Professional Services vs. Professional Service Excellence.
A passion for serving clients is a choice you and your team makes each and every time you engage. Professional Services delivery is purely a matter of meeting your client’s needs and expectations. Professional Services Excellence is something entirely different. A commitment Service Excellence in the Professional Services industry requires going further, harder and sometimes faster to “over deliver”. When you sense your client is thinking “Wow, I am definitely getting more than my money’s worth here”, then you’ve got it!
Establishing your firm as a purveyor of Service Excellence can pay valuable dividends including differentiation from the competition, a steady stream of referrals and of course, getting invited back for additional engagements.
To win the game, you must know the rules.
Someone once told me “good paper makes good friends.” I’ve found this to be a truism in my consulting business. In order to deliver Professional Services Excellence, we start with defining the service engagement in terms of:
- Scope / Objective
- Assumptions
- The Approach
- Client Responsibilities
- Exclusions
- Timetable
Of course, this is the easy part. When we have a kick-off or strategy session, our goal is to get the team excited about the project moving forward and the real probability of their hopes and dreams being realized. When we do our job right, this happens and it is fantastic. With that said, sometimes that excitement leads to a cloud of euphoria which after the meeting may leave the client expecting our team to be the proverbial “magic bullet”. As a result, at the beginning AND end of each major session, we visually frame out the project responsibilities of all parties – ours, theirs and any third parties’. This ensures we will be measured on the work we know we can deliver to a standard of Service Excellence.
Set the Bar High.
Of course, delivering a quality service on time and on budget is critical but those are simply table stakes. The goal is to impress so we go hard each and every time to do more rather than less. Sometimes it’s the little things that make an impact such as offering to handle the internal scheduling, running interference with a vendor, gathering information from others, our job is to take the ball and run with it while making our sponsor a hero in the end.
10 Tips for Delivering Professional Services Excellence
Here is a good place to start. Always be –
- Organized… communicate a plan of attack and follow it
- Prepared…come prepared with questions, objectives and study the materials provided
- Visual…a picture is worth a thousand words so use a lot of them
- Collaborative…the client’s input and opinions help you make better decisions together
- Respectful…the client is the boss, we aim to please
- Social…you’re not all business, be up for a beer after work
- Knowledgeable… have a proven methodology
- Confident… know what to do but be humble in your approach
- Punctual…you sell time and therefore value your client’s
- Self effacing…if there is a doubt, you are wrong and the client is right are right
- Trustworthy… be trusted with both company and personal information
