Great Customer Service in Consulting: 2024 Edition

This blog was originally published on August 3, 2017 by Kognitiv’s CEO, Luke Switkowski. Seven years later, I thought it was appropriate to bring it out of the archives and share what is still so important to our business today! With a few tweaks and add-ons to polish Luke’s piece, please enjoy this “oldie but goodie”!

What Makes Us Special?

Clients have often asked us: ‘How do you do it?’ – with regard to Kognitiv, Workday, and our ability to acquire business. To us, a lot of it starts and ends with great customer service. Even with the advent of AI chatbots and social media support, it’s still important that we recognize the key reasons that our clients reach out to us for support and lean in to providing them with top-notch service.

I am going to present a few examples of poor customer service, how it’s a great opportunity for Kognitiv, and explain our approach to consulting services in such situations. We now have hundreds of clients and have amassed a lot of experience over the years!

Problem: My consultant told me that what I want configured in Workday is not possible.

Any time we come across a scenario like this, it’s an opportunity to win over the client. I’m not sure it can even get better than this because if you can prove the opposite, two things happen:

1. An immediate trust factor is established. Whoever was doing the work before will at best be consulted for a 2nd opinion, if they’re lucky.
2. The client will, by default, give you more business opportunities after this experience. Why would they trust someone who did not deliver results previously?

When someone else says no, we like to offer another creative solution. You don’t have to take ‘no’ for an answer with us.

Problem: My consultant is unresponsive. They’re not answering my requests and I’m not getting the help I need.

A high level of engagement with our clients is one of our core beliefs at Kognitiv. Any time there is an opportunity to provide a higher level of response to a client, we will grasp it. This is a strong indicator of operational efficiency, and if there are ever too many clients with too many requests that you can’t field, something isn’t right internally.

We have time for you and won’t leave you out in the cold. Your business is important to us!

To provide great customer service, there are a few things we always do and make sure we stay consistent on.

1. We try to help our clients, not sell to them all the time. Believe it or not, if you do a good job, you get inbound sales without much effort. A $3,000 project can easily turn into a $300,000 engagement over time.
2. We are sincere and honest about our approach, findings, and expertise. This goes both ways; when we try to accommodate a specific client requirement or if we think a request is out of bounds from a practical point of view.
3. We thrive when clients are happy and we try to make sure each client has the best consulting experience possible.
4. We are easy to work with. We try very hard to work on terms that suit our clients instead of trying to box them into something they don’t need. Yes, there are massive challenges for the ‘back-end’ of the company to make it work, but that should be our problem not the client’s.

Luke also wrote a short piece regarding ‘Doing a Great Job’. The concept there – doing your best, always, is the most important part of your job  – can be added here as another point related to great customer service. If the work is shoddy and causes negative downstream impacts, it doesn’t matter how good we are at everything else. Any consultant should desire to leave a legacy of being great by providing excellent customer service to every client and giving them something they couldn’t get elsewhere. 

Things have not changed in the 7 years since Luke wrote his original piece: companies operating as Workday consultancy firms still need to focus on the client experience aspect of their business. The experience clients are looking for needs to be good enough that they’ll not only come back again and again, they’ll tell their friends. Or even better, they’ll hire us at their new employer when they change jobs!

If you’ve experienced the problems mentioned above and are looking to make a change, we’re here for you. Contact us today to take advantage of 10 free support hours and experience some great customer service!