Client Services Breakfast

13 May 2014

The Challenges of a CS professional

• 17 years = 119! • Falling into CS • Growing up• My passion

About Me

Challenges

• Challenges of being a Client Services professional

• Challenges of having a Client Services function within your business

CS practitioner challenges Understanding which key skills, attributes and

competencies are associated with the different roles within a CS team

Keeping up to date Finding peer forums that add value enough to create the

time and space to engage Recognition of the CS function amongst peers and clients

Organisational challenges Attracting, nurturing and retaining talent Professional development in an ever-changing, dynamic

sector Role definition and ensuring process and culture

appropriately integrate, ensuring a CS professional can add maximum value within their own company

Chargeability and ensuring that CS is not an overhead but a fee earning function within the business

Developing a CS function that can interchange between new business and an account scenario

Challenges

Challenges• Meeting challenges

• A framework of standards and attainment that manages competencies in a discipline where we are all one of a kind

• A CS Academy that nurtures and develops talent• Permanent talent watch • Business structure and processes that are inclusive and

facilitate a CS professional playing the right role, therefore delivering the maximum ROI

• Appreciation of the overall role that a CS professional plays to win, grow and retain commercially viable accounts

• Tools and systems to ensure that the team can work efficiently and manage information back into the business effectively

• A CS team that can articulate and demonstrate the value they bring to client relationships and therefore have an ability to sell themselves as well as they sell their colleagues

… Or rather where to start

• Empowered professionals • Clear roles and responsibilities • Respect of management, peers and clients • Authority and remit • Tools and processes • Knowledge • Deliver relationships that are:

Mature Open and transparent Sustainable Profitable Based on trust and ones that recognise the

immense value you as a business bring

CS and the Virtuous Circle

THANK YOU