There is much to do these days about client friendliness. And it does not help that the notion is understood in so many different ways, most of them perfectly understandable.

Perhaps many forms of client friendliness can exist side by side, presumably as long as the one is not mistaken for the other.

Look at the roles involved. Imagine that you are the client (as you often are, no doubt). What have you experienced in the area of client friendliness in the bakery, the car dealership, with the insurance salesman and in other situations? Did you appreciate the politeness of the other person, the intelligent response to your question, the respect with which you were treated, the quality of the service or product, or something else?

Then imagine that you are the other person, facing clients and doing your best to treat the client accoridng to some notion of client friendliness. You may have very well been in this position as well. What is the mode of behavior that comes to mind for you?

Do you see links between the images that you associate with those roles?

Client friendliness and the local bakery

We all know those small bakeries. We can walk in there in the morning and buy freshly bakes bread, available in great variety, sold to us by a lady who knows us and who also knows the baker. She and the baker have a pretty good idea of who their clients are. They meet them in the street, where their shop is and near where they live, and they meet them in the park, walking the dog, at the soccer field and, above all, in their shop.

The clients also know them. The clients know the person who is baking their bread and they know the person who is selling it to them. Clienst, baker and saleslady have the impression that they understand each other; not to the depths of their souls, but well enough to make their interactions fruitfull.

In business organizations (shall we leave governmental organizations out of this for the moment?) a lot of time and energy is spend on making managers understand their clients as well as the local baker does. This does not mean that those managers are less equipped to understand clients than is the baker. Their products and services are often more complex, and the value those products and services add to clients is accordingly more complicated. Between the managers and the actual clients are often many echelons, keeping the managers from actually meeting the clients. To those managers, understanding the clients is often a matter of understanding marketing reports, not so much the people whose needs would be reflected in them.

But the local baker can be a test to the manager. Some companies use such tests, sending their managers to supermarkets and giving them the experience of communication with a possible client on needs and available products. It could well be that such a test is just as important as any test an MBA education can give them and probably more practical.