Transcript

Speaker0

[0:02]The firms that are getting it are the ones that recognize that we have to change

[0:13]

Client Experience Revolution

Speaker0

[0:07]our mind, that we are in the customer experience, client experience business, right? And so the way that we deliver the services that we're hired to deliver, what that experience is like is really where the client measures success. They expect a successful outcome as it pertains to the technical things, right? They don't expect you to mess up. They don't expect the building to not be a great building. They expect excellence on the technical side. But where they're really increasingly consumer-like is they are expecting project delivery experience to be great.

[0:54]

Welcome to The Intangible Brand

Speaker1

[0:55]Welcome to The Intangible Brand, where we explore the connection between employee experience and client experience, and the hidden forces that make brands stick. I'm Jerry Gennaria, and I'm joined by my co-host, Carl Winstead. Today, we're joined by Tim Asmos, Head of Growth at Client Savvy. Tim brings over two decades of experience in AEC marketing and is a recognized thought leader in client experience strategy. Recently, Tim delivered the closing keynote at CXPS 2025 titled From Insight to Impact, Creating a Culture Where CX Thrives. In his talk, he emphasized that while tools and strategies are essential, the true driver of exceptional client experience is organizational culture. He challenged attendees to consider how internal mindsets and behaviors directly influence external client perceptions. Tim, welcome to the show.

Speaker0

[1:46]Hey, thanks, Jerry. Appreciate you for having me on.

Speaker3

[1:49]Tim, it's great to have you here as well. Great to reconnect with you. I'm looking forward to digging into some of the thoughts and themes from your keynote that Jerry just mentioned. So I'm wondering if maybe before we do that, though, I know you guys at Client Savvy are always doing some cool things and kind of on the front edge of things. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what you're doing right now at Client Savvy.

Speaker0

[2:11]Yeah, so some big things have been happening at Client Savvy. We actually were acquired a couple months back by Clearly Rated, another professional services focused CX platform. They've been focused in staffing and accounting and legal and not so much AEC.

Speaker0

[2:32]So kind of combined, we are as forces, we're expanding our reach into the professional services world. The Client Savvy platform is very focused on AEC and more of a project-based, sort of journey-based approach to client feedback. The platform has been basically completely rebuilt from the ground up over the last two or three years. Lots of exciting features have rolled out, are rolling out. So that's a big deal. I'd say the other big thing that we're working on is we partnered with the S&PS Foundation to do the very first of its kind research study on CX in the AEC industry. We are actually doing all the analysis now. We're prepping Ryan Sudam, the founder of Client Savvy, and I will be presenting at Amplify AEC with the big SMPS conference where we're going to be sharing the full results of that study. But it's going to be a really, really fascinating look for the first time at what percentage of firms even are doing CX, to what level is leadership involved, to what degree, what outcomes are they seeing in regards to better profitability, better hit rates, what's the correlation between the tactics that they're employing.

Speaker0

[3:52]What role does client feedback play in measuring and quantifying that client experience? So, yeah, it's going to be a really, really exciting study. I know selfishly we've wanted data like that for many years as sort of the pioneers, if you will, of CX and AEC. But now we're going to actually have some tangible research to really show you where we are in the industry and what we can learn from those that are doing some really great things with CX. So, yeah, exciting time. That's great.

Speaker3

[4:23]Well, I look forward to hearing that in Columbus, and I'm glad to hear that you are not bored right now.

Speaker0

[4:27]That's good. Yeah, definitely not bored. Lots going on.

Speaker2

[4:31]That's awesome.

Speaker1

[4:32]Yeah, we're super excited to see what happens next as the merger solidifies a bit. And yeah, looking forward to that presentation at Amplify.

[4:41]

The Role of Organizational Culture

Speaker1

[4:41]So I mentioned in the introduction the CXPS conference and you gave a talk that was really about, you know, culture and the core of client experience. Can you elaborate a little bit on how, you know, organizational culture influences the client experience, you know, particularly in professional service firms?

Speaker0

[5:00]Yeah, well, you know, I've been in and around the AEC industry now for 20 years, and I've been inside an engineering firm running leading marketing. So I know, I know what it's like to try to sort of be the champion for a cause in a professional services firm. And it really requires that top-down buy-in that leads to a full enculturation in order to push that idea forward. And CX, I know at Client Savvy, we've seen the firms that thrive at CX, there is a direct correlation with culture. It isn't just a tactic or it's not just a campaign strategy.

Speaker0

[5:46]It truly becomes the way that firms do business. You know, in the same way, I always do the parallel of safety, right? For a large, for a construction firm, a GC, a construction management firm, safety's huge. And safety doesn't happen without it being part of the culture, right? It's not just this thing that we add on. It's not an aspiration. It becomes a part of the culture. And culture has norms. It has, you know, beliefs and values, but then those are backed by budget and they're backed by initiatives. They're backed with people. They're backed with process to make sure that thing comes to life. And in the same way, that's how construction firms have safety at their core. A firm that really wants to embrace CX, they have to have it as part of their culture. And the good news is that's not just a hypothesis. The early results from our study with S&PS Foundation has found an absolute direct correlation with success in CX and that top-down leadership and culture component. So, yeah, I mean, that's really, I think, the way that it becomes seen by the whole firm as something that they're embracing and not just one more thing we have to do.

Speaker3

[7:08]Yeah, Tim, I know that we in the AEC industry, we've always talked about technical proficiency and what we expect ourselves to do, expect our teams to be able to put together. And I'm sure you'll get into this with some more data at SMPS. But, you know, are you seeing any more of a shift in firms to say, yeah, we're starting to understand that culture and CX, like, you know, they were early adopters, right? And then the people are coming along. Are you seeing a sort of a shift, like people are really starting to pay attention to this more than we did before? What are you seeing out there?

Speaker0

[7:43]Yeah, absolutely. And there's a parallel SMPS Foundation study that they're working on, I believe, with Stanball and NAS. So that's around the biggest trends in the industry. And maybe I'm giving away a little bit of their thunder, but one of the top three trends in the industry is CX. I think we're starting to see more and more firms realizing this CX thing. Number one, it's not going away. It's not a fad. It's not just marketing speak. And in fact, at its core, it really doesn't even have to do with marketing, right?

Speaker0

[8:17]But I think that firms are starting to realize that this idea of client centricity that firms have been talking about for years, well, the only way you really sort of do that well is when you have a whole sort of a program that wraps around like making that a real reality. You have to measure it. You have to improve it. And you have to make it sort of part of the DNA of the firm and not just sort of this thing that we throw out that, oh, we put clients first, we're client first, we're client centric. But you have to back that up with some real sort of cultural norms that you establish. So definitely seeing a lot more movement in the area of CX. In the early days of client savvy, I wasn't here for this, but it was sort of like they were sort of in the wilderness trying to preach the good news of CX to everybody that would listen. And most people just probably thought it sounded like either a trend that would go away or, oh, you're just trying to pull something from the consumer world into professional services. And that's not exactly going to work. A lot of naysayers.

Speaker0

[9:33]So I think now you have people realizing, like, it really is the way we can differentiate our firm. Instead of competing on we have the best people, we have the best project portfolio, we have the best experts, you know, which is how every firm in the industry tends to try to compete. We can just ultimately deliver a project experience that's better than our competitors. And that will differentiate us in ways that our competitors won't be able to very easily claim or duplicate. So, yeah, I think it's definitely good trends that we're seeing.

Speaker3

[10:08]Yeah, and culture means more than pizza Wednesdays and sending, you know, a Christmas gift, right?

Speaker0

[10:15]Yeah, absolutely. And ping pong tables. There you go.

Speaker1

[10:20]Pool tables if you're at Klein. Tim, you talk about that journey in the wilderness, and now it's,

[10:31]

Internal Alignment for Client Impact

Speaker1

[10:29]you know, starting to become reality. And it sounds a lot like, you know, it's an internal alignment kind of an issue. Can you talk about the importance of being internally aligned if you want to really create that kind of external impact? How do firms ensure that the internal behaviors and mindsets are consistently delivering the client experience that they want?

Speaker2

[10:53]Yeah.

Speaker0

[10:53]Well, you know, I think it's really a major mindset shift, right? You think about the AC industry, you've got engineers and architects and scientists and landscape architects and technologists and construction managers, all these technical people that pride themselves on the skill set that they ultimately bring to the table. I think that internal alignment has to do with recognizing that when a client hires your firm, they fully expect that your engineering solution is going to be great. They wouldn't hire you if they didn't fully expect that your architecture designs were going to be exactly the vision that they had dreamed up in their head and you were going to design a great building.

Speaker1

[11:43]Table stakes.

Speaker0

[11:44]You were going to build a great building, right? And it was going to be a safety, accident-free job site that is table stakes. I think the firms that are getting it, if you will, and I've done air quotes twice, so forgive me, but the firms that are getting it are the ones that recognize that we have to change our mind, that we are in the customer experience.

Speaker0

[12:06]Client experience business, right? And so the way that we deliver the services that we're hired to deliver, what that experience is like is really where the client measures success. They expect a successful outcome as it pertains to the technical things, right? They don't expect you to mess up. They don't expect the building to not be a great building. They expect excellence on the technical side. But where they're really increasingly consumer-like is they are expecting the project delivery experience to be great and to be better than someone else. And they're willing to pay a premium if that was the case. So I think it's a big alignment of getting technical people that are very much steeped in what it is that they do, what they went to school for, what their day-to-day job is to really see it through the lens of the client. And the client is expecting you to return their emails fast.

Speaker0

[13:11]They're expecting you to give them all the details that they don't know that they need to know because maybe this is the first time that they've designed this sort of building or they've gone through this process before. They don't walk in your shoes. So it really comes down to like client empathy as at the core. And that requires that's where the culture really plays. When firms sort of measure their success based solely on the end project deliverable and not whether or not we met the client's expectations in every area and not just in the final process.

Speaker0

[13:48]You know, deliverable, that's sort of where, you know, firms really start to turn the corner and see a very different approach. And that requires that alignment internally of looking beyond just the technical, right? I wish the health, I always like to do the healthcare industry is a great analogy because, you know, if a doctor is doing their job and they're treating you, they think they've done their job. But as a patient, we care about things other than just the treatment. We care about? How long did we have to wait? And was the doctor, you know, answering all of our questions? Do we have to probe too hard? You know, there's a lot of that and it is no different in the AEC world. So it's just putting yourselves in the shoes of clients and thinking about like, well, what would make this a really great experience for them? And then that's where feedback comes in. Actually asking, did we meet your expectations?

[14:40]

Empathy in Client Relations

Speaker0

[14:41]Did we fall short if we did? like where can we improve how can we get better because I always like to say CX is definitely a journey and not a destination you don't just create a great client experience and then it ends there it is a moving target once you have exceeded expectations you've now elevated what their expectation is going to be moving forward and that should really be your goal to always be elevating their expectations always creating a better experience and not enough firms really get that they're still stuck and mired in the technical right but it's the firms that go above that that i'm starting to see some real some real changing of minds and clients you know or i think clients are the ones that really benefit from that yeah.

Speaker3

[15:29]Yeah it's interesting you know changing Changing of mind is kind of like, it's sort of like a little bit, it's kind of parallel to innovation, right? It's like a change. And I know, you know, in our industry and even in our office, you know, we feel like, oh, innovation almost feels like it's everywhere, right? The software is changing. AI is now in the mix. And we recognize that innovation is important and we need to embrace it. But, you know, you're talking about also moving beyond just the technical things about innovation and embracing, you know, what is innovation in the entire experience, right? And that means being able to listen sometimes and maybe, you know, hear, you know, hard truths maybe or make changes. But some of those can be like common barriers, like, you know, how do you move forward past that? So I'm just kind of curious, like, what do you think we need to be looking at as as an AEC industry, as a firm to overcome some of those speed bumps? And what do you see that that kind of is holding us back and keeping us from creating that that culture you're talking about?

Speaker0

[16:37]Yeah, honestly, Carl, there's such bias among leadership in general, right? Right. I'm just going to go on a little soapbox here, but I've been in it and around it for so long. There's such a bias that we've got it figured out and we kind of know how to be successful. And let's just face it. I mean, I just some early data that just came back for this year, like the industry overall is doing well, like firms are growing and they have been growing. And that tends to be the measuring stick. Well, we're successful the way that we are. So, of course, we're not doing anything that needs to improve or we're not doing anything wrong. And you can have a very successful firm and not have CX at the core. But the point is, you can have a much more successful firm. And I'm excited for our data to back that up. Higher profitability, higher win rates. And then the key here, you know, you also have a better chance of retaining top talent when you deliver a premium client experience. Because guess what? Really great talent wants to work on the best projects with the happiest clients because burnout tends to happen when you're putting out fires and you're dealing with clients that are less than ideal. And so there is a direct connection to to the employee experience, obviously. But I think.

Speaker0

[18:01]To answer your question, you know, it's firms that are willing to say, hey, you know what? I've got bias, but I want to just like take a step back and actually, you know, think about things through the client's perspective.

Speaker0

[18:16]Through a different perspective. My goal has always been as a consultant, as a speaker, I just want to give people a new perspective because, you know, you you operate in such with such blinders that the way we do it or the way we've always done it is great or good enough, sufficient. And I just think we're seeing as the generations are changing.

Speaker0

[18:42]You know, you've got more millennials in the workforce in leadership positions than boomers. Now, you've got Gen Z slowly working their way up and getting older. You know, that's the generations of Amazon and all of the great CX experiences in our personal life. And so the way things have always been just isn't good enough anymore for those people. They're like, well, if if I expect better responsiveness and communication, like then there's not a good reason for you not to give it to me, you know. And so I think it's that firms are going to have to be willing to actually look at things from a different perspective and through a different lens and listen to outside voices in order to really change. You know, innovation, change. It happens when you look past the obvious and you look past the status quo. And that does require like really different perspectives. And so normally in the firms that I see where they're very innovative and they embrace things like CX, they've got a leader that.

Speaker0

[19:55]Has a very innovative sort of mindset and then that that leadership team it starts to really really trickle down i have seen a really innovative leader create have massive roadblocks by a board of directors or or a larger leadership team that doesn't want to change but most of the time a leader that really is is willing to turn over some new leaves and and actually like do things differently, it sets the tone for everybody else to start wanting to do some new and different things, to try some things, to try to make some improvements that maybe they haven't been willing to try before versus just sticking with what is safe and that sort of risk management that you're in. In the technical world, risk management is a hugely important factor. But when it comes to things like innovation, and this is directly connected, I think, to things like CX, like you have to be willing to try some new things, knowing that we don't know exactly how this is going to turn out, you know?

Speaker1

[20:59]Right. Yeah. How does, how does leadership take that innovation mindset,

[21:09]

Innovation and Change in AEC

Speaker1

[21:05]that CX focused mindset and embed it throughout the organization? Are there any tips or things that you can share?

Speaker0

[21:12]Yeah. You know, I think especially the larger, the firm, the harder it is. It's like the old adage of, you know, an aircraft carrier takes forever to turn around because it's so huge versus a small little ship there, a little boat. It's easy to turn around. But when the firms start to get bigger, I think that's when you have to have more, you know, innovation sort of.

Speaker0

[21:36]Pockets or labs or piloting some things like, hey, let's we're going to try this out in this one office or in this one group or with this one champion that is the one raising their hand saying, hey, I'd really like to try this new thing that we're not currently doing and empowering people that want to do new and different things to be able to be empowered to do that. You know, on the marketing side, obviously, I'm a lifelong marketer and I've been involved with the S&P S since 2006. And I mean, for the last 19 years, I've heard nothing but marketers frustrated by getting their sort of ideas shot down by leadership.

Speaker0

[22:16]Again, the idea is a little off the beaten path, if you will. And they don't they don't want to give that person an opportunity to see if that idea might actually have some traction. And so, yeah, the leader has to have a mindset of innovation, but I also think they have to be willing to empower others to be able to run with some ideas. It's almost like an entrepreneurial spirit in some ways, which I think a lot of firms that grow organically have that entrepreneurial spirit, you know, but that entrepreneurial spirit has to go beyond just starting up a new office or a new service line. It has to be in things like marketing and business development and client experience and other sort of disciplines, if you will, that maybe don't usually get as much rope as the as the as the technical kind of service teams do. Sure.

Speaker2

[23:15]Tim, you know, I mean,

Speaker3

[23:16]Technically, you know, as architects, we've always talked about like our brand and we always talk about it like this is our portfolio. This is what our brand is. And our strategy is how many times can we get it out in front of people? But, you know, as part of this podcast, we know that brand and brand strategy, that's a whole that's a whole different thing. That's a science unto itself. Right. And we're now seeing an emergence of like the relationship between the brand strategy and the client experience. You know, do you see, you know, more embracement of that in firms in the AEC industry that, you know, seeing that, yeah, we're understanding that the connection between a brand and its strategy and the experience of our clients?

Speaker0

[23:58]Yeah, I would say in in some pockets, yes. Yeah. Across the board. No, I still think largely brand is really misunderstood in the AEC industry. I think there's innovative firms that get it and that are investing in it that actually put some resources behind it but then you have others where a brand is the logo and the color palette and the website that changes every seven years which is too long the way for the listeners you know things like that they don't really understand brand strategy they don't understand positioning and messaging and the brand promise and and sort of all the different components and and ultimately where there's that connection is, you know, the brand, a good brand makes a promise to the marketplace and that promise can only be realized by the client experience. So brand experience and client experience are absolutely connected to one another because the client experience is what ultimately delivers on the brand promise.

Speaker0

[25:03]And then the other X we have is employee experience. And that one is connected to both of those because the brand experience and the brand sort of culture and brand philosophy kind of informs the employees. But ultimately, the employees and a professional services firm are the ones that deliver the client experience. So that's kind of where if we had like a Gantt chart, you'd have culture right smack in the middle because I think culture plays a huge role. All the brands we admire culture drives that brand right all the client experiences we admire culture drives that all the firms that are the best places to work that people would take a pay cut to go work there culture drives that employee experience so i really think that looking holistically at how the three experiences all actually truly work together harmoniously if If you're going to see success in all three, I don't think the industry's quite picked up on that yet. I think there's some firms that are getting it. The fact that we have this podcast started that's focused on EX and CX and the connection to brand is a great sign for the industry. But I think we're still we're still probably casting a vision that a lot of firm leaders are going to have to embrace and be kind of educated on. Gotcha.

Speaker1

[26:26]Do you think, and this is maybe getting a little out of the core field for client savvy, but as you've gone through this merger, are there other professional service businesses that are further along the continuum of integrating EX and CX into their brand philosophy?

Speaker0

[26:47]You know, it's interesting. I do get asked about this a lot. You know, I think accounting is further ahead in CX than legal. But believe it or not, I actually think AEC is a little further along than the

[27:04]

Brand Strategy and Client Experience

Speaker0

[27:03]other professional services. And my reason for that is, as a whole, I see much more adoption of journey-based client feedback in AEC than all the other professional services. And why I think that's an indicator of embracing it more, you can't manage what you don't measure. I think one of the leadership gurus said that years ago.

Speaker0

[27:32]And so if you're not measuring the client experience and you're not measuring it at a sort of journey based approach, you know, how do you know what your experience even is? Right. And so I think legal is very skittish of client feedback. I would say they're the they're the most conservative with being afraid to ask clients for feedback. Accounting is definitely starting to embrace it more clearly rated's been in the staffing industry a long time they're very much embracing it but aec you know historically has done the sort of annual feedback maybe every two or three years do a study but increasingly firms are realizing like hey project experience actually leads to the client experience you know the the client experience is sort of determined at a project level. If a project has some hiccups, if a client's expectations aren't being met, that is the client experience coming to reality. It's not this big, overarching sort of idea. It's really like I said, that client experience ultimately delivers on the brand promise and the project experience is what really creates the client experience. So.

Speaker0

[28:52]I actually think this industry is, of the professional services, I actually think that it's a little bit more innovative when it comes to CX. I don't think they're innovative in everything, interestingly enough. I think legal's got a pretty interesting take on business development and sales. They're actually not even afraid of the word sales. So they have a little more of a traditional sales structure in larger law firms, but When it comes to CX, I actually think AEC is on the right track and kind of leading the way a little bit in the professional services industry. So, okay. Well, you know.

Speaker3

[29:33]You mentioned just now, you mentioned about the idea about measurement. And I know traditionally, we've all come to kind of understand what a net promoter score is. And that was a little bit of a new learning curve for a lot of us. Like, oh, what does that mean?

[29:52]

Beyond Net Promoter Score

Speaker3

[29:47]But I think at the end of the day, you would probably agree that like that has limitations. I mean, we tend to put a lot of weight in that score, but it's not everything, right?

Speaker0

[29:58]Yeah.

Speaker3

[29:58]And I think you would probably talk about the client experience indicator, CXI, for example, that that is maybe has a better measurement understanding of the client experience. I wonder if you can just maybe help us understand like what that is, because we've just gotten where we understand what net promoter score is.

Speaker0

[30:15]Right. And honestly, Carl, some people still don't. I still have regular calls with potential clients that I'm having to explain. So for those on the call that maybe don't know what net promoter score is, there's a question that we all get asked in a survey based on a scale of zero to 10. How likely are you to recommend us to a colleague or peer? That's the net promoter question. The nines and tens are promoters. Sevens and eights are passive. Zero to six are detractors. and the net promoter score is the percentage of promoters divided by the percentage of detractors, that gives you your net promoter score. It is a good metric. It is a metric that we encourage firms to track. It's built into the client savvy platform. However, when it comes to CX, it's only a metric. It's not the metric. And a lot of firms, it becomes the be all end all metric. Where it falls short is it doesn't identify room for improvement outside of.

Speaker0

[31:18]Oh, we've got a detractor. They're not happy.

Speaker0

[31:20]We need to make some improvements. But what we've often found is you can have, we have clients, the majority of our clients that will regularly have a promoter that also provides challenging scores in our CXI scale that I'll describe in a moment. And so that seems a little on the surface as a dissonance. But what that means is they're a raving fan. They love your firm. They would recommend you and give you a referral. No problem. It doesn't mean that you've delivered everything perfectly. Right. And so that's kind of where we developed a patented methodology in our scale. It's called the client experience indicator. And the whole purpose of it was how do we quantify the experience that our firm is delivering to clients. And so it's a seven point scale. It centers on met expectations at four. So we don't ask satisfaction questions. That tends to be a little subjective, a little more maybe emotion oriented. At the end of the day, every relationship, professionally, personally, marriage included, is all about managing expectations. So our scale measures around those expectations. Business development, seller doers, the brand promise sets an expectation when they hire your firm. And so now we're going to go down the line in different categories like responsiveness.

Speaker0

[32:50]Helpfulness, quality, soft skills, hard skills, all of them to see, are we meeting your expectations? Are we falling short? Are we exceeding them? The satisfaction scale, highly satisfied, that five point, the five dots, it's more of a consumer-based approach. In our scale, highly satisfied would be equivalent to met expectations. No one hires your firm to be anything other than highly satisfied.

Speaker0

[33:19]Everything that you've promised, when you deliver it, you've met their expectation. The nice thing about our CXI is.

Speaker0

[33:26]We're not just identifying when you've fallen short, when you're below their expectations, when there's room for improvement.

Speaker0

[33:33]Often, you're exceeding expectations in certain areas. And what that can mean is, on the surface, it sounds like, oh, this is great, and it's a good thing. But it can often mean that you're over-delivering, right? You're undercharging. You're over-delivering. when you consistently far exceed their expectations, we've seen a direct correlation to profitability. And so the scale then gives that opportunity when you've exceeded consistently, that client is likely open for a fee increase. They maybe won't balk at that change order that you've been holding on. Or it might identify, especially when you compare to project profitability, that some of your project managers that are far exceeding expectations maybe have some of the lowest profit margins on the team because they're doing more than the client's actually expecting. So that's where that scale really can bring out a lot of specific ways that the firm can dial and improve and make corrections to the client experience. And that promoter alone is just too straightforward. They'll promote you. They won't promote you. That doesn't help you actually solve or fix the individual

[34:55]

Measuring Client Experience Effectively

Speaker0

[34:49]challenges or issues or things that contribute to the net promoter score. So that's that's a little bit about the CXI and why it is powerful for client experience.

Speaker1

[35:02]So are you doing that at the end of the project, through the project? When are you integrating that kind of measurement?

Speaker0

[35:09]Yeah. So most of our clients are getting feedback, multiple milestones throughout the project life cycle. I always like to pick on Hilton, the Hilton Hotel survey we get two days after we checked out. That's like the project closeout.

Speaker0

[35:28]They can't fix my problem. You know, I checked out two days ago. They can't fix the fact that my pillows were terrible and my neck now hurts. If they texted me right when I checked in or my first morning on a three-day stay, how was your stay? Actually, my pillows are terrible. Now they could fix it. So most of our clients through our platform are actually asking for feedback early and often, starting sometimes at the proposal phase, starting with pre-construction. Maybe it's at the kickoff session.

Speaker0

[35:58]We'll see clients come out of a kickoff session and there might be an area where you fell short of their expectations. Pretty darn important to know that going in at the beginning of the project where you can give some course corrections before finding out at the end of the project some things that you didn't know about. And statistically, one out of four surveys comes back from our platform with a previously unvoiced issue. So there's another assumption and bias a lot of firm leaders have is, oh, we talk to our clients every day. They'll certainly tell us that there's an issue. And one out of four times, you're hearing something that you've never heard before. It could be a small thing. It could be a major thing. I mean, we've seen major projects saved because of a comment made in a survey and the project manager had zero idea that that issue was even there. So it just makes it sort of an easy button way for clients to give feedback early and often and then start to build trust because the difference between the Hilton Hotel survey and.

Speaker2

[37:03]The other reason we don't take that,

Speaker0

[37:04]They can't fix the issue, but also it's corporate. We don't believe there's anyone on the other end that can actually do anything about my issue or fix my problem. The way that we propose that you do it is that the request actually comes from the project manager or the project executive or the person that is the closest to the client.

Speaker0

[37:25]So I'm now building trust because if I'm the project manager asking my client for feedback, they give me feedback. there's a belief that the project manager can actually do something to fix the issue that I might've brought up. So yeah, it's, it's sort of like this, it's a culture of listening where clients have a mechanism to always voice their, yeah, they can bring it up in a one-on-one meeting with the project manager all day, but making it easy for them to give feedback through probing questions that the project manager maybe isn't going to ask them, you know how are things going it's sort of like when i asked my 16 year old son how was your day you know i get pretty good but when you can ask some specific probing questions that are tied to a category like say responsiveness well now you're actually opening the client's mind to think about things maybe that they haven't thought about you know maybe they're just marginally disappointed that the project manager takes a little too long to respond and they really like the project manager so they wouldn't want to say it to their face. But when you ask me, all right, well, I'm a little bit below expectations on responsiveness. Well, now the project manager can say, all right, tell me where I'm falling short. How can I improve?

Speaker0

[38:41]And now you're improving the client experience in the middle of the project versus hoping you get a chance to make it right on the next project that may or may not ever come, depending on the environment that we're in with competitiveness. So, yeah, our clients.

Speaker1

[38:56]Sorry, Carl, our clients annoyed by the frequency that you're asking these questions.

Speaker0

[39:04]I mean, generally we set parameters around survey fatigue rules so that a client's not, especially if they have multiple projects, which is very common in the industry. They're not going to get pinged like every week or every two weeks. Usually it's a 31 day minimum threshold of survey fatigue. But what we found is, again, we don't take the surveys we often get because we don't believe it will matter. But when you when you give feedback and when the when the project manager acts on that feedback, now you've essentially trained the client that every time they have feedback to give, you're going to be listening for it. And so we actually see many of our long term clients, their response rates go up over time, not down.

Speaker0

[39:52]Because they've created that culture of listening and clients now know, all right, this is a survey worth taking. Number one, it's only going to be two or three minutes and number, and two, I'm going to actually, my life's going to get better. And most of us can't say that a survey ever changed their life, but I think what we're going for with client savvy and with our clients is like, it can actually make their life better. So, yeah. And that's where communication plays a big role. You don't just start firing off surveys. You communicate it to them. Right. I mean, we even give new clients boilerplate for proposals to where you actually start telling that story of client listening when you're proposing. Like, hey, we're client centric and here's the proof we are. We've got this whole system. We're going to ask you. It's going to be easy. You can give us your feedback and it's going to be, you know, a very easy way to do that. And when we give, when you give us feedback, we're going to actually act on it and make improvements that matter to you. So, I mean, that's a pretty good value proposition, I think.

Speaker3

[40:56]Yeah. Well, and that's a, that's a, that's a real practice

Speaker2

[40:59]Of the firm too, right?

Speaker0

[41:00]That's not just a, like the one, one and done piece.

Speaker3

[41:04]And I guess the way it's really successful is because you sustain it.

[41:11]

Building a Culture of Feedback

Speaker3

[41:08]Like you create a culture where you continuously are looking at that. Yep. Are there, you know, if you were giving somebody, hey, here are a couple of quick things, you know, from a practice standpoint, like what, how can firms maybe adopt a practice as, yeah, we're going to, we're going to be that continuous, you know, we're going to seek that all the way through.

Speaker0

[41:27]Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know. Feedback is not CX. Feedback is step zero of client experience. You know, I believe it's a foundational thing. Back to what I said earlier, you can't improve what you don't measure. So if you don't have a client listening or a client feedback program in place, it's really hard to truly elevate client experience because you're relying on anecdotes that you get from project managers or gut feels or that, you know, survey that you did three years ago, which we all know so much can change in three years. So I would say the first step for a lot of firms, it's overwhelming, even though they might intellectually buy into this idea of asking for feedback at multiple points throughout the project. It could be overwhelming if they're saying, hey, we haven't even done a survey in like five years. I think step one is do a study, do a client perception study, go out to all of your clients and clients maybe you haven't worked with.

Speaker0

[42:37]Establish your net promoter score if you don't have one, understand what that is, understand what you're doing well, where you have room for improvement. You know, if you're just relying on like I was just talking to a firm the other day, you know, they call 10 percent of their clients once a year to do a phone interview. And I'm like, what about the other 90 percent? You know, they're leaving the other 90 percent out. And so, again, sometimes people will say things on the phone or in person. They sugarcoat things sometimes. So I think being able to kind of quantify things is helpful, but I would say start with getting client feedback beyond just what you already have anecdotally from those conversations to establish what your baseline is. Yeah. How are we doing? Where can we improve? Where do we have systemic challenges that crosses over?

Speaker0

[43:28]Divisions and groups and practice areas you know who are who are sort of the people that that we might be able to get some good referrals from because they've acknowledged they're a promoter and they're a business development opportunity because they say hey we're a promoter we're nine or a ten on that net promoter scale well they're a ripe opportunity to get referrals so that's where I would start start there and then obviously build towards integrating client listening into your overall program. You know, we're a platform that relies on surveys, but a good client listening program isn't just surveys. It is interviews. It is maybe those top 10% one-on-ones with a principle. It's like multiple angles. It might be a client panel. You know, there's a multiple areas of feedback, but I do think that ongoing mechanism to get clients feedback throughout projects is a foundation to a good CX program. Oh, all right.

Speaker3

[44:31]That's great. Great advice. Thanks.

[44:34]

Emerging Trends in Client Experience

Speaker0

[44:33]So if we look ahead.

Speaker1

[44:35]Is there any emerging trends or things that you're seeing in client experience that, you know, professional service firms need to be preparing for?

Speaker0

[44:44]Yeah. Well, I would say a trend that I'm seeing as CX is being adopted. This kind of speaks to the parallel I was giving around safety, I'm starting to see more and more firms having a dedicated CX leader or a dedicated CX staff. You know, chief experience officer is a growing title. Smaller firms are now at least having a client experience manager, a client experience specialist. They're actually hiring people or pulling someone from another group or another. Maybe they're a business development person or maybe they've been on the technical side, but they have a passion for clients. They're allowing them to focus on the client experience at the firm. And they're the eyes and the ears, and they're the ones sort of measuring and analyzing and looking for ways the firm can really elevate it. In the same way that safety becomes a reality in a construction firm because they have safety people, you know, with safety budgets and safety tools, I think I'm seeing more and more firms starting to have some dedicated or semi-dedicated staff and definitely dedicated CX leaders that are just looking at things more through the lens of the client and less through the lens of the project and the work itself.

Speaker3

[46:14]Interesting. are you seeing that that client experience person is sort of juggling the employee experience too or are you seeing a trend where like no the client experience person really is focusing on client and the employee experience is kind of coming from somewhere else what are you seeing yeah that's a great question

Speaker0

[46:33]I have seen dual roles but i would say overwhelmingly cx is is sort of to itself and employee experience is kind of being viewed differently. The two, as I mentioned earlier, they're connected, they overlap, you need one for the other. But I think there's so much to be done on the client experience in a professional services firm that I don't see a lot of firms tasking their CX person to handle EX as well. I've seen it a couple times, but it's definitely not the norm.

Speaker2

[47:09]Okay. Duly noted. Yeah.

Speaker0

[47:11]And usually EX ends up under, under an HR sort of function of people, you know, you see, you've got like chief people officer now, we might have a employee experience person under them, but, but yeah, that's what I'm seeing.

[47:27]

Key Takeaways for Professionals

Speaker0

[47:26]Okay. This has been.

Speaker1

[47:28]A fascinating conversation, Tim. What's the one thing that you really hope our listeners will take away from our conversation today?

Speaker0

[47:35]Yeah. I would say if you're doing, if you're, if there's the air quotes one more time. If you're doing CX now, like I think the data, the research coming out is just going to encourage you more that you made the right choice to maybe step out into some new ground and try some new things because it's not a fad. It's a trend, but only because it's becoming a discipline in the professional services firm. If maybe your firm is considering CX, Maybe you've talked about it, but you haven't actually put dollars or people or time behind a CX initiative. I would say like, yeah, now's the time you can still be a somewhat early adopter. I think. Less than 25% of firms probably have a legitimate CX initiative. So there's a lot of room to grow to get ahead of the competition. So that's kind of my hope. I hope that you've been encouraged if you're doing it. And if you are considering, or maybe you've even been a naysayer, I hope I've given you some new perspectives to think about.

Speaker3

[48:40]And while you've given a lot of us a lot to think about it for all of us, I appreciate that, you know, your insights and your experience certainly are well needed and welcomed in this profession. So we appreciate what you're doing to sort of foster that in all of us. I guess, Tim, as we wrap up, we have a question that we ask all of our guests and you will be no exception, but it's an easy one. And the question is this, is there a book or a podcast? Obviously, this is a great podcast, but maybe another podcast that you might recommend to our audience?

Speaker0

[49:15]Yeah. So I really dig Adam Grant. He's got a podcast called Work Life through TED. He's written some books. I follow him on LinkedIn. He really covers business through a really unique lens of kind of that psychology and organizational behavior and empathy. And man, I just like I've got a presentation that I give and I think I have him quoted in there twice, which I never do. But like both quotes are so powerful. He's just like a wealth of wisdom. I feel like he can make you better as a leader, make you better as a company and certainly even on your personal life as well.

[49:59]

Recommended Resources for Growth

Speaker0

[49:57]So that's who I would recommend, Adam Grant. He's a really, really powerful thought leader in I don't even know what, just life wisdom. All right.

Speaker1

[50:08]That's awesome.

Speaker0

[50:09]Perfect. All right.

Speaker1

[50:10]Well, Tim, where can our listeners find more about you online or learn more about your work with Client Savvy?

Speaker2

[50:18]Yeah.

Speaker0

[50:18]So follow me on LinkedIn. I post a lot. Go to clientsavvy.com. We have a bunch of resources. If you are looking into the CX thing, tons of articles written to the AEC world, lots of downloadable guides with a lot of information. We do regular webinars as well that are educational. You can also get CEUs from SMPS for those. And if you're going to Amplify AEC in August, definitely look for me. I'll be speaking on Wednesday. And then Ryan, Sudam, and I will be presenting our research on Friday morning, the August 8th. So check me out there as well.

Speaker1

[50:55]That's awesome. Well, that wraps up another episode of The Intangible Brand. If

Speaker0

[51:02]You found value.

Speaker1

[51:03]In today's conversation, please take a moment to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Your support definitely helps us continue to bring insightful discussions like this one to folks like you.

Speaker3

[51:14]And if you happen to be watching on YouTube, don't forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel as it also helps others discover this show and join our community.

Speaker1

[51:26]We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's episode, what you learned from our conversation with Tim. Feel free to leave a review or share your feedback or questions with us. Tell us what you liked or what you'd like to hear next.

Speaker3

[51:39]And I think you can also, if you want to, connect with us on LinkedIn. And there's also a website, theintangiblebrand.com. So those are other places to find resources from us.

Speaker1

[51:52]So thanks for joining us on The Intangible Brand. And Remember, the strongest brands are built on the experiences that they create, both for their clients and their teams.

Speaker0

[52:01]