Our values with respect to our clients

Since Marque d’or started, its slogan has been “la marque de l’excellence”. Our excellence rhymes with client [see Hervé SÉRIEYX, Le Big Bang des organisations, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1993, p. 85 ss.]. That is how we remember that we aim to always give more to our clients and the community we serve. We have four sets of values that allow us to pique the interest of our clients, to give them more all the time and to ensure that they keep coming back.

First, the 5 Reasons that justify more and more a business to become more service oriented.

Clients come First. Clients have lots of choices. They will only become faithful if we provide them with concrete advantages, convincing differences with our competitors and  if we find ways to make it easier to meet their needs. Our clients always have their say in our business. We consult them with respect to our orientation, we work with them to ensure the continuous improvement of our services, we create new online services for them and we are open to ideas to meet their specific needs.

Clients want us to Satisfy their expectations generally.
A client does not buy just a minute book but rather a book adapted for his or her specific needs. The more the book is adapted for the client, the more satisfying it becomes for the client. Obviously, the needs of our clients are constantly changing, especially given the legislative revolution context we are in right now. We are thus in a unique position to propose ready-made solutions for completely new problems, such as those resulting from the entry into force of Regulation 45-106 respecting prospectus and registration exemptions.

Clients want Respect, which means that the services we sell them must be designed to fulfill their needs rather than ours. If a client prefers to communicate by phone, by e-mail or both, we hastily meet his or her needs. Moreover, we must take care of all our market segments and tailor for each of them a specific and clear policy.

Clients want to be Reassured by our knowledge, our expertise and our accomplishments. Everything must be easy. We must provide clear, understandable, reliable explanations; our after-sales service must be irreproachable. Our by-laws and other legal documents have become a corporate law standard. Both our annual conferences concerning legal developments and Telemark, our electronic journal, are proof of our interest for the law that underlies our activities. Our contract with CIPO is reassuring to our intellectual property clients who ask us to do trade-mark searches.

Getting the client to Come Back. It takes a lot less effort to keep an existing client than to get a new one. We must acknowledge and correct any errors. We must answer the questions of our clients at the best of our abilities. If we do not know the answer or are unsure, we must find it by doing research and consulting experts. Any contact with our clients must be seen as an opportunity to thank him or her for choosing us and to invite him or her to come again.

There are 5 Imperatives to obey:

We must Identify which of our clients are regulars, occasional, potential, jurists, professionals, members of the public and governments, but must also keep track of their attitudes, needs and perceptions. We must stay in a constant, friendly and interactive dialogue with them.

We must Involve our clients. Faithful clients are those that feel involved.
That is why we use various means to involve our clients in our business, to make them interested in our objectives: consulting them directly; having them assess our services during our conferences; meeting the senior management of leading firms.

We must Individualize our services. The anonymous consumer stops here. Our clients must have a first and last name, an address, a purchase history, choices to make and the opportunity to make comments. Consequently, each mandate becomes a single market. Our objective is not to make twenty thousand minute books, but rather to make a single book for a single client twenty thousand times. The quality of our services is also based on the significant individualization of our customer relations. A phone call is better than a leaflet or an email, and a meeting is better than a phone call. The best marketing techniques are useless if one forgets to establish a personal connection with each and every one of his or her current and potential clients.

We must Innovate so as to offer more and better products and services to our clients. We are the only research house in Canada that employs more than 25 computer specialists to design computer programs especially to meet the needs of our clients. Whether it is for name and trade-mark searches, computer-assisted translation or management, our business is the leader when it comes to the interest of its clients.

We must Invert the pyramid. The client is in charge, so each of our employees in contact with clients must have the power to meet their needs. Our employees must have sufficient leeway to be able to give the clients what they want. Those are the famous “moments of truth” that should always become success stories and moments of satisfaction.

There are 5 attitudes of Contempt
we must do away with

Contempt for their expectations: We must not offer the services that we know but rather those that are asked for. Some businesses see clients who dare express themselves as troublemakers. Our business actually sees such clients as the possibility to surpass ourselves. Our personnel, our market studies, our meetings and assessments must allow us to determine what our clients need and want.

Contempt for their criticism: 85% of dissatisfied clients do not come back if they are not given the possibility to voice their discontent, but they are only 25% if they are given such an opportunity, they decrease to 5% if their opinion is taken into account and they become ardent supporters if we not only alter our practices but also offer them a complementary service.

Contempt for time frames. When one purchases a 2-hour delivery PRECOTM, one not only purchases the PRECOTM but the 2-hour delivery as well. The time frame is part of the purchased product or service. The clock starts when we receive the request. Despite the fact that we receive a significant amount of calls at certain times of the day, we try the impossible to be available.

Contempt for costs: our business must keep a tight rein on its expenses.
We must avoid costs due to bad management (power failure, mistakes in the documents, inventory shortage, useless meetings, badly trained staff, etc.); these costs do nothing for quality.

Contempt for after-sales service. Increasingly, our clients expect us to be responsible for the consequences of what we sell. That means maintenance and warranty of our products, but also the indirect consequences of a improperly provided service. We have no choice, we must provide excellent before sale service in order to avoid after-sales problems.

Finally, there are the 5 Efforts that each one of us must make to always make sure that our clients remain at the heart of our concerns:

We must be Better Listeners. More monitoring measures and client satisfaction indicators must be put in place. Each one of us must be the ears of the business and we must forward the comments made by the clients to a designated person in charge of improvement.

We must Kindle Enthusiasm. Having satisfied clients is not enough, we need enthusiastic clients who can become our best ambassadors. Enthusiastic clients means enthusiastic representatives and jurists and consequently result in a solid and enthusiastic management. Our staff must represent our strengths, if such is not already the case.

We must Work Together. The lack of synergy between parties who should perfectly complement themselves is often surprising. We should ask ourselves whether we are successful in our endeavour to create and maintain solidarity throughout the business.

Our Management must be turned inside out. Not only must we invert the pyramid, but our business must also go from “obeying” to “being responsible”, from being interested in “quantity” to being interested in “quality”, from the “CEO comes first” to the “Client comes first”.

We must Commit. Last but not least, we must make a firm commitment to reorganizing our business with a focus on our clients, i.e. we must follow the four sets of values presented above, otherwise our business will become self-centered and will be more interested in its own functioning rather than its market.