2/24/0: The golden rule for keeping your B2B customers happy.

I've been working in professional services one way or another for the past 16 years. If you are a lawyer, an IT consultant, a financial advisor, a management consultant, working in media, advertising or any other service you know that building and maintaining strong and long-lasting relationships with your customers is probably the most important thing in your business. This article is about a golden rule that has helped me build healthy relationships with my customers throughout my career.

Let me start with one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to customer happiness in professional services. Most people think that the main driver for customer happiness is the quality of service. While this is partly true, you won’t go far with a shitty quality of product/service, responsiveness is always more important than quality.

How do I know it? Well, this is an empirical fact that is based on dozens of customer satisfaction surveys that we've run in our own businesses (a management consultancy, an ad agency and a media agency) and countless others that we've run for some of our customers at REBORRN that are in the services industry.

When a customer is asked to prioritise what is the most important factor with their relationship with a given supplier, surprinsingly the answer is always responsiveness, beating price competitiveness and quality of service.

So, it gets down to effective communication and responsiveness. But this is more tricky than it seems, especially when you have Gen-Z or Millenials on the supplier side and other cohorts on the customer side. I am a millennial myself, believe me, I know. ??

Let me give you a good example of how different expectations when it comes to communication can destroy customer happiness.

Meet Mark. Mark is a high potential Data Scientist working in an analytics consultancy. Mark is working on a major project for Bank X and his customer is Laura a Product owner working at the Bank’s analytics department.

Mark loves his job and he’s great at it. Mark hates jumping on calls, and writing emails is not his favourite part of the job. I can identify myself with Mark.

Laura sends an email to Mark for a small change request that needs to be done in their running project. Mark receives the email, it’s part of the scope and an easy two days of work. Mark changes his priorities for the following day to get his hands on the request first thing the next day. 72 hrs later Mark responds back to Laura that the change is done!

Here’s why this is bad client service:

For 72hrs Laura was in the dark.

Did Mark receive the email in the first place? Did he understand the need? If yes, how soon will I have it done to let the other team know? What if Laura was pressured by her boss just to get an answer on when this change will happen, rather than make the actual work happen? In that case, Laura wouldn’t be able to provide this answer to her boss for almost 3 days.

Mark might not get the full picture.

Mark went straight into doing what Laura asked, without aligning with her on her expectations (definition of done).

Mark could have been late.

Again without aligning with Laura’s expectations, Mark proceeded in completing the task that he was assigned, deciding that he’ll spend two days working on it. What if Laura needed this done in 24hrs. While Mark is not superhuman, they could figure out a way to deliver part of the job in the next 24hrs, or agree on an entirely different solution with Laura.

If you ask Mark, he would be sure that he didn’t do anything wrong. He saw a request and went straight into getting the job done to keep his customer happy, yet this could be bad customer service.

Solution: 2/24/0

While the above is a hypothetical example, I've seen countless similar cases in my career and the frustration for both sides, just by the lack of a:

Thank you, I got your email i’ll have this done by Wednesday. Is that OK? -Mark

So to solve this, a few years back we created the 2/24/0 rule, which is both a process internally and a promise for new and existing clients.

It’s a very simple and easy to apply rule but ensures the clarity of understanding between both parties.

Decoding 2/24/0: What 2 means.

You commit that whenever a customer sends you a request they’ll get an acknowledgement within 2 business hours.

• Hey, Thank you. I got your email and will get back to you asap. -Mark

With this acknowledgement, you ensure peace of mind.

Decoding 2/24/0: What 24 means.

It means that within 24 hrs your customer will know what to expect. Whatever the request is here are the three different answers you might give.

Small size request (get them done within 24hrs):

• Hey, it’s done! Is there anything i can help you with? -Mark

Medium size requests (get them to know when you’ll get it done):

• Hey, i went through it and it seems that we can have it done by Monday end of business. Does that work for you?

Large size requests (let them know what the next step should be):

• Hey, i went through it and it seems that we’ll need to involve Marsha and John to discuss your project. Let’s set up a meeting this week!

Setting expectations within 24hrs, you ensure clarity. Your customer knows what’s the immediate next step.

Decoding 2/24/0: What 0 means.

It means that you deliver what you promised in the previous step with zero delays. It would be even better if you deliver earlier than promised.

• Hey, as promised, here the deliverable we promised by Monday EoD. Let me know if you need anything else.

Do we always deliver on our 2/24/0 promise? No, but it’s our North Star, our standard of excellence. It is also a straight forward framework that is helping us maintain a consistent way of treating our customers while growing our teams and our customer base.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the above approach as well as your tips/rules on building healthy relationships with your customers.

PS. We have several other ways to build and maintain strong customer relationships and you can find them all in this ?? older article on how we are challenging the traditional client-consultant relationship.