acBy Kevin Walker with Paul Denvir
and Cliff Ferguson
Publisher: Continuum
International Publishing
Price: £18.99
My first reaction on being asked to review a book on ‘key client management’ was to decline the opportunity politely. So I shall start with a health warning.
Why? Because all clients are key clients. At least, they all deserve to be treated in a way that makes them feel that they are the only client you are working for at the time. Besides, how can a client become a key client without first being a transaction and then being nurtured into a relationship? So this review will treat all clients as ‘key clients’ and apply the techniques discussed accordingly.
While the landscape has changed significantly in recent times, too many law firms believe client service management is a technical legal issue. Talk to many lawyers about ‘service quality’ and they get uppity about how they work long hours and bend over backwards to complete the transaction on behalf of their clients.
This book begins to tell the truth. Service to clients means something else. Legal services is at the commodity end of the product life cycle; lots of providers, lots of buyers and limited scope for differentiation – and there is always someone else who will do it for less.
To the ‘key client,’ service is less about the product (competence and innovation must be a given) and much more about managing the whole experience. To the law firm, it should be about client share and the proportion of the overall spend on legal services that you are achieving with that client.
Of course the basics have to be right; many firms will have client satisfaction measurements in place, but that will only rate what you do for the client now; not what you have the capability to do, but do not.
In many cases, being intensively proactive with clients to understand their businesses will take you deep into your own organisational culture; almost certainly this will lead to significant improvements in your own operational processes – a very useful by-product! Written for and about professional services, the analysis and prescriptions in this book apply to any organisation that is concerned with building and retaining value-added relationships with its clients.
It is a first-class book: well argued, well written and structured, clear and easy to reference and use. It succeeds admirably as a practitioner’s manual. Containing a wealth of practical exercises, the book will enable you to pinpoint just where you are on your journey to delivering world-class service quality.
Do not let the language in the introductory chapter about Sales Force Automation systems put you off; the key to successful Client Retention Management (CRM) lies in the effective use of IT and has direct relevance for law firms and their client contact programmes. It is not an accident that leading retailers and leisure companies achieve higher than average repeat purchases; they use neural networks and other system- based tools to track (and predict) customer behaviour and to manage subsequent marketing activity in a way that yields superior results.
The ‘first steps’ section at the end of each chapter is an excellent idea – removing the mythical ‘they’ (the client partners) as a barrier to progress and concentrating on what the individual can do to cement relationships is a very good technique.
Considered in detail, successful client relationship management is so much common sense; the trouble is that common sense is not as common as you might think and this excellent book makes it sound too easy.
Vincent Denham is chief executive at Radcliffes.
