It’s No Wonder Why Your Doctor, Lawyer & Accountant Suck at Service
5 Quick Tips to Help you Make Price Irrelevant
1) Customer Service Feature Story
One thing for sure, when customer service rankings come out, if you want to see where lawyers, doctors, or accountants fall, keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. You will find them with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, internet providers, and airlines.
Q. Did you hear the story of a client who raved about their _______ (insert lawyer, doctor, or accountant)?
A. Me neither.
Before I go any further, I do want to point out that there are examples of companies from these industries that are good and, in some cases, excellent at client experience. Some are our clients. Unfortunately, those are outliers. So why are these industries so archaic in the client experience they deliver? Here are the top 4 key reasons:
1. Abundance of technical education
Not only does it take a great deal of formal technical education leading up to getting licenses in these professions, but it doesn’t ever stop. Their ongoing technical education is constant. Which doesn’t leave much time available to focus on strong business practices, building a strong corporate culture, and a world-class client experience.
2. Ego
Let’s address the elephant in the room. These are highly educated professionals who can appear arrogant. Knowing their patients or clients need their expertise led to growing very healthy egos. Today, technical brilliance is a commodity. Over the last decade we have seen a commoditization of professional knowledge. For decades, professionals were able to charge premium fees for their expertise, which was considered a rare and valuable skill. As a result of living in a world with access to the internet, the value of expertise in many professions has been dramatically reduced. Much of what customers would have called an expert for in the past—in private banking, consulting, or even engineering, say—can be found online in a few minutes today.
3. Lack of soft skill training
It is not just the front-line employees who need to increase their service aptitude through more soft skill training. I have worked with hundreds of organizations and professionals such as accountants, financial advisors, consultants, lawyers, programmers, and doctors,
whose technical skills are at a much higher level than their people skills. There is a void of human empathy, an inability to make an emotional connection or build rapport. These
industries spend little to no time training anyone in their organization, technical and non-technical, on soft skills to increase their service aptitude.
4. The need for non-technical senior leaders
Primarily because of reasons #1 and #3, 100% of their training and education was spent on their technical training, lawyers, doctors, and accountants are not the ones that should be in charge of businesses operations. Yes, typically they are the entrepreneur, the founder of the company, which is fine. I am not suggesting they step down. However, often times, the entrepreneur is usually the technical geek, and should be focusing on that side of the business. See Steve Jobs part 1 at Apple. See why Elon Musk was ousted from his first two startups: Zip2, and PayPal. The best entrepreneurs and CEO’s build their leadership team with skillsets they are lacking. Now look at who all the senior leaders and partners are in law firms, accounting firms, and medical practices. See the pattern? See the disconnect?
These professionals need to realize quickly that it is not about a tradeoff between IQ and EQ. It is the marriage of them.
* We are now accepting applications for the 2021 Customer eXperience Executive Academy (CXEA), which starts April 2021 with virtual classes until travel restrictions ease.
2) Episode 34 of The Customer Service Revolution Podcast
In Episode 34 of The Customer Service Revolution Podcast, The DiJulius Group’s Chief Revolution Officer John DiJulius and Senior Customer Experience Consultan
t Dave Murray talk about the legacy of Tony Hseih, the man who built Zappos into a customer experience powerhouse. Hseih pioneered so many revolutionizing customer experience used in all industries today.
What you will learn
- How Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos, took an unthinkable business model and turned it into a billion-dollar business.
- How Zappos produced higher sales by focusing less on marketing and advertising and more on customer service and customer experience.
- How Zappos offers their employees a quitting bonus to filter out the people who are not truly bought into their culture.
- How Zappos had to offer free shipping and free returns just to get people to give them a try.
- How Zappos doesn’t track conventional call center metrics, like average call time, instead that measure if their reps made a personal emotional connection during the call.
- Hear what happened when we called Zappos and asked their call center rep what the weather was in a different part of the country.
3) Must watch short video
Customer Experience Consultant Jess Pischel shares How to Keep your Customer Service Focus and Momentum Going
4) Quote of The Week
“We can’t get into a customers head until we get to their hearts.”
5) Join us for our webinar on How to Build Your own 6 figure CX Coaching Business
Are you waking up before your alarm goes off, throwing the covers off and jumping out of bed because you are so excited about your workday, your career, and the impact you are having? Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who do feel like that. Maybe it is time you become one of them. Join John DiJulius on March 10th, 3 pm EST, for our webinar on How to Build Your own 6 Figure CX Coaching Business.
In this webinar, find out how you can start a business around your passion and grow it to six figures, working just a few days a week.
You’ll hear:
- what it takes to become a successful coach and business owner
- how to find your first clients
- the formula to follow to ensure your success
- the benefit a community plays when you’re a solopreneur
- how to earn six figures your first year
- Who should apply to become a CX Coach
