Is Client Loyalty Dead?

Week of September 8, 2014
I've been pondering this question a lot lately: Is Client Loyalty Dead?

Things keep floating up out of my subconscious in response, like when I worked for my father's law firm. He told me that clients, including managers of corporations and government officials, never liked being shifted from the attorney they were familiar with to another in the same firm. The client saw their primary relationship as being with the individual attorney, not the law firm. This was a particularly difficult issue in the large law firm in Portland where he first practiced because senior attorneys wanted the younger, less-expensive attorneys to do as much of the work as possible, which led to more profitability. And while clients may not have understood the motive, they certainly felt slighted if "their" attorney wasn't made readily available.

So maybe our thinking about loyalty is faulty -- that someone could be loyal to a firm/company. It follows that it is easier to establish and maintain a relationship with clients on an individual basis, not a firmwide or organizational one. 

What are we doing to create those relationships? 

I think that part of my role in marketing is to help identify the individual qualities of the person and then help select the technical individual who is the best match. Client research has to go beyond what can be read on the web or in a report. It is equally important to know as much about the individual client staff as it is to know about the organization, company, and market.

 It is a two-step process (at least): 1) Identify the clients and the people within that client organization who are most influential and figure out what makes them tick/what kind of people they are. 2) Then identify the strengths of your BD/Marketing team and match them up to the people at the client organization. 

If we want any semblance of loyalty, perhaps we need to look at how we approach our clients (and with whom) first. It is bringing the "friend making" to a conscious level, and pairing the "right" people together to create something extraordinary. 

I'm still pondering this... More next week...