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GAZETTE
N W
JUNE 1993
Quality - the Competitive Edge
Delegates at the Law Society's Annual
Conference, held at the end of May in
Connemara, heard presentations from
four speakers on the importance of
quality management in solicitors'
practices.
Patrick Hayes,
Managing
Director of Corporate Image
Management Limited, said in his
| address to the conference, that quality
was not a new-fangled fad but had
always been an important issue. For
j
example, wine makers in Paris had
| banded together in 1835 to promote
their own standard of quality - premier
cru. What was different now was that
the environment in which people did
business had undergone fundamental
change on an enormous scale and
people supplying a service ignored that
fact at their peril. He said he was very
conscious as a business man in a new
industry - public relations - that he was
speaking to members of a very long-
established profession which was
rooted in tradition and driven by
precedent. However, the challenges
facing us all were the same. We were
living in an era of competition the like
of which the world had never seen
before. There were too many PR
consultants, too many banks, too many
car dealers, too many solicitors. Even
corporate giants like IBM, Digital etc.
were being humbled by the market.
Consumers were saying "I want value,
quality, service and if I don't get it I'll
be as mad as hell and I'll take my
business down the road. I want service
and in a market of over supply, I can
get it."
In his view it would be difficult for the
solicitors' profession to resist the tide
of increasing competition. The
profession had the option of saying
"we'll dig in, we'll row back" but, in
his opinion, it would be a very high
risk strategy. Current thinking was not
| in favour of monopolies. The public
was against them and the media was
behind the public. Therefore, he
believed that the solicitors' profession
The speakers at the Annual Conference
v
Robert Pierse, Patrick Hayes, Raymond
Andrew Lockley and Philip Hamer.
had to go out and meet the competitive
situation head on. Paddy Hayes said
that surveys had consistently shown
that purchasers of services were
influenced in their choice by five
factors: quality, reliability, speed of
delivery, courtesy and price.
The customer for life
Paddy Hayes spoke about the
importance of the concept of the
customer for life. He said practices
should consider the capital worth of
keeping a customer for life, since it
was five times more profitable to do
business with an existing customer
than to cultivate a new one.
As a public relations practitioner, he
believed that public relations was not a
solution to problems except to
communications problems. Underlying
problems which often gave rise to poor
PR could in many cases be dealt with
by addressing the quality issue. He
said that people in the service
industries should embrace what he
described as the "slogan for the
decade":
I believe what you say,
because / see what you do.
rith the President of the Law Society, l-r:
Monahan, President of the Law Society;
A deliberate searching experience
"Most solicitors have never sat down
and considered how their clients judge
the service being provided by their
office", said
Robert Pierse,
whose
firm, Pierse & Fitzgibbon, was the first
firm of solicitors in Ireland to obtain
the Quality Mark. In his address,
Robert Pierse described the assessment
procedures for the Quality Mark as
being put through a "deliberate
searching experience". His firm had
had to look at its process of service,
evaluate it and re-establish it on a
quality basis. This process got written
down and was presented as a sort of
'bible'. "I see, therefore, this quality
approach as a new look at how we do
things and how we are seen to do
them. Outside objective criteria
for a service profession are
applied to our office. International
standards are refined into our
client care."
He posed a series of questions which,
he said, firms would have to consider
if they wanted to achieve a quality
service:
• Do you consider your professional
work a service?
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