Priority for a client servicing team: Quantity or Quality?

Ideally, every client servicing team should be capable of prioritising competing tasks and responsibilities without sacrificing service quality. The team should manage all the tasks at hand well, instead of churning out huge amounts of work with no heed to quality. However, under normal circumstances, an attempt to meet high quantity demand often leads to a decline in quality. More often than not, this challenge of having to prioritise one over the other is born out of the over-eagerness of an organisation. The approach of increasing output without enough resources to cover the operations tends to compromise the service quality. It’s the management’s role to ensure that the client servicing team is not overburdened with work. Clients shouldn’t have to suffer because of an organisation’s heavy workload. “Speaking in terms of broad concepts, quality trumps quantity, any day. Under a time crunch and without resources to back quality, catering to large numbers is a recipe for disaster,” cautions Dr. Uday Salunkhe, Group Director, Prin. L.N. Welingkar Institute of Management Research and Development (WeSchool). However, it may not be a good idea to prioritise quality over quantity, every time. For example, in the case of a client in need of high-quantity, low-cost, low-margin, services in a short frame of time, it might become necessary for the client servicing team to aim for quantity instead of quality. Here, the team will have considered a third option – client satisfaction. It is common knowledge that it is more expensive to find new customers than it is to retain them. Every client comes with a unique set of requirements that the servicing team must learn to navigate. A team can provide good service and retain clients only if it understands and manages to deliver these requirements. But, what if factoring in client satisfaction doesn’t help with the decision-making process? Imagine a scenario where a client needs a huge marketing campaign to be prepared and rolled out in a day. Big investments have been made to book the advertising spaces but there is no design or content yet, whatsoever. What do you think should be the priority of the client servicing team? Should they focus their efforts on the meeting the numbers while they forgo quality or should they emphasise on maintaining quality and ignore the numbers? Dr. Salunkhe answers these questions, “Any client would want both quantity and quality standards to be met. But, since in a hypothetical scenario, where both are at a paradox, it is the job of the client servicing team to evaluate pursuing which would hurt the client less.” Exceptional client servicing goes beyond expectations. It is about delighting clients by providing value. “There is certainly nothing wrong with just doing your job,” says Dr. Uday Salunkhe, “That alone is a tall order in many cases. But, if you wish to stand apart, you must differentiate yourself and make yourself indispensable. At WeSchool, students (or Welingkarites, as we like to call them) inculcate leadership skills which prepare them to make informed and effective decisions quickly, even in the most difficult of situations.”