Why don’t professional services firms create value for their customers? In this Expert Insight Interview, Dom Meli discusses the death of professional service firms. Dom Meli is a Principal at People At Their Best, international keynote speaker, and author.
The interview discusses:
- Changing approach to stay relevant
- Customer experience as the most valued
- Things that only people can give
- Things to focus on in the future
Change Approach, Stay Relevant
To stay relevant, professional services firms have to add value to their services. However, many of these firms still believe that adding value means delivering service to customers through knowledge and expertise. Actually, creating value for customers has shifted to creating a customer experience. Thus, consultancies and other professional services firms should create a customer experience since their customers want and pay for it.
The Value is Customer Experience
During the industrial and information age, professional services firms were creating value through providing data. Today, businesses compete to be the fastest in learning customer needs and differentiating customer experience. Companies need to start to listen to what their customers want and to focus on providing them a solution. Also, many companies still measure their performance and define success internally. Instead, the best measure for the company’s performance and success should be the difference that service has made in a customer’s life.
Man v Machine
Delivering a great product or service to the customer does not create a good relationship. A good relationship should already exist before doing anything in order to know what the customer really values. In today’s world, almost everything can be copied, automated, and outsourced. But three things cannot, and those three things are: making someone feel valued, being empathetic toward others, and helping people through conversation to find sense in uncertainty. Thus, it is of utmost importance to create something that machines cannot copy, such as an experience through human interaction.
Experience is the Future
People buy for only two reasons. To get rid of the problem they have or to create a reality they want. Thus, creating value means helping customers define what they want and making them feel like they are going towards it. The only way to deliver that value for the customer is to interact with a customer. Besides, the buying experience is 70 percent of how people feel while doing it. People are even willing to pay more if they know that they will get a better buying experience. Thus, homework for professional services companies in 2021 is to focus more on exploring new ways of how they can engage their clients in the process and create a better customer experience.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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