Differentiation and Deliberate Client Service

In my recent LinkedIn articles, I’ve been share some excerpts from my new book “The Startup Handbook – A Founder’s Guide to Building a Business”.

Last week I focused on the way that you define and justify the attributes you are looking for when hiring in order to build a successful team. This week, I’d like to extend the theme of doing things deliberately but this time with a focus on putting clients at the centre of your business, a critical step for any successful business to embrace and often a great differentiator.

Being Deliberate about How You Want to Treat Clients

When we first started RFI, we couldn’t believe the way that many of our competitors treated their clients. Perhaps more surprising was that this treatment wasn’t a secret, we learned about it from several sources, including:

·?????? Firsthand accounts of interactions as told by our clients

·?????? Observations of interactions between partners and our clients

·?????? Firsthand accounts of client interactions as told by our competitors and partners

Clearly, the way you treat clients comes with implications for future business and this is a very dangerous approach in a competitive market. So, we decided early on that we would use it to our advantage and make it one of our differentiators.

This is a well worn method used by any challenger. Take a pain point from the industry you are disrupting and make your solving of it a core part of your business proposition.

The Kano Model

There is a method of product or service analysis called the Kano Model that is helpful here. The model was developed by Dr. Noriaki Kano at the University of Tokyo in the 1980s, and it helps to determine which attributes of a product or service can have the biggest impacts on customer satisfaction.

There are three types of attributes that your product or service will need:

• Basic attributes. These are the things that your customers expect to have. You can’t get rid of them, but once you have them, no matter how well you deliver them, they won’t improve satisfaction. Think windscreen wipers on your car—you definitely need them, but they don’t improve your satisfaction of a car through their presence.
• Performance attributes. These are the items that are not absolutely necessary, but when you deliver them, they improve satisfaction in line with quality of delivery. Think about the check-in process in a hotel—the smoother and faster it is, the more satisfied you are with it.
• Excitement attributes. These are the “wow” elements. The things that customers didn’t even know they wanted but which delight them when they find them. Think about a free upgrade to business class when you’ve booked economy.

Essentially, by plotting your product/service attributes on a chart of Customer Satisfaction vs. Performance, you can understand which are your “wow” factors.

Our thinking was that client service could be both our performance attribute and our “wow” factor because we’d deliver valuable and often unexpected things, and we’d do it well.

It might sound like a very simple thing, but our competitors were not doing it, and so we set out to be known as the company that was great to work with. We took away as many barriers as we could to creating a great working relationship.

For example:

• Communicate effectively.

o?? Acknowledge client requests quickly when they come, even if you don’t have the response at that time.

o?? Manage client expectations regarding deadlines and delivery.

• Find a way to say yes.

o?? When a client asks for something, instead of thinking of the problems involved, think of the best way to get them that something. Respond with, “I’m glad you came to us, let me see what we can do.”

o?? Remove additional charges for small queries that might get you small, incremental revenue.

• Be proactive.

o?? Even when a client is not asking for something, if you see something interesting, let them know.

o?? Ask questions to better understand the client’s perspective.

This decision to put the client in the center of everything that we did at RFI helped us not only to be seen as a partner rather than a supplier by many of our clients, but it also became part of our culture. The people we successfully brought into the business lived and breathed the mantra of “client first” and enjoyed (and still enjoy) fantastic working relationships with those clients in turn.

If you like this and you’d like to hear more, then check out my new book “The Startup Handbook – A Founder’s Guide to Building a Business”. Available in e-book (US$6.99), paperback (US$18.99) and hardback (US$25.99)

?