The daunting role called client service

Client service is a lever into the client's world, making them an important asset to an agency. With the strategic importance of their relationship comes responsibility many client service are ill-equipped to deal with.

Management expects client service to divide their time between managing the client, third parties and internal resources. They are expected to influence these three groups in different ways, depending on the objective and desired outcomes.


They are managing tight budgets, high expectations and sometimes uncooperative parties. In this difficult environment they are still expected to grow the business, build agency influence and scale their own team.

It's no wonder we commonly hear the industry refer to client service as 'glorified secretaries'. To the quite observer, they can appear inept when faced with the daunting challenge of dealing with this complicated landscape.

The question is then, how to train client service to be able to better respond to the pressures, and reduce instances of attrition. Here are some suggestions.

1. Identify the paradigm
   
2. Teach manoeuvre
   
3. Set up a training ground

Identify the paradigm.
Agency management need to highlight the landscape in which their client service operate, and make the behaviour of the different stakeholders a study. It is not until client service understand the gravity of the forces on them, can they begin to learn how to deal with them.

Teach skills
'Service' in client service encapsulates a broad range of tasks. These tasks are skills which can be taught. To varying degrees, client service excel in all or few of these skills. However, to provide a 360 degree solution, they are required to be supreme in all three.

The client services person who is apt in the art of negotiation, may not be good at coping with the rigorous discipline required to project management.

To be able to negotiate, project manage and expand relationships is a prerequisite to becoming a successful client service.

Teach manoevre
Strategic orientation of oneself in this landscape is important. No matter how developed a client service skill levels may be, they have to take positions and understand how the game is being played.

Manoevre is the study of where best to situate one self to apply maximum effect. By being in the right position, they can exert pressure without writing an email or making a call. They are able to see passed the day-to-day, and understand underlying trends in relationships.

Being able to manoevre gives client service options when they are faced with challenges. Instead of one plan, they have multiple ways of reacting to each group to achieve their end goal.

The chellenge for agencies is how to teach manoevre. Unlike skills which become honed through repetition, manoevre is a way of seeing and thinking about a problem.

Establish a training ground
Nothing can replace practice. The best group to practice skills and manoevre is with suppliers. Clients and production staff are less forgiving, and may not provide feedback. However a long time supplier can make a better test subject, being more accommodating and provide truthful feedback.

Tackling motivation.

Tackling unmotivated client service raises a few questions. Can we motivated them, and if we can't, you got to ask why we hired them in the first place.

Hiring an unmotivated individual, regardless of their capability, is a mistake. The unmotivated, instead of solving their issues, can turn their energy to distract the motivated.

Being career-oriented, or motivated, is often confused as a responsibility the agency must bare. It isn't. Having career goals is a matter of personal choice every employee makes.

So agency management can be forgiven for failing to motivate the unmotivated. And instead, can place their energies in getting the right people on the bus, and maintaining the motivation of the right people.

One simple way to keep high performing client service motivated, is to give them opportunities to work on, not problems. Motivated client service measure their success by personal growth. Facing a difficult problem that they cannot surmount, their growth is stunted, and they despair.

Agencies will always have problems, but opportunities are rare. To close opportunities, and keep motivation high, point your best and greatest towards opportunities.

Effects of inertia

When client services under perform when they have to stop and start projects, or are frequently required by management to change direction. Each time this occurs, client services must first slow down, and then power back up. This effort, or energy requirement is called inertia.

Put in physics terms, inertia is the force required to overcome friction and move a project from rest to a certain velocity. The quantity of force required to 'kick-start' the project is substantially more than what is required to keep it running once it is moving.

Overcoming inertia involves setting up meetings, reconnecting with facts, checking with all parties for status reports. For the client service, this can rack up unbilled hours. This unseen cost to services business is transparent in other industries like building and construction. For example, a foreman who books a concrete mixer to arrive on-site, but finds he has nowhere to lay the concrete faces a financial penalty from the truck driver, even though no concrete was poured.


What's more, client service management fail to recognise the debilitating effects of inertia. Inertia consumes precious time and energy of client service, and produces no value for the company or client. Inertia therefore could be blamed for low motivation and staff attrition.

Clients are also taxed by inertia through lost sales revenue. Even though the scope of work has not changed, it has taken longer than forecasted to launch the new product or service.

It stands to reason both the agency and client have a vested interest in keeping a project moving without rest. For client service are most productive when maintaining a constant speed, and least productive when overcoming inertia.

Scaling client service

Getting the right client service on the bus is hard enough for multinationals to accomplish. For small agencies, it is even harder. Talent is seduced to join the larger companies because they have greater scale, a globally-recognise brand and more internal support structures.

So small agency's find themselves locked out of the talent war, attracting fewer CVs than an MNC. The obvious alternative is to hire staff who lack skills but have potential. Staff who have potential are believed to have the right attitude, but lack experience or proficiency. Therefore, they have a competency gap.

To close a trainee's competency gap, at least three elements are required:

1. Motivation
   
2. Aptitude
   
3. Support functions and incentives

The larger the competency gap, the greater the likelihood the trainee will not succeed. What's more, a competency gap of say two points, compared to four more than double. In fact it could be as much as six times greater. This is because the combination of the three criteria create a multiplier effect - the exact result is hard to predict.

For most small agencies, the pressure to provide value is unrelenting. So delivering on a promise to provide support and incentives to trainees is not easy. Providing training can distract key staff from creating value, cause customer dissatisfied and even financial loss.

So it is no wonder we see management tossing their hands in the air, and cursing the quest to scale.

there is another alternative. For the firm to focus on creating client value, hiring experienced people is a better strategy. A more experienced trainee can bring networks of clients, suppliers and new perspectives to improve the firm.

In addition, the risks associated with a competency gap are minimised, as the person is assumed to be proficient.Emphasis shifts from training, to one of maximising the performance of people.

To hire such talent, management will have to offer more salary, and expect to wait longer to find the right person. Using unconventional means to identify talent may be required, like prowling trade shows.

Why small is beautiful

Contracts alone cannot protect Agencies and Clients in every instance. There is simply not enough time to write a contract for every engagement. Nor are contracts always feasible. For example, you can't write a contract to make a Client give a referral, if you complete project successfully.

In Robert Leonhard's book The Art of Maneuver, Robert criticises the US Military heavy reliance on IPB (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield). Simply, IPB is a heap of satellite data and surveillance feed which allow military leaders to plot successful attacks.

Although IPB providing intelligence in real time, Robert suggests it slows down decision-making - the necessary ingredient to taking advantage of opportunity. Similarly, large organisations can be subject to an over reliance on information - obsessing over making every decision an 'informed decision'.

However, if the resulting plan cannot be executed faster than the competition, it is not as effective. What's more, the 'mass' - the strength of large organisations - has been proven by history to be rarely used effectively. Only a small portion of the total mass is ever effective during conflict, due to geography and time restrictions.

So large companies can quick loose both speed and mass.

It has never been a better time to be small.

Speed as a survival mechanism

The key to Genghis Khan's success was not the size of his army, but the momentum at which it could move. In all accounts of the battles he fought, Khan was reportedly outnumbered by his opponents.

Khan contributed to today's military thinking of maneuver, with his concept of force. Force is the power or influence a company can exude. Force is equal to mass times acceleration (f=ma).


What Khan lacked in mass, he made up for in speed.

Therefore, when a firm is relatively smaller than its competitors, speed is vital for survival. Without speed, small companies lose, because organisations with greater mass are able to exert more force.

To maintain speed, management need to think and execute carefully:

1. Hire self-starting people. These are people who have the motivation to make decisions and execute work with little supervision. They enjoy an automous working environment, free of red tape and micro-management.
2. Take only small projects. Set a finite length of time, like one month. For projects which are longer, break them into parts. In a small firm, large projects slow down people, make them tired and reduce their motivation.
3. Spend time planning the week. Encourage all people to plan their day using calendars. Become masters of our time, we move with greater speed, because we are effective. We see problems much earlier, and we plan how to circumvent them.
4. Discipline to follow core procedure. Discipline to follow a well designed class of company processes, procedures, documentation, we become efficient. By being efficient, we make fewer mistakes and save time, which can be reinvested to provide customers greater value.
5. Focus every effort. This is probably the most important, and is present in points 1-4. The objective is to do less. Write fewer emails, give few instructions, ask fewer things of suppliers and deliver fewer items to customers. Focus prevents us loosing site of objectives, and prevents all parties, including the client, from tiring and becoming unmotivated.