Verbatim: What Clients Say
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How Your Firm Can Get a Big Payoff in the Current Economy
This is no economic time to assume that a satisfied client won't leave your firm. "Even customers who say they're satisfied frequently don't act that way," wrote Jim Billington in "Five Keys to Keeping Your Best Customers," an article published by the Harvard Business School Press.
"What you have to achieve today, apparently, is utter and complete satisfaction," Billington said. “But this pays off big."
"What most do not realize, however, is just how important the level of customer satisfaction is in markets where competition is intense," Billington said. "One of the most important elements of customer satisfaction is providing extraordinary services that so excel in meeting customers' personal preferences, in appealing to their values, or in solving their particular problems, that they make the product or service seem customized."
Billington added that Harvard Business School professors Thomas Jones and Earl Sasser, in their Harvard Business Review article "Why Satisfied Customers Defect," told of a company that regained 30 percent of its lost customers by contacting them and listening attentively.
"At the heart of any successful strategy to manage satisfaction is the ability to listen to the customer," Jones and Sasser concluded. Your clients must please their customers. Many of them listen to their customers, in order to keep their business, so they expect the same from your firm. For example, listen to what the following clients said in Strategic Client Interviews.
The CEO of the dental labs mentioned above said, "We do this ourselves with the many dentists we do business with."
One law firm chose to interview a client that is a leading provider of service programs. This company works with over 250 corporate clients to improve customer acquisition and retention, enhance service, and create new profit centers. The general counsel commented on the value of the law firm's initiative to listen him: "It's a great thing to do. We want feedback from our clients on how well we're doing and on how to improve."
While many firms are still operating in cutback mode, Strategic Client Interviews are a cost-effective way to help your firm listen to its clients and realize a big, invaluable payoff.
Verbatim is published electronically by JKS & Company LLC/Strategic Client Interviews. For more information on Strategic Client Interviews, contact Joyce K. Smiley at 561-775-9755, or jsmiley@jkscompany.com. On the web at jkscompany.com. Copyright 2011 JKS & Company LLC. All rights reserved.
email: jsmiley@jkscompany.com
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