Seventh Article in the Series:
Efficiency and Productivity
Last week’s message focused on Serving It Up, that is, developing a process for ensuring your Ideal Client has a rich, personalized, meaningful experience with your firm. As every firm has a unique client base and service offering, the message laid out only general steps for a service plan. It is up to you to personalize that plan to meet your Ideal Clients needs and expectations.
Do you know how you measure up to your clients’ needs and expectations? Are your clients satisfied and engaged? Or dissatisfied, yet too loyal or lazy to seek advice elsewhere? Have you noticed a departure of clients who gave vague or “it is not you” reasons for their leaving?
You know that you cannot please or serve everyone and that is why the Ideal Client concept is so very important. Once defined, your Ideal Client allows you to build and develop a client experience that will please and satisfy exactly the clients you want to serve and allow you to attract more of them. Through your work with the Ideal Client profile, you know what worries, scares and pains your client and you have solutions to address these concerns. You have a fairly good client experience that embraces this Ideal Client.
It is fairly good at this point because it only considers one perspective – yours. You need input from your Ideal Client, as well. Some of this information comes as you develop your practice around this Ideal Client. Individual clients will provide feedback and you will adjust and make changes. Yet if you truly want to know how well your firm is delivering on the client experience, you need to ask more formally. Yes, that means you need to solicit feedback and not just by asking “are we doing okay?” at the close of an annual meeting.
Surveying your clients is one of the most effective ways to gather in-depth feedback that will allow you to enhance the client experience and strengthen and deepen client relationships. Don’t we all inwardly cringe when we consider this? Isn’t it easier to pretend we are doing alright since retention is okay and we don’t have many complaints? Very few of us are overjoyed at the idea of asking for feedback, yet it is a powerful way to understand exactly what our clients need and want from us. Isn’t that why we built the firm in the first place?