Legal and Business Writing Consultant : Lori Herz : Write For Clients : Professional Writing and Online Content Consulting

In an earlier post, I discussed the concept of Client Experience Management. As a business writer for service professionals, I’m also very interested in the related concept of Client Evangelism.

Client evangelists are people who are so pleased with, and passionate about, services they receive that they voluntarily shout the provider’s praises until the rafters ring. I first learned about this kind of consumer zeal through Ben McConnell’s and Jackie Huba’s terrific book, Creating Customer Evangelists, and now continue my education at their Church of the Customer Blog.

Always on the hunt for practical input on this front, I was pleased to run across a McConnell-Huba article titled Customer Evangelists: Spreading the Word. In it, the authors list some telltale signs of client evangelism, including:

• Clients passionately recommend you to others

• Clients give you unsolicited praise and feedback

• Clients forgive your occasional services lapses, but tell you about them

• Planning a social media strategy that incorporates blogs, e-mails and podcasts

• Soliciting client feedback

• Creating an open, two-way line of communication

Providing another take on this topic is an article called Capturing the Voice of the Client culled from the Originate! Business Development Newsletter (the article is part of a free preview issue of a newsletter that's available by paid subscription). Documenting an initiative undertaken by the law firm Patton Boggs, the piece highlights how the firm has built a strong service culture around creating opportunities to listen to, and hear, its clients.

One way the firm accomplishes this goal is by publishing a biannual magazine. The publication gives its “key clients” a chance to “talk about issues relating to their businesses.” Likewise, it offers the firm an invaluable opportunity to showcase its “intimate knowledge of the client’s business, organization, culture, industry and financial metrics.”

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A client recently asked me to gather and review some articles on life with the ubiquitous BlackBerry. Although I’m not a user myself, I am closely related to some major BlackBerry enthusiasts. So, I was eager to read up on the subject.

As I’ve noted before, successful business relationships require intimacy – a willingness to get to know the human beings we work with and want to work with. It’s basically the same kind of intimacy that fuels healthy connections to family and friends. But, according to some observers, the tools that many of us now depend on for everyday connectivity may be compromising our capacity for intimacy.

In a Forbes.com article on PDAs (as in personal digital assistants) and intimate relationships, one expert describes this kind of wireless technology as “the modern-day equivalent to the spinster chaperone.” Although PDAs appear to boost relationships by providing users access to one another 24/7, the interactions they facilitate are generally quick and impersonal. As these “nanosecond communications” become the norm for us, we expect “instant relationships as well as all other kinds of instant gratification.”

As a WSJ.com piece on BlackBerry Orphans suggests, this expectation may not play out so well in the real world of human-to-human connection. While some of the quotes from kids dealing with PDA-obsessed parents are funny, the sentiments behind the words are powerful and hard to ignore. These kids are expressing a real need for attention – they want to be more visible to their parents. But, at many points throughout the day, they’re largely invisible because their parents have exchanged intimacy for constant connectivity.

For another perspective on the nexus between constant connectivity, our (past, present, future) everyday lives and our business communications, set aside a few minutes to watch this thought-provoking video, Did You Know? (tipped at Marketing Profs Daily Fix).

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I’m very interested in a business trend called Customer Experience Management (CEM). Evolving in tandem with the new experience economy, the CEM model considers a customer’s relationship with a service or product from the vantage point of user experience. It asks providers to understand how their customers’ lives are enhanced or depleted as a result of consuming their goods or services. This doesn’t require super sleuthing. More often than not, this kind of customer – or client – information is readily available.

That’s because people tend to translate their consumer experiences into stories that they quickly share with others. A great example of this comes by way of a Fast Company article in which some “customer service champions” describe their own “stellar customer experiences.” Here, Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy depicts his monthly outings to a local junk store where the proprietor understands how much his customers thrill at the hunt for buried treasure. There’s also an anecdote about exceptional book store service relayed by Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark. Referring to something she calls the Cheers factor, Clark says: “People don't have to know your name, but there has to be that connection and recognition of your value as a customer and a person.”

Echoing Clark's perspective is the poignant customer experience story set out in a much-talked-about blog post called I Heart Zappos (flagged by Seth Godin). In it, a woman describes how she bought several pairs of shoes for her ailing mother from online retailer Zappos.com. Some of the shoes didn’t fit and she intended to return them, but couldn’t get around to it. When Zappos learned that the woman’s mom had died, the company sidestepped its corporate policy and arranged for UPS to pick up the unreturned shoes. What happened next, told in the customer’s own words, is what’s most heartening:

“Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos. I burst into tears. I’m a sucker for kindness, and if that isn’t one of the nicest things I’ve ever had happen to me, I don’t know what is.”

This kind of positive customer experience clearly derived from sincere human-to-human exchange. It wasn’t orchestrated or contrived.

With sincere interaction as a lodestar, service professionals can engage in Client Experience Management through written business communications.

For openers, you can offer newsletters, blog posts, articles, e-books and other content that helps clients navigate their business questions and challenges. The objective isn’t to tout your greatness or push your services. Instead, you have to come with a genuine desire to provide relevant and practical information that benefits your clients and prospects. When you close a project or resolve a matter, you can continue to engage CEM by sending a personalized thank you note welcoming your clients’ candid feedback about you, your work and your firm.

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Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone is one of my favorite books on building business relationships. You’ll find a nice overview of its core messages in this USA Today article.

Ferrazzi recognizes that business relationships are personal. To help us make this connection, he encourages us to find our currency. We all have this particular kind of currency. It’s our “capacity to help somebody else fulfill their mission or vision of themselves in some way.”

In fact, according to Ferrazzi, most of us have multiple currencies. Some are naturally stronger than others. Typically, he says, “our most valuable currencies are things we do that seem as natural as breathing -- natural to us, but to others, these skills are a real rarity!”

Your business writing provides a clear channel for conveying your currencies to clients and prospects. But, to optimize these communications, you first need to pinpoint what your currencies are.

To do this, Ferrazzi suggests that you consider the following questions:

• What things do you say about yourself and your interests that excite or intrigue people you meet?

• When did you help make someone else a success at something?

• Of the times you were able to give, which worked the best and which felt the best?

• How can you purposely incorporate those currencies into your sales and networking plans?

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A few years back, consultant Elise Bauer introduced me to the term thought leader, which she defines as “a recognized leader in one’s field.” Bauer says that this recognition comes when “the outside world” acknowledges you for freely and generously sharing your intelligence and expertise to meet the needs of your clients and the “broader marketplace” in which you operate.

Picking up on this theme, author and consultant David Meerman Scott provides some great tips on producing thought leadership content. He notes that - whether presented via white papers, blogs, newsletters or reports – this kind of written material:

• Addresses issues of interest to your clients and prospects

• Aims to educate and entertain, but not to sell

• Solves problems and answers questions

• Shows that you and your firm “are smart and worth doing business with”

Scott is one of my favorite sources of information on creating excellent Web and print content. He offers his insights through his blog, webink now, and his terrific book, Cashing In with Content.

For the visual learners among us, Brian Carroll has a post on Using Thought Leader Content As A Lead Generation Tool that includes a great mindmap of client-centric content that can position you as a thought leader.

Rounding out the tips is Scott Ginsberg’s post on 17 ways to become a thought leader. My favorite, of course, is “write, write, write” because, as Ginsberg puts it, “[i]f you’re not capturing your thoughts, ideas, experiences, stories, advice and insights, forget all about this whole thought leader thing."

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Many service professionals dread the thought of networking. They would love to find a philosopher’s stone for converting their loose business contacts into a golden network of prospects, clients and referral sources. But, fantasy aside, successful networking requires action and persistence. Like any relationship-building endeavor, it also requires mutuality - a healthy combination of giving and receiving that’s organic and not contrived.

As it’s taken root in the service professions, blogging has become a channel for creating and fortifying natural webs of business connections. (If you need an introduction to business blogging, take a look at Kevin O’Keefe’s excellent collection of tips and thoughts on Blog Basics and the Art of Blogging) These networks typically build around useful and relevant information bloggers offer to address their readers’ business needs, challenges and concerns.

However, as Susan Cartier Liebel recently detailed, service providers can also cultivate business contacts by blogging about personal interests. Liebel’s post introduces us to lawyer Michael Keenan. After starting The Connecticut Elder Law Blog, Keenan launched Glastonbury Running to share insights and news with other local runners. Keenan’s blogs link to one another and to his conventional website. As Liebel reports: “Little did he realize [ ] his running blog would get more hits then his professional blog. Because they are linked he gets a tremendous amount of business from people who, first, find him and then relate to him as a runner.”

Keenan’s blogging experience highlights how we can make valuable business connections when we share our knowledge and ideas with people who can benefit from them. The connecting points forged through this kind of exchange are the sturdiest building blocks of present and future business associations.

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Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen proffers an interesting question about slide presentations that applies equally well to our everyday business writing. He asks: “What can you do to consciously reduce the nonessential?” In other words, how can you trim your language and messages so that they’re “simple yet not watered down, trivialized, or compromised?”

Reynolds gives us a taste of this “elimination of the superfluous” by sharing the story of a fish monger who pares down the words on his store’s sign until he realizes that they’re entirely unnecessary - the store, by its very nature (and odor), speaks for itself.

I really like this post, story and the accompanying comments thread because they highlight how simplicity can be a powerful ally in our effort to create memorable communications.

Dan Pink takes another look at simplicity in his Wired Magazine article on Pecha Kucha. Pecha Kucha (the Japanese term for chatter) is a streamlined form of presentation design and delivery. It requires communicators to convey their message using 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That’s a whopping six minutes and 40 seconds for the entire presentation.

Pink, an accomplished writer and speaker, tries his hand at Pecha Kucha and posts the clip of his endeavor. It shows that achieving this kind of simplicity when communicating is not as simple as it seems.

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