Articles

Think like a customer

It makes good business sense to find out how your customers see you, says John Haylock BankLink's Practice Performance Manager.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. I first learnt the importance of this simple mantra more than 20 years ago when I was contracted by a university to help rewrite their course booklets.

At the beginning of the project I sat down with Dougal Stewart, then head of the university's Information Centre. Dougal picked up one of the existing booklets and wrote down on a piece of paper the headings of the key sections. He said, “John, you know what the key problem is? The departments have written these booklets for themselves.”

He pointed out that all the detailed information the professors occasionally needed was at the front of the booklet. While all the information that their target audience - school leavers - needed to understand was at the back.

Dougal picked up that piece of paper and turned it around 180 degrees so that all the general information was now at the beginning and the detailed stuff was at the back. He said: “That’s how we’ll write them." And that’s exactly what we did. We reordered the booklets so they were written for the customer.

That image of Dougal turning the paper around so that the booklets would be written in a customer-focused manner has stuck with me ever since. Viewing a situation from the opposite point of view is a very powerful tool.

An accountant recently told me about the way they restructured the affairs of their financial planning division. He noted that they used to talk about “fee for service.” Now they use the phrase “service for fee.” This simple reordering of words refocused them on providing a high level of service as the key to producing fees.

This is a key lesson for accountants in public practice. It is very easy for accountants (and indeed any business) to fall into the trap of not designing their business systems from the client’s point of view. For example if accountants in public practice were designing their systems to give clients what they wanted, accountants would have systems for:

• Turning jobs around quickly and delivering on time, every time
• Giving clients fixed prices upfront on jobs

Research has shown that these are two key service standards that clients want. Instead, most accountants in public practice have systems that deliver the exact opposite.

Accountants in public practice have a strong focus on trying to maximise chargeable hours. This is an internal measure of no interest to clients - apart from the fact it encourages 'busyness' and leads to slow turnaround. They also try to minimise their risk - such as by calculating the fee after the job is done - which places all the pricing risk back on the client.

It is easy to think like a customer when you are one. It is harder but much more valuable when you can think like a customer of your own business.

You’ll see what you need to do to provide outstanding service and turn your clients into incredibly loyal advocates.

This article first appeared in The Journal. It is reproduced with the permission of the NZICA.