The Gazette 1993

N W

JUNE 1993

GAZETTE

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

rith the President of the Law Society, l-r: Monahan, President of the Law Society;

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. 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. The customer for life

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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