The Eyelet.

In my last two posts, I wrote in some detail about the mechanisms of client satisfaction and offered suggestions of what to do when service delivery breaks. So, client retention is quite simple, the firm must deliver the service it was hired to perform and provide flawless client service in the process. When service breaks (this is not an if – it’s a when) the firm must recover through clearly acknowledging mistakes and communicating how it’s going to fix them. Easy enough, right? Well, not quite.

Clients Hate You
About a month ago, we had the Chief Marketing Officer of one of the world’s most respected companies in our office for a strategic workshop we were facilitating. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I hate agencies.” This is an individual who’s worked with hundreds of globally respected agencies and their top executives. Marketing at his company is well respected and well funded. His corporation has the cache and the resources to command the attention of any agency worth its salt. Yet, none of his agencies are vested in his business? What? Why?

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My most recent post was on the drivers of client satisfaction. To ensure client satisfaction, a professional services firm must tend to both sides of the service experience: the delivery of the technical service (“what it was hired to do”) AND client service (“how it accomplishes the service”). It is my opinion that the “HOW” component of the service drives 80% of a client’s satisfaction, or lack thereof, with a professional service firm.

Client Service Failure is the Biggest Driver of Dissatisfaction
The reality is that most clients perceptions of a firm are developed at the moment in time when something goes wrong. At Mlicki, we call these “moments of truth.” Any IT consulting firm engaged in any level of systems or network support can probably relate to this concept. As long as an application is performing the way it was intended, the client is reasonably satisfied. The moment an application becomes unexpectedly unavailable, clients are dissatisfied. Even good clients can forget thousands of hours of uninterrupted performance if the firm’s response to the disruption isn’t professional, timely and well communicated.

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During the first part of this year, I’ve written rather extensively about the merits of building a firm that is deeply positioned around expertise. In short, be it an engineering firm, an IT firm or financial services firm, we believe the best clients are those that hire the professional firm for its “proven expert guidance” rather than its “warm bedside manner.” That said, I don’t want firm leadership to misunderstand our opinion in this regard. The best clients hire experts. They stay or leave the firm based on the service experience.

The 2 Sides of the Service Experience
There  are really two components to the service experience that any competent firm must manage:

1. WHAT = Technical Service Delivery: This is the functional part of the service delivery. It’s the technical expertise that the client lacks that your firm provides. If you’re an engineering firm designing an industrial facility, it could be the process of understanding the business purpose for the facility, analyzing the site, making technology recommendations, and developing the physical drawings and documentation necessary to actually begin the build process. It’s WHAT the client hired you to do.

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Over the course of a month, I’ve interacted with a lot of people tasked with the job of marketing professional firms across a variety of industries. Some of these folks have a marketing background, others are professionals turned marketers. Some have high level responsibilities such as client attraction, others are tasked with more tactical issues such as tradeshow coordination or development of promotional materials. Regardless, most struggle with a similar conflict within the culture of their firm: quite often, the professionals they serve don’t understand nor value the marketing discipline within their firm. For the most part, I chalk this up to misunderstanding. As a result, I’ve discerned Three Myths of Professional Services Marketing:

1. Marketing = Sales Support
Often, when I ask firm leaders how many people are in their marketing function, they tell me how many people they have to assist the proposal writing process. While developing project case studies, producing sales collateral and coordinating tradeshow activities are all necessary activities within a firm, if your entire marketing function consists of producing materials to support the business development process, you might as well be running down the middle of a busy street with your eyes closed.

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As followers of this blog probably know, Mlicki advocates strongly for “expertise-based” positioning within a professional services firm. We believe that efforts to position a firm solely on brand…meaning positioning it only on the efficacy of client service (brand perception) and the way it communicates (brand personality) fall short because they fail to create clear, meaningful differentiation in the mind of a prospect.

What is Expertise-Based Positioning?
If your only source of positioning sounds something like this, “we do what the larger firms do, only we do it [better/faster/cheaper/etc.]” you’re probably not doing it. That’s not to say that this approach to positioning a professional services brand is 100% not viable. But, it is to say that the firm must provide a credible claim of expertise beneath these high level brand statements that identifies a narrow, well defined client sector in which it operates and offers specific reasons why the firm is better than other viable options for the client’s business.

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