Re-energise your firm…with a little client help
Rock the Zeitgeist with RTZ Upstream!
The right kind of engagement can be transformative, refreshing, and energising for your business. It can enable you to get things right. It will enable you to create and deliver a refreshing proposition that your clients actually want in areas including:
· Pricing
· Added value
· Business process
· Relationship management
· Service delivery
· New services
· Technology
It is possible to get all this and more from a well put together key client programme which includes active engagement with your clients to ask them what they want from their professional advisers – both now and in the future.
In it’s simplest form this is about asking your clients about their organisations and what they want from their advisers…and then using that information to develop and deliver relevant services and advice.
By using your own clients as a business transformation catalyst, you can be sure that you are doing it right. This is important for two reasons:
1. Continuous improvement is expensive – you don’t want to ‘improve’ your offering only to find that you have got it wrong;
2. Professional advisers – possibly more so than any other sector – are the masters of making incorrect assumptions about what clients want
Why risk getting this wrong when you don’t need to?
As a first step a useful exercise is to identify your key clients and to select a manageable number on which to focus. This may not be as simple as it sounds – our team can help you.
Once you have identified your key accounts and agreed objectives, then tell these clients that they have been identified as ‘key’ – they will like this and this is an important first step in getting the level of engagement necessary to make the process really work. Ask them if they would like to take part in a ‘key client listening programme’ – that this won’t take up too much of their time – but that it will ensure that your organisation delivers what they want.
During the process you will probably find out stuff that you weren’t expecting your client to divulge – information about your competitors; their key client programmes (or that they don’t have any), and their pricing, products, and services. Again, we can help you to rock the zeitgeist.
Finally – having done all this – be prepared to re-energise your firm as a result of what your clients have told you. If you aren’t prepared to implement change (or think you can’t) then don’t bother doing it – you will eventually lose these clients anyway.