“Our mentality isn’t that client services is its own thing, but that everyone is in service to the client. Everyone has a level of delivery that they need to be providing.”

When you’re the person with the most visibility in front of a client, it can easily feel like the pressure is all on you to manage expectations, relay changes to the team, and navigate the conversation between both sides of the table. It can be a lot. 

So, how can you make client services more of a team effort? Stef Lait, client experience director at OST, seems to have found the answer. 

“We’re trying to create more of a customer-centric business,” she says. “Over the last 12-24 months, we’ve really tried to instil that mentality, so that everyone across the business sees and understands exactly how we make money, how clients fit into that, and how they themselves and their role contribute to that.”

The first thing Stef changed was the amount of visibility the rest of the team had in front of clients. 

“When it comes down to accountability, you care a lot more about what you need to deliver if you know the person who’s on the receiving end of that. If you yourself have looked them in the eye on a call and said, ‘Yes, absolutely, I can do that’, then you feel more of an emotional connection and responsibility to them.”

Because of this, the team has actually experienced a slight decrease in extra requests and last-minute demands from clients – citing that more visibility means the client understands the amount of time, effort and people power that is being dedicated to their project.

“Although we never want to make the client feel like they’re not our only client, it kind of sends a message of, ‘There’s a lot of people that work here doing the things that they love, and we have to respect their time. We try to delight the client as much as possible, but we never make promises that we can’t keep.”

In this session, Stef will be taking us through how she has instilled a client-first mindset throughout her entire agency, as well as some of the benefits it can have on your business – and your clients. 

We’ll be asking:

• How do you demonstrate to your team the importance of client services?
• What benefits are there to having more team members client-facing?
• How can you improve the customer service skills of your staff?

Come along to hear how Stef got her team on board with this approach and see if you could apply the same strategy to your own agency.