Translating service levels to business growth

Done that? Let’s look through them – most individuals I would suggest will be focusing on targets and ambitions for that firm? So, for example, in 12 months’ time you would like your income levels to be £X, or you would like the number of new clients to be X, or you would like to have completed X mortgage applications. Perhaps you want to increase your staff numbers or maybe you’d like to open new offices, diversify into business sectors, maybe you’d like to actually sell the firm?

Whatever you have written down as your top five priorities, how many of them are what we might say service related? How many are focused on, for example, increasing customer satisfaction? How many are about improving the level of service you offer to your customers? How many are focused on the customer service skills and training required by your staff to ensure the client’s experience is as good as it can possibly be? Be honest here – I would suggest that we would be pushing it to have one priority focused on this area, let alone two.

And yet, looking at the typical priorities that you are likely to have set out, how many of them might actually be met by increasing the service levels of your business? Let’s work this through – an improved customer experience/increase customer satisfaction rating will probably translate into greater referral numbers, which means increased numbers of new clients, increased business levels, the need for new members of staff, and possibly the opportunity to open new offices and diversify into new sectors simply because different customers have varied wants and needs.

It seems a rather simplistic view but this is generally how businesses grow – it happens because you provide a service which meets and exceeds the needs and expectations of your customer base, and those clients go out and tell their friends, family, colleagues, etc, about that experience and they help drive more clients to you. But, without that initial and ongoing focus on service the chances of this happening are unlikely and all those non-service priorities that you hope to achieve over the next 12 months are also unlikely to happen.

I was reminded of this recently when the Solicitors Regulation Authority came out with its own priority areas that it wants solicitor firms to review. Top of the list was service priorities, in its case it was concerned about the level of service being provided to what it deems ‘vulnerable customers’. That is someone with a disability, someone unable to judge the quality of the legal advice they were receiving, someone who was coming to the firm having had a trauma or personal tragedy, or someone in an incredibly stressful situation.

I can think of hundreds of examples where individuals have to deal with a legal firm in these situations; indeed, you could probably say that many, many clients are only dealing with a solicitor because of a stressful incident or life experience. Now, this might also be the case for customers with advisers – our finances can be stressful and not be as we might wish them to be and therefore coming to an adviser might be a process embarked upon to try and de-stress this situation.

However, the important point here is about the overall customer service you provide regardless of the client’s situation. They may well be going through a divorce and need to secure finance from the home to pay a spouse, but they might also be a first-time buyer embarking on a journey which gets them to a happy place, their first home. In all situations, if that customer’s experience is of the highest quality and the service is right, not only will they come back again and again but they will bring others with them.

So, why not add another priority to that list? Make it a service-related one and see if by achieving this, you can’t greatly increase your chances of achieving all the others.