to reach your client, and they are less likely to be frustrated at being disturbed at a bad time. Everyone gets what they need.

Client Journey Map

This exercise is a measuring stick for how your company is coming across to your clients — past, present, and future. It can reveal gaps between how you want your company to be seen and the current reality. It can also reveal gaps of opportunity — the places and moments your client interacts — or could interact — with your business. An example of a company that has done this very well is Apple. They have designed and curated an entire customer experience from the eye-catching ads on billboards to the appealing and iconic layout of their stores and the unboxing of their products from those clean and crisp white boxes. Not to mention the design of their products themselves which make using them so enjoyable.

Whether you make a product or provide a service, you can put the same care into how your clients interact. You may want to start with a high-level map that answers questions like:

How and where do potential clients learn about the services you offer?

Who fields the initial contacts from potential clients?

What happens immediately after a client signs a contract?

What happens once a client’s work is complete?

When creating a journey map, you also want to get a sense of how the clients are feeling at each of these points. Are they pleased? Anxious? Frustrated? You don’t have to guess — you can get feedback from actual clients, yourself and the people who are involved at each step. What do they hear clients’ saying about their experience? If you’re still not sure, ask how do you hope your clients feel? There are no right or wrong answers and ideally, you are gathering information from the sources with the most knowledge. Based on the experiences of the past, you likely have a good sense of where clients are at different stages.

You may have noticed that this section is longer than the following ones. That is because understanding your business from the client’s point of view is foundational to improving client service by adopting client-focused solutions. Personas and journey mapping are two ways I help my clients do this. But this information is only worthwhile if you do something with it and I’ll talk about that next.

What is your problem?

Once you have an initial understanding of your clients’ experience, the next step is to identify opportunities to design a better experience, which could mean addressing common client complaints, or being intentional about experiences instead of leaving them to chance. It isn’t usually feasible to address every concern identified in the first phase; choose an issue to work on first based on frequency, importance and urgency. Before you jump into solving that issue, however, it is worth digging deeper to really understand what is behind the issue. Skipping this step makes it more likely that you will solve the wrong problem and not see the change you want to see.

For example, let’s say one issue that came up often was client frustration that calls or emails were not promptly return. You could roll out a policy that requires people to respond within a certain time period, which might help some, but it’s worth checking whether there are some other reasons responses are delayed. Maybe you’ll learn that one reason your people are not returning messages quickly is because the most common reason clients call is that they are asking for an update on their matter, and employees simply do not have anything new to share. It may be that the problem is not communication — it is clients not understanding the process and timeline for their work. This better understanding is reflected in the problem statement:

The second question widens the scope of possible solutions, because it not just about returning calls and emails, it is addressing the underlying concerns that clients have. Addressing that concern directly is better for your people and your clients.

Solving the Problem

Now that you have defined the problem, you can explore different ways to solve it. This is the time to get creative — sometimes the best ideas start out as a wild dream. It is also the time to build a team of problem-solvers. This team should include key stakeholders, people from all ages and stages within the organization and/or client base. Dedicate some time for exploring ideas both in groups and individually. To make this exploration most productive, you’ll want to:

· Create a judgment free zone

· Encourage quantity over quality

· Build on others’ ideas

· Go quickly to bypass logical and self-censoring blocks

The goal is to generate a lot of ideas to start with, but it can be challenging to choose from so many options. Before choosing, it helps to organize ideas around common characteristics and then select a few that stand out — and this may include combining pieces of several ideas. Ideally, you will have 3–5 good choices to try. Next, you’ll consider which of these is feasible, viable and desirable based on your circumstances and the problem you are trying to solve.

This is not a “one and done” process. Designing effective solutions often requires going back through each part to gather better information and generate more possibilities.

One More Thing Before You Go All-in on That Solution

Now you have an idea or two that people are excited about. But before you spend a lot of time, energy and budget on rolling it out, you want to make sure it is as good of an idea as you think it is. How well does it solve the problem? We can answer that question relatively quickly and easily by testing the solution with the right people — usually the same people who gave us the information that started this process.

How you test out your idea depends on what the idea is, who is involved in the solution, what information you still need, and where you are in the process (is this your first test-run or fifth?) Some ways to test drive an idea are:

· A/B testing

· Pilot program or other short-term tryout

· Create a story deck or story board to share

Whether you choose one of these, or some other option, it is important to solicit feedback. Feedback will let you know if your proposed solution meets the needs of your clients and stakeholders. With that feedback, you can refine your ideas and repeat until you are confident that you’ve solved the problem. Yes, this takes time. But it is also one of the best ways to make sure you are delivering better service which will pay off with more loyal and satisfied clients.

Why It’s All Worth It

Like most other people, clients want to be seen, heard and understood. When you step into their shoes, you gain empathy for your clients and are better positioned to see, hear, and understand their needs. Yes, this takes time. Yes, change can be hard. But attracting and retaining clients also takes time and can also be hard. It becomes easier when you are serving your clients more effectively, which is what this approach is all about.

For more about human centered design in the workplace, please visit my website. I also speak about using human-centered design to foster inclusion and engage employees. Find out more here.