A fresh look at a few old things isn’t always a bad idea… thought #1 ahead
In the few minutes I have to grab your attention today we’re going to look at just a few “New” ways to look at old things, or what I’d like to encourage you to consider as a “Fresh Perspective”. A lot of what I’m doing these days is just that, giving people a fresh perspective on what they see and do every day. Sometimes, as my grandmother used to put it, we “can’t see the forest for the trees” – we’re so caught up in the day-to-day that we really can’t or don’t take several steps back to really “see” what’s going on.
Some of the agency reviews we’re doing these days are very comprehensive where we’re looking at the entire organization, ”tearing it down and rebuilding it for the future”, as one agency principal put it. Other times we’re simply studying one key function to isolate inefficiencies and redundancies where the lifeblood of the productivity is bleeding the agency dry.
Client Service is one of those areas. For over 25 years I’ve studied and tested many of our industry’s latest and greatest trends in Client Service. Whether it was the early days of putting mirrors in front of our CSR’s so they’d see what they look like while they talked to clients OR the multiple thousands of dollars we’ve invested in web-based technology to compete with the Lizards of the cyberspace insurance world, the bottom line is the client is still the client and they’re the ones who make the decisions.
If we’re not focusing our client service on what the client’s unique and individual expectations are, we’re never going to guess what’s going to be successful, because as the old Chinese proverb states “Not All Clients were created Equal”. You might not find that in your favorite Chinese proverb book, but trust me – every client you have on your books is different, unique and their definition of “Value”, be it coverage, relationship, price, service and a hundred other things that make up your Client Service Relationship with them is different in every single case.
As I go about the country working with a whole host of different types of agencies, principles and their staff the one thing that is still very common everywhere I go is that the “Average Client” definition is within 5 years of age difference than the principal or producer I’m talking to. The median income is generally 20-30% the same and quite often the standards of living follow right along. What am I saying? We sell and work best with people like us – so, as it relates to client service, we think we know what they want, or at least we know what they “should” want and we design our client service around that myth. Notice I used the word “myth”.
Things like Facebook, Twitter and other social networking phenomenon are changing our culture dramatically as it relates to our client’s needs and expectations for client service and what the “value equation” looks like. It’s not what you think – trust me – it’s not what you think. If you’re not designing your client service around the unique and individual needs of your clients someone else will and they’ll be gone in a TWEET.
There is an awakening and a very aggressive movement in like industries to customize and formalize very specific client service teams and programs based on expectation queries of the client at the beginning of the relationship and constantly updated throughout the lifecycle of the relationship to make certain they are meeting and exceeding a more holistic scope of client service expectations as defined by the client. If you’re not taking a fresh look at the “whole” that makes up how you communicate and respond to the known expectations of your clients and prospects you’re about to be replaced by someone who is.
Stay tuned for thought #2 shortly.
