Make Your Clients Work

Make your clients work.  Sounds antithetical to great service doesn’t it?  And in some cases it is – having your clients have to go back to your home page in order to get to another section of your site is a pain, incredibly frustrating and a good way to make your clients give up.  Same if you make them chase you to find out the status of how things are going.  However, if you can educate your clients to the value of your process – why you do things the way you do, then the more you make your clients adhere to your process (i.e., work), the better their experience will be with you.

In 1999, a partner and I started a business called Red Wine With Fish?.  We delivered price-fixed three course dinners primarily to the bankers, lawyers, accountants and other professionals who pretty much ate dinner at the office every night.  Having been a banker and a lawyer, I knew that options were limited and wholly unsatisfying, despite having the firm’s money to spend for a meal.  Moreover, the experience for the poor junior employee responsible for ordering was horrific. They have to take everyone’s order, aggregate them and then be responsible for the whole order showing up. Inevitably, the restaurant forgot something and then it was the junior employee’s problem to fix it.  Imagine working 12 hours, having to spend at least 45 minutes ordering, another 30 minutes fixing the problem and only then being able to go back to work.  Not fun.  So we developed our business around these junior staffers.  We took each person’s order individually and packed each order separately with the order on the outside of the bag.  If Bob got a salad, tuna entrée and a Coke, then Bob got a bag labeled with his order.  If there was a mistake, it was our fault, not the junior staffers.  And we were very good at fixing mistakes.

The only problem was the junior staffers hated us the first time they called.  They had just spent 45 minutes aggregating everyone’s order and most times didn’t know who wanted what individually.  We made them undo all that they had done.  We also made them give us all of their information – firm, address, telephone number, email and credit card information to make it easier the next time (no other restaurant did that at the time, remember we are talking 1999).  But that meant more time on the phone.  Some early customers would just give up mid way through.  After much tweaking and training of our staff, we were able to convince the junior staffers of the value of doing things the way we did.  All we were hoping for was the second order from the junior staffer, because then the value would hit him or her over the head.  On the second call, we turned a 45 minute process into less than 5 minutes, taking margin of error and blame from nearly 100% to almost zero.  Very happy junior staffer.  Given the choice, we expected these junior staffers would want to order with us multiple times per week.  And they did, on average 3 times per week – usually for at least 5 people.  It did not take them long to create an order form that they sent around to make their life even easier. I made a million other mistakes (read every one under the Sun) that ultimately cratered the business, but I am very proud of the process we created to teach value to our customers and ask them to do work our competitors did not.

For creative businesses, I see all the time the desire to provide great service to customers.  Nice idea, except it usually means catering to their every whim and offering them only the illusion of value.  A whole lot more focus on the “what can we do for you” than “here is what we will do for you”.  For instance, if your creative business provides a tangible product, the more time and certainty you have to deliver the product the more value you can deliver.  A florist that knows what it is going to do definitively six months from now can lock in wholesale pricing and set aside inventory, where a florist who does not know until just a few days before cannot.  So telling your client that, if she wants your best, she will have to approve your design six months ahead of time is just good business.  And yet you do not for fear of alienating her.  When she changes her mind, you let her and do not change the price.  You never really asked her to decide in the first place so you do what you can to “make it work”.  Yet, as much as we would want economics and math to not be rational, they are, and you pay more and make less.  Your client never understands the value of certainty since you never asked her for it. The end result is that you do the best you can (and lose a lot of money along the way) instead of your absolute best.  Your accommodation provides only the illusion of value — more a disservice than service.

Loyalty and value is not created because you are willing to be a doormat, it is created when you are convicted enough to believe your way is a better way and can prove it to your clients.  Make your clients work hard for your creative business to receive your very best and they will respect you more, not less.