How To Provide Great Service To Your Most Important Clients | Customer Service Excellence Training

Outstanding client service begins with the people you work with every day—your internal clients.

An internal client is an employee of your firm. For example, when a tax preparer compiles the return, he or she is the internal client of the partner who provides insight and guidance. And vice versa, as the partner reviews and signs the return, the partner is the internal client of anyone who may help in the pro-cessing of the return.

Delivering great service depends on keeping staff turnover low. As outlined in the book The Customer Comes Second (by Rosenbluth), reducing staff turnover and increasing staff satisfaction is the key to staff making clients happy.

Do Unto Others

Unfortunately, in both law and accounting firms, too often we witness a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” approach: the partner bends over backward for the external client, but takes internal clients for granted.

How external clients ultimately get treated is a direct reflection of how internal clients treat each other. As a business, you cannot give better service to your external clients than you do to your internal ones.

We are experiencing one of the most dynamic labor markets in history. Most law and accounting firms say their biggest need is not marketing, but finding qualified associates to do the work who have five to ten years of experience so they can hit the ground running.

Just this week, I worked with a large firm with the following characteristics: 10 partners, 50% travel, 70 staff members, average work year for all employees 2,600 hours. Employee compensation is average for the market, yet the firm had only lost three employees in the preceding two years. When asked about this excellent record, the employees said, “The partners treat each other with great trust and respect and they treat us the same way. Because we feel valued, this is a great place to work.”

Treat Internal Clients with Respect

How can you expect to provide great service if you treat each other with disrespect? We thank our clients, and we always should try to thank our employees for providing good internal client service. Both those thank you are equally important.

Conclusion

During a number of our training sessions, the professionals develop excellent client service ideas. These ideas apply equally to our internal clients: to make our clients feel respected and recognized in a variety of meaningful ways, to be more responsive by returning client phone calls within four business hours, and to keep clients better informed as to the progress of our work. You need analogous internal service standards.