The Owners' Manual | Issue 11 | Fall 2017

During the months of May and June, nineteen Client Care training sessions were held in various offices. The goal was to make sure all our Employee Owners were made aware of the importance of Client Care and given some basic tools to understand how they can help assure that we continue to improve in that regard at all levels across the company. The “Client Care Team” were pleased at the enthusiasm and level of engagement by the attendees and would like to thank all of you for your time, participation, and feedback. In fact, it was feedback we received that resulted in revising our definition of Client Care. It has since been edited and now reads as follows: CLIENT CARE: The act of attending to the needs of a person or group that is dependent upon our support and the delivery of our commitments while providing an exceptional experience through service. The new definition includes an emphasis on making an impression through the “experience” of working with BL Companies. Anyone can attend to the needs of another if they choose to do so and set their minds to it; but what can truly set BL Companies apart is the experience of how we provide service. Think of the difference between visiting an amusement park or DisneyWorld. There’s no question which one leaves you speaking about the experience rather than simply

clients and provide them with a memorable experience unless we first take care of each other. In the words of Damon Richards: Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. It’s not a coincidence that our Care Competencies for our internal and external clients are almost identical. We need to apply the same level of care and behaviors to both. Internally, we need to make sure we are attending to the needs of our project team, across disciplines, and across offices. We have already received feedback from work seamlessly across offices and deliver on our promises, where other consultants have failed. There is still room for improvement, but it’s a great example of how our internal Client Care translates to external Client Care. We’re now seeing the same results with the services we provide for Amazon. This is a demanding client with very ambitious deadlines. Our responsiveness and ability to communicate has made an immediate impression. Although we are relatively new to the fold, we are already being sought after by the project managers at Amazon, who trust that they can count on us to deliver. We have worked hard to understand this new client and address their concerns. That has been made possible by taking care of our internal clients, supporting one another, and working as a team to deliver on our promises. clients such as FedEx who have noticed our ability to

the rides. So, how do we deliver a memorable experience? We can begin by practicing the nine behaviors that define our Care Competencies: UnderstandYour Client Be Adaptable Be an Advocate for the Project Be Responsive Be Accountable Communicate Effectively Before the training sessions you may not have thought your role was one that required you to focus on client care. Hopefully the training sessions showed you why that couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone – yes, everyone – can demonstrate Client Care through their behaviors toward our internal clients. As we learned from our examination of Southwest Airlines, we can’t possibly satisfy our external Act Professionally Build Relationships Be aTeam Player

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