Don't Treat All Your Clients the Same

In creating a great organization, we'd all like to assure that every person in the company or firm provides consistently excellent service.

But, in reality, do you find that, within your firm, different professionals render different levels or quality of service? This is pretty common, I think.

We find that people within a firm are pretty consistent overall but out of every 10 or so, there seems to be at least one person that seems more exceptional and one that seems sub-par.

Your firm or company should have base-line service standards that are applied to all customers across the board. All customers should be able to rely on treatment that is prompt, fair, respectful, and pleasant--even if the 'news' or 'deliverable' is unpleasant. This is reputation insurance if nothing else.

The base-line standards should hold true no matter who is communicating with the client or who is responsible for them--whether the "lead" partner or manager, an assisting partner, a first year associate, a file clerk or the janitor.

If you have people who are sub-par at service, without a doubt, this needs to be fixed. Your reputation is vulnerable.

But it might surprise you that now I'm going to state that not all customers should be treated equally.

Above your base-line standards (about which many firms don't even have documentation or training, much less accountability...) it's just not physically possible to treat all customers the same (silly little barriers like 'not enough time in the day' seem to prohibit this).

It's actually okay to give super-deluxe service to your very best customers, to give some extras to good customers, and to give your base-line (which I'd hope is still at least slightly above average) to all the rest.

Think of it like an airplane--but it's not just about how much someone is paying you (revenue) for the one ticket, it's how important their overall continued patronage is to you. Loyalty works both ways. Think about hierarchy in standby, upgrades, legroom (United has 'Economy Plus'), club access, and more. This doesn't mean an airline should be rude to coach passengers, but that each step up gets a little better.

Make sure your base-line standards are better than average. And make sure you know exactly who your "good" and "very best" are above that. (See my recent post Who ARE Your Best Clients? for exactly how to evaluate customers.) 

Make sure everyone in your firm knows who's who, too, so that the right level of service can be delivered consistently from person to person. When anyone pulls up a customer in your database, shouldn't they immediately know if they are "gold" "platinum" or "executive platinum" so they can act accordingly?

Comments

[Ed Kless]

Great post!

In addition, you can't give A-level service to a D-level customer. They (the Ds) in incapable of accepting it. In fact, I believe you are doing a disservice (and it may even be immoral) to your A-level customers by keeping the Ds around.

[Phil Gott]

Another interesting post Michelle. One point that needs to be emphasised though is that clients should be involved in choosing the level of service they want to receive (and are willing to pay for). Following your airplane analogy, the customer gets to choose whether to fly first, club or economy class.

This means that professionals need to have an open and sophisticated conversation with clients to assess their requirements and manage their expectations. This also provides an excellent opportunity to discuss value-based billing which I know you support.

Whilst firms are increasingly categorising their clients as you suggest, I’m not convinced that they are all holding open discussions with their clients as part of the process. This risks failing to meet the expectations (of the “bronze clients”) who might be receiving a service that is average at best. In turn, this could well damage the firm’s reputation.

Keep up the good work with the blog!

[Michelle Golden]

Phil,
Thank you for your comment. You are exactly right. It is not okay for a firm to decide how someone "chooses to fly"! This is such an important point!

At VeraSage, we do a LOT with this airplane analogy--the analogy is very powerful and multi-faceted. A common misconception professionals have when they first see it, though, is that THEY get to choose where clients sit. In my opinion, this is altogether WRONG. As you articulate so eloquently, the CLIENT should decide where he or she sits.

However, it is YOUR plane so you can decide how many seats in each "section" you can offer and support (hint: fewer seats in first class because the level of care and contact is much higher).

Here's the catch. In order to have the kinds of conversations with clients that you describe, and the type of conversations that lead to decisions about where a client may sit, the firm HAS to get to pricing, right? Whether it's a fixed price at varying levels of "service" or whether it is *ahem* a higher hourly rate (readers of my blog certainly know how I feel about hourly billing) for premium levels of service, the bottom line is that a customer is an uniformed buyer until this part of the conversation is had.

I completely ignored the pricing aspect of this discussion (not by intent) within my post but the assumptions about price impact and the requisite conversations needed to reach this level of understanding are paramount.

In fact, I can see that it may look even more like I don't regard the client's choice of "where to sit" when I suggest that THE FIRM conduct a client evaluation! Yikes. But those who read my article on evaluating clients will find that I do have several value pricing elements within the considerations.

I appreciate your post and your taking issue with my approach. You made a valid and important point.