Putting the service back into Professional Services

PM Forum
February 2008

UffindellWest asks if the link between customer experience, employee empowerment and reputation needs to be further leveraged in the professional services industry

Professional services firms distinguish themselves on factors such as IP, expertise, sector proficiency, reputation, experience, knowledge transfer, competence, processes and approaches, industry insight and research and technology. All these things are the services that make the professional service industry – or are they? What is service really? The list above is a list of services, but that doesn’t mean service as such – the service that includes the actual relationship between employees and clients, the degree of trust between company and client, or the value of the human interaction that goes on as knowledge is transferred.

How many professional services firms leverage the service aspect of their offering? And given today’s competitive market and relative similarity between services provided, maybe it is time that this sector learned from more consumer-based industry and distinguished themselves on this basis. The movement of people between consultancies allows their expertise to be commoditised, but what about the relationships and customer experience they create for clients.

Customer experience is one of the most tangible expressions of a company’s culture because it reveals the personal relationship of an individual with the entity of the company. The challenge to the sector’s lawyers, accountants, trust advisers and other providers of corporate services is to build a more engaging customer experience – building emotional rapport to support ongoing investment in products and services. According to our research, a firm that offers a truly excellent customer experience is one that not only offers a consistently good service in general, but is also value for money, good at resolving problems or complaints, responsive to questions, and one that inspires a high degree of trust in their client. But this is just the beginning – our research highlights that while factors that make up a strong customer experience are important for keeping up with competitors, great companies stand out by going the extra mile in a variety of other factors such as shared ethics, valuing the clients business and treating the client like an individual.

In this way, a truly exceptional professional services firm would not only ensure a high degree of responsiveness to all the questions or issues a client might have, and a competitive fee estimate, but also offer a tailored service, by matching personalities between employee and client.

In this scenario it is imperative that employees are capable of fulfilling the human element needed, which means they always have to be engaged and on top of their game. This has repercussions for HR initiatives, not just in terms of hiring socially engaging recruits, but also in terms of creating an environment where they will be engaged to the extent that they are enthusiastic and committed to providing an excellent customer experience. As our study outlines below, job satisfaction plays a key role in creating employee engagement, and we have statistically linked this with aspects such as employee empowerment, engagement and brand reputation.

We believe that ttruly great service revolves around emotional, people-to-people bonds. However we also believe a truly exceptional customer experience can only come from the confluence of three factors:
• engaged employees who enjoy positive experiences
• quality customer-facing behaviour – more likely to come from these engaged employees
• adopting an attitude and tactics that say ‘we are not just great, we are exceptional’.

There are numerous methods to engage current and potential customers. The challenge is to identify which methods your audience will actually buy into, and which will deliver the fastest results. An exceptional experience is one a customer remembers. One that will lead them to recommend your company to friends and colleagues. One that will keep them loyal to you – even if the same service is offered more cheaply, or by a more established company. But despite immediate assumptions, it’s not always obvious which parts of the customer experience our own customers value the most. While sound expertise and good service standards might be enough to win their business, you need to go much further to stand out as different and special.

The research
An earlier study by UffindellWest revealed the extent to which building and maintaining trust is an essential component of a brand’s strength, often helping to justify a premium price or positioning. We know that a quality customer experience is fundamental to building this trust. Employee interaction, the services on offer, and wider branding issues are pivotal to creating the most powerful and influential companies.

The customer study examined the views and attitudes of 1000 business people from the UK and US, from a broad spectrum of age, gender, seniority and business fields. Each was asked a series of questions regarding their relationships with suppliers, and their opinions on their working environment. Which suppliers provided a strong customer experience? What was most important to them in making this decision? What aspects of their job do they find most important? Respondents were questioned about the quality of the customer experience delivered by their own firm and their own job satisfaction – and were asked to rate both.

What was most surprising was that customers weren’t particularly concerned with the material aspects of service - those often used to promote companies. They didn’t seem to mind if services were different from what they could get elsewhere, if there were offices nearby, or if they received a tailored service. What they did care about were the more emotional, people-oriented aspects of a company’s service – facts such as problem solving, quick and effective response to questions, and feeling they could trust the company. These proved more important than the cheapest price, a track record of innovation, a user-friendly website, or being easy to contact.

So what’s the difference between a performing company, and a truly amazing company? We distilled factors involved in shaping a strong customer experience into those that were highly valued, and widely used by suppliers, and those that were highly valued, but not generally used in the marketplace. We found that good companies cover the basics - factors such as being easy to reach, having communications and services that are easy to use and always keeping to schedule. However, as mentioned above, it’s the person-to-person factors such as valuing a customer’s business, treating customers like individuals and having the same ethical standards as customers that really make the difference between a provider of an acceptable customer experience and a provider of an exceptional customer experience.

The importance of people
So it seems pretty simple – if the combination of brand reputation and employee-customer relationships can foster a strong enough emotional bond with customers on these levels, the goal is achieved. However, when we consider the second aspect – the employee-customer relationship, we are exploring newer ground. Maintaining loyal, engaged employees who are willing to put in the extra effort to strengthen their relationships with their individual clients as not that easy.

As we can glean from personal experience, job satisfaction has a lot to do with how much engagement we have for, and how much effort we are willing to put into, a job. Our research took this further – finding a strong and clear correlation between job satisfaction and the quality of the client experience an employee provides. Subjects who had high levels of satisfaction at work strongly believed that they provided an exceptional customer experience.

This correlation is particularly strong for job satisfaction features/employee experience factors such as ‘freedom to do what you think is necessary’, ‘freedom to be yourself’, ‘interesting work’, ‘company with same ethics as I have’, ‘highly regarded business’ and ‘good colleagues to work with’.

Firms that base the employee experience around these characteristics, rather than poorly-rated factors like ‘health insurance’, ‘attractive physical working environment’, ‘opportunity to travel’ and ‘holiday allowance’ – which HR departments may traditionally use to entice new recruits – will create higher levels of job satisfaction. Not only does this boost the customer experience, but on a separate level, aspects such as ‘interesting work’ and ‘good colleagues to work with’ are good for the business through greater engagement with projects and with the team.

By boiling down the factors, we propose three categories of employee experience that amplify job satisfaction and customer experience:
1. Empowerment (I can make a difference)
2. Engagement (I am committed to the business)
3. Reputation (I am proud to work here).

By offering their employees an exceptional experience along these three axes, companies will be statistically more likely to offer a strong client experience than those who do not.

The brand challenge
Our survey highlights how brand reputation flows through company-employee, employee-customer and customer-company relations to create a driving force that impacts everyone, but in different ways. We suggest that by fixing internal aspects of its brand a company can influence customer experience (as well as turnover) and thus the external embodiment of its brand reputation – which is universally acknowledged to play a large role in determining selection of professional service firms. When the competition is high, and companies are competing on the same grounds it is necessary to up the stakes in every way possible. Professional services firms and the sector as a whole must surely focus on service aspects to do this.

This article originally appeared in Professional Marketing magazine. For further details to go www.pmforumglobal.com