The Client Experience & Why We Get It Wrong

In essence, client experience is the sum of all experiences between a client and a service provider over the duration of their relationship but most professional service firms don’t treat it that way.

What we tend to do instead is emphasize touchpoints – all those critical moments when our clients interact with us and our services either before, during or after purchase. The problem is our narrow focus on maximizing satisfaction at those moments often creates a distorted picture. It allows us to think that our clients are happier than they actually are. It also diverts attention from the bigger picture: the clients end-to-end journey.

In my experience, most clients aren’t unhappy with any one interaction. In fact, they don’t much care about those singular touchpoints. Reduced satisfaction comes about because of cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints and in multiple channels over time. At the heart of the challenge is the siloed nature of service delivery and the insular cultures that flourish inside the service lines that design and deliver our services. Clients often work across multiple service lines and service providers but our people aren’t generally organised that way. They work alone and their performance is measured as if it is completely independent of anyone else’s. These groups shape how our organisation interacts with our clients but even as they work hard to optimize their contributions to the client experience, they often lose sight of what clients want.

We need to move away from our focus on touchpoints and identify the journeys in which we need to excel, understand how we are currently performing in each, build cross-functional processes to redesign and support those journeys, and institute cultural change and continuous improvement to sustain those initiatives. 

Defining the journeys and understanding what our clients want is critical. For the most part we don’t. While, as professional service firms, we all talk about putting the client experience at the centre of what we do it is mostly just that – talk. 

Consider our processes and systems for example. Are they built to maximize the client experience or are they there to suit ourselves? Do we discover what is important to our clients, and design and build services to match - or do we create services that are profitable and then try to convince our clients of their importance? Do we find out what really matters to our clients and how we are performing, or do we just ask clients to rank us compared to our competitors so we can claim we are better than them?

If client experience truly matters to us, then we should place it at the centre of how we design and build our services not just at the centre of how we rate our delivery.

We should be focused on client journeys rather than just touchpoints and actually measure end-to-end success. Once we have identified those priority journeys and gained an understanding of the problems within them we should be getting cross-functional teams together to see those problems for themselves and design solutions as a group so the fixes have a better chance of sticking.

Too much of what we do in professional services is trying to convince our clients that our solution is the best way to tackle any problem and that is where client experience starts to go wrong. We think we know our clients’ needs and we concentrate on developing our existing tools rather than questioning what clients really need and developing the right tool for the job.