1. Client Services Breakfast
13 May 2014

2. The Challenges of a CS professional

4. • 17 years = 119!
• Falling into CS
• Growing up
• My passion
About Me

5. Challenges
• Challenges of being a Client Services
professional
• Challenges of having a Client Services
function within your business

6. 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

7. Challenges
• Meeting challenges

8. • 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

9. • 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

10. THANK YOU