Client Care Flashcards
What is client care?
- Tailoring your service to meet the client’s needs
- Looking after the clients best interests and providing an appropriate service that satisfies the clients needs and achieves value for money.
- Identifying, winning and keeping clients. As well as aftercare and maintaining the client relationship.
You mention behaviours that deliver good client care. What are these?
- Acting in a way that promotes the RICS 5 ethical and professional standards (Service, Trust, Integrity, Respect and Responsibility)
- Understanding client requirements
- Clear communication and ongoing dialogue
- Delivery on time and appropriate resource
- Trust based relationship
- Quality assurance and CHP
How would you adapt your approach?
- WHY - All clients are different so our interaction with them must change.
- HOW –
o Research the client and the market they operate in
§ Gives idea of experience, ethos and structure
o Robust briefing process
o Clear ongoing lines of communication
o Important to establish what the client will measure project success on
What factors would adapting your approach depend on?
o Varying levels of experience, resource and objectives (time, cost, quality)
Why should good client care exceed contractual obligations?
- Providing good client care requires some activities that are not typically included in a standard scope of services. For example:
o Understanding client’s business and internal procedures
o Robust quality assurance and complaints handling procedure
o Facilitating client feedback
What is the benefit of exceeding basic contractual obligations?
- Reputation
- Repeat business
- Maintain good client relationship
Give an example of when you’ve exceeded contractual obligations?
Blossom Street - Project Charter
Why is clear communication and ongoing dialogue important for good client care?
· Builds open, trusting client relationships i.e. BL ‘difficult conversations early’
· Prevents misunderstanding
· Allows for any issues to be discussed early and resolved
· Allows the client to monitor progress of the project e.g. newsflash
How would you identify and understand a client’s requirements?
- Identify client’s organisation – ethos, structure, experience, policies
- Understand and establish communication and reporting strategy for client’s internal / external structures
- Identify stakeholders
- How – ask questions, experience, have a list to work from
- Understand the market the client operates in
- Briefing process
- What task / service is required?
- Time / cost / quality?
Why is it essential to have formal procedures in place? Give an example?
· Important to document key project developments and these must be clear to avoid misunderstanding
· Must be concise and provide the right level of information
· Prevents surprises to the client as they can track project progression and flag if KPIs are not being met.
· Examples: Financial reporting, presentations, weekly newsflash, monthly reports, lessons learnt workshops
What is the RICS complaint’s handling procedure?
• A firm must operate a Complaints Handling Procedure (CHP)
• It must include a redress system
• A firm must have a complaints handling officer and a complaints handling log
• CHP are free of charge to the complainant initially but some B2B complainants may be part paid if the ADR process is used
• Sole traders can’t deal with complaints themselves
• Understand your own CHP and know the process for dealing with complaints
• Time limits for RICS compliant policy
○ Acknowledge with 7 days
○ Substantive reply within a further 21 days (total 28 days)
○ 2nd stage redress if client dissatisfied
What is your company’s complaints handling procedure?
- Clarify complaint
- Inform line manager
- Acknowledge complaint within 5 days
- Formally respond within 14-18 days
- Formally record and investigate
- Internal lessons learnt held thereafter
- No set mechanism for referring to third party for redress, if remains unresolved.
How did you report progress on Blossom Street? Examples?
I reported to the client through a mixture of formal and informal processes. One example of this is the monthly report which is issued to the client on a monthly basis and then reviewed in a meeting. It reflects key project risks, costs and programme progress.
Other examples:
○ Regular weekly catch ups
○ Newsflashes - high level summary of activity to the client
○ CapEx - report on project expenditure and agree budget movements if required
Tell me about this new financial process on Blossom Street? / Give an example of when you’ve adapted your approach to meet client requirements?
There was a new business wide financial system put in place which did not enable me to report to the level of detail required on the project.
To address the issue, I tailored my approach and created a tracker to the required level of detail which was then used for client reporting.
What did the BS financial internal process not show?
o Our project often had multiple suppliers under the same capex budget line and the system couldn’t track individual suppliers paid to date.
o Tracker I created reflected each supplier separately and allowed us to track payments across all disciplines & plots on the project.
