Craft a Superior Client Experience

Author: Allen Cash

As a recruiter working in a firm which treats you like a business partner, you must be focused on your clients and think strategically about client relationship management. During tough economic conditions creating a superior client experience differentiates you from your competition.

Client experience:
To help you deliver a superior ongoing client experience, a structured method of regularly and successfully interacting with your clients works the best. If you keep your clients well informed and up-to-date, they will be more engaged in the process and more likely to send referrals your way.

Building rapport with new clients begins with presenting a clear overview of your firm’s expertise and capabilities. Guided by a disciplined recruiting process, convey that your goal is to thoroughly understand your client’s hiring challenges and formulate a tailored recruiting solution.

Educate your clients about the challenges of recruiting and how your firm has effectively responded to those challenges. This plays a major role in building a credible image of your firm. Following are some of the areas where innovation can help your clients build loyalty towards your services:

• Building a highly capable recruiting team
• Holding regular client meetings or scheduling conference calls
• Building a customized sourcing and recruiting strategy
• Being critical on key process implementation and continuous learning.
• Investing in your employees and encouraging performance oriented attitude.
• Foreseeing the changing market conditions and strategizing accordingly.

Get to know your clients well.
This is the first step in presenting a superior experience for your client. Get to know your clients by keenly observing their business personality and conducting methodical research. Your primary objective is to learn all that you can about your clients and use it at the right time to develop trust.

Review your client’s business goals and objectives. Your ability to listen carefully and adapt to client needs quickly is essential. A fact-gathering session is absolutely the most important time you spend with your clients, as it sets the tone for your future relationships.

Be proactive in stating challenges and offering solutions.

Demonstrate clearly to your client that you understand their goals by developing a modified process based on their specific needs. Carefully document the process and get the client’s approval on the work process documents.

No matter how enthusiastic your clients are during the initial stages avoid haste. Ensure that all the processes are effectively set. The most powerful thing you can do is to give the client suggestions like their business partner focusing completely on their interests. Over a period of time when you give intelligent suggestions to the client they begin to appreciate your acute business acumen.

Implementation of the ‘high quality client experience’ designed processes.

Establish regular communication on a daily operational level, this will clarify client expectations and business priorities every step of the way. Your actions and client expectations will be in sync and you will develop a much stronger expertise of the client’s account. In addition to the daily conversations set up regular weekly or bi-weekly discussions with the clients. These are high level business consulting discussions where you go over the reports, observe trends and suggest changes to maximize productivity. This strengthens your position as a recruiting specialist whose priority is developing a long-term consulting relationship. When the client comes to an agreement with you on implementing new processes an innovative and the fast moving client account is established.

Always be alert.
Anticipate problems before they arise and prepare a plan of action. Present the plan with the possible challenges to the clients before they bring up concerns. This is important, as it is not uncommon for your clients to experience heightened anxiety in critical business situations. Having a ready plan of action will reduce the client’s panic and will not defocus from producing results.

Constant follow-up.
Follow up with the client by always asking them for feedback and areas of improvement. This helps you understand the logic and intelligence of your client’s expectations. The constant feedback seeking helps in raising the bar of performance within your own company.

It is imperative to constantly monitor your own performance. One of the best ways is to conduct periodic client relationship surveys. Ask your clients to rate your services objectively in terms of the overall productivity. Be clear in showing clients that your desire to constantly improve is to produce better results for them.

Client relationship surveys give you the opportunity to examine other issues that might exist. It also creates opportunities to get referrals if you have delivered a superior client experience over a period of time. The goal should always be ‘customer delight’ and not just mere satisfaction.

First-rate technology keeps you focused on client relationships.
Effective technology and administrative support fine tunes the superior client experience. High speed internet and error free networking can help you spend more time with your clients uninterrupted. Automated processes for the administration of new accounts, user centric designed websites and error free performance reporting are the basic necessities for offshore recruiting.

This is the iPlace way of creating an exceptional and sophisticated client experience. Most of the iPlace clients have valued and endorsed this approach.

In my opinion, offshore recruiting is moving away from a typical ‘service oriented business’ dependent on an individual recruiter’s performance. Instead, it is emerging to be an integrated and consultative business. To make the best out of emerging trends, stay consistent with your commitment to differentiate your practice from your competition and brand yourself as innovative thinkers. Give your clients the experience of tomorrow, today!