The idea of delighting your customers is rarely questioned in business. From frontline customer service reps to in-house legal teams working with ‘internal clients’, most of us believe that success means pleasing our clients.

In fact, 73% of general counsel agree that success requires pleasing clients, according to Gartner’s 2019 General Counsel Personal Effectiveness Diagnostic.

But what if this doesn’t hold true? Or worse, that focussing on pleasing clients can actually undermine GC performance?

According to Gartner, a focus on pleasing clients can:

• lead to a 31% reduction in personal effectiveness when GC fails to push back on client-suggested work or priorities that please clients;

• reduce a legal department’s focus on strategic priorities; and

• weaken or undermine client relationships.

So if going ‘above and beyond’ is not the path to success, what is?

The answer: make it easy.

Reduce your client’s effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved. In simple terms, remove all obstacles.

Indeed Gartner research shows that the:

“ROI of meeting customer expectations and making their interactions effortless is much higher than “delighting” customers… Business partners don’t want pleasant support so much as they seek partners who deliver business outcomes. For GC, this means making it easy to achieve agreed-upon client priorities instead of adopting a resource-intensive strategy to meet all client requests.”

Understanding this can make a big impact on your legal team.

Reframing the service challenge away from delighting clients to making things easy for them can be highly illuminating, even liberating.

Asking team members to exceed expectations can lead to confusion, wasted time and effort. Telling them to “make it easy” gives them a solid foundation for action.

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