Why AEC Firms Keep Getting Client Experience Wrong and How to Fix It

Steven Gallo: Hi, everyone. I’m Steven Gallo, your host and vice president of Client Services at Reputation Ink. If you’re new here, we’re a PR and thought leadership marketing agency for B2B professional services firms, especially in architecture, engineering and construction. You can learn more at RepInk – that’s “ink” with a K – dot com.

So most AEC firms track client experience, and many are actively working on culture, but the two are rarely connected. My guest today is Jerry Gennaria, president and CEO of TOKY, a full-service branding and design consultancy. He spent more than a decade helping AEC firms understand why that gap exists and what to do about it.

He also hosts his own podcast, The Intangible Brand, which explores this intersection in depth. I’ve been on it — go check it out. In this conversation, we’re talking about why executive buy-in has to come first, how to turn client satisfaction data into actual organizational change, and why the [00:01:00] firms getting this right aren’t just better places to work — though that’s great — but they’re winning more business.

So Jerry, welcome to the show. Appreciate you coming on.

Jerry Gennaria: Thank you. I really appreciate being here as well. It’s fun to be on the other side of the screen from you.

Steven Gallo: Of course. Well, for those who may be new to TOKY, can you tell us a little bit about what you do and the work you do with AEC firms?

Jerry Gennaria: Absolutely. I think you set that up well. We are a full-service branding and creative strategy firm. We’re based out of St. Louis. We’re a small but focused firm, been in business for almost 30 years, and we work across a number of different industries, but about half of our work is within AEC and professional services.

At the center of what we do is a philosophy we call branding from within, and I think it’s relevant to what we’re talking about today because it’s really about three components of brand: your brand position — what you do and who you do it for; brand [00:02:00] experience — your values and how your people behave; and then something we call brand truth, which is your unique point of view.

In our experience — and I think maybe you’ve seen the same thing — a lot of firms are only thinking about one of those aspects: their brand position, what they do and who they do it for, trying to compete on their expertise, services and things like that. But there are so many more opportunities, and I’m excited to get into it.

Steven Gallo: Yeah, likewise. Let’s go ahead and do that and start with perhaps that disconnect. How connected really are client experience and employee experience in most of the AEC firms that you work with?

Jerry Gennaria: Honestly, they’re not very connected. Let me back up and say they’re very connected — I just don’t think that a lot of firms are thinking about it that way. Most firms are thinking about these things in completely separate domains. Client experience, if they’re [00:03:00] addressing it at all, lives in BD or lives in operations. Maybe it’s a little bit in marketing. Employee experience lives in HR, assuming you even have HR.

A lot of firms aren’t really big enough to have a dedicated department, but when they do, they very rarely are talking to each other. But we’re talking about professional service businesses, and your employees are your client experience. There isn’t really a product sitting on the shelf. Your product walks out the door every day and then comes back — virtually or otherwise.

What we’re selling is really the interaction between our people and our clients. Sometimes we get wrapped up in the idea that we’re selling a service — design or management or building something. But really, what we’re selling is this interaction between people and [00:04:00] our customers. So if we’re not connecting those two things, we have this fundamental misalignment.

Steven Gallo: And that’s how your customer is experiencing your brand — through the people, the experience they’re having and who they’re working with. Differentiation in this space can be challenging. AEC firms tend to hear probably the same feedback from clients: you stayed on schedule, you were on budget, you were responsive. But for the AEC firm decision maker, it makes it tough to discern what they’re actually doing differently. So where does that differentiation come from?

Jerry Gennaria: It comes from a few different places. Differentiation can be complex — it doesn’t have to be, but it depends sometimes on the size of the firm and other factors.

Small firms may differentiate based on [00:05:00] services they provide, a geography they service or a sector they’re involved in. But the larger that you get, the more services you have, the more sectors you serve, the more locations you’re in — the less you can differentiate on that.

We’re in the habit of continuing to differentiate that way. There is a huge opportunity to differentiate based on the experience you’re providing to customers — what is it like to work with you? A lot of firms internalize that and want to talk about it. So we hear firms talking about things like collaboration or service. The challenge is everybody says it, and it’s really difficult to demonstrate that before you actually work with someone. We often hear some variation of, “Once you work with us, you’ll understand the difference.” The problem is you’ve got to get them to work with you [00:06:00] first.

So you may need to have something a little bit more. That could mean a quantified way of talking about your client experience. We’ve seen some firms utilizing measurement tools, which we’ll probably talk about in a bit, and then actually using those measurements to justify what they’re saying about their client experience. Employee experience works the same way — we do best-places-to-work recognition as a form of external validation.

But there’s an additional way to differentiate, and that’s what I mentioned earlier: brand truth. This idea of what is your unique point of view? How do you think? How do you approach the work in a way that is not just “we’re experts at it”? [00:07:00] Can you talk about what the work means, why you did the things you did — in a way that is tangible, consistent across the firm and relevant to your customers?

Steven Gallo: That makes a lot of sense. But I feel like I can already hear someone in the C-suite at one of these firms — maybe a bit skeptical — wondering: sure, but how does this really affect the bottom line? Does this really have an impact? How do you combat that objection when you’re trying to get buy-in?

Jerry Gennaria: There are a few different layers to this, and it really starts with data. When you’re in the C-suite — particularly if you’re in operations, or you’re the CFO, or even the CEO — you’re not operating the business [00:08:00] on vibes. There’s some research that actually measures this.

There was a Kotter and Heskett study out of Harvard Business School that found that companies with strong cultures outperform those with average cultures — not bad cultures, just average cultures — by 900% in share value. Of course, we’re talking about larger, publicly traded firms, but this is not an isolated finding. They also noted that there was nearly a 700% difference in revenue growth based on culture. There’s another research study by Peters and Waterman that showed very similar results. Culture-driven companies outperform those that are not focused on that, at least three to one. [00:09:00]

So there’s a second component to this. If I’m thinking about how to make the case for focusing on both employee experience and client experience, it’s worth pausing to do the mental exercise: if our people are our product, if the experience our customers have is driven by what our people do, then our internal culture — the unwritten rules of how we do things, the written rules of how we do things, the values that we have — these are all critical in delivering that experience.

The second component of data is turnover — both retention and acquisition costs. Goldberg did a study, and they’re a well-respected firm. They noted that the cost to replace an employee — here we’re getting down to real dollars and cents — is somewhere between 33% and 200% of annual salary.

[00:10:00] So if you have a senior engineer on staff making $150,000, it may cost you $300,000 to replace that person. And if you have 10, 15, 20% turnover in a 100-person firm, this is really significant money. And it’s damaging your reputation. It’s damaging the customer experience. In AEC, we’re in the middle of a talent shortage, so the more turnover you’re experiencing, the more that compounds.

There’s one more thing — a third element that I think leaders miss: the correlation between success with customer experience and higher profitability and higher win rates. Client Savvy, now ClearlyRated, has done a significant amount of research around this. It really boils down to great talent wanting to work on the best projects with the happiest clients. When we’re not focused on this client experience and employee experience connection, [00:11:00] we are burning out our people. We’re not delivering on the experience we want to have, which means a lack of talent retention and a lack of client retention. So it’s in the data, more than anything else.

Steven Gallo: And it speaks to the kind of client you want to attract — who wants to work with your people. The data’s there to support it, but some of this is just ground-level common sense in doing good business.

Jerry Gennaria: Yeah.

Steven Gallo: OK. Say you’ve convinced a skeptical AEC firm leader. [00:12:00] We’ve never done this before. Where does a firm that hasn’t tackled this at all even begin? What’s the first step?

Jerry Gennaria: I think the first step starts with listening. The good news is that this is something AEC firms actually do really well in their day-to-day work. There’s a lot of listening, gathering insights and reading between the lines that these folks are doing with their clients just to get projects done.

We’re really talking about taking those same skills and applying them systematically to understanding your clients. We recommend starting by doing some interviews — sit down, either with someone in the firm or someone you bring in from the outside. There are pros and cons to both approaches. But what you’re really doing is establishing what we would call formative research — [00:13:00] to help you form a hypothesis about what your client experience is and begin to understand the contours of the relationships you have, what your clients are valuing about them and where they’re experiencing a disconnect.

Steven Gallo: Establish that baseline.

Jerry Gennaria: Yeah, exactly. Starting to establish a baseline. But to really get to the baseline and get to the data and the numbers, you want to do something quantitative as well — a baseline customer perception survey. And you want to do that as a baseline so that you can continue to do it over time, because this isn’t a one-and-done thing.

If you don’t have those numbers, you can’t measure it. You can’t understand what you’re doing well, you can’t understand where you need to grow, you don’t understand what the unvoiced issues are that are holding you back. And you’re relying on this assumption that “we talk to our clients every day, of course we know.” But do you really? Are they telling you the things that could make your firm better, increase value, help you improve your win rate?

[00:14:00]

Steven Gallo: And are you asking those questions to begin with?

Jerry Gennaria: Right.

[00:15:00]

Steven Gallo: So for something that is intangible — or may at least seem that way — how do you begin to measure it?

Jerry Gennaria: It’s a lot more measurable than people think. It’s just a different set of metrics than we’re used to measuring with.

On the client side of things, there are a lot of different tools you can use. I mentioned Client Savvy, now ClearlyRated — their tool is top-notch. Things like Net Promoter Score give you a macro look at what your client experience looks like. You can also build your own survey. But I’d recommend using something that is tried and true and delivers real, actionable insight and intelligence.

You’ll also need to be measuring on the inside as well. There are a number [00:16:00] of tools for that. You can do simple pulse surveys internally to understand the experience that people are having. One approach I like is a very simple one-question survey that goes out once a week. It simply asks, “How are you doing?” on a scale of one to 10, with a follow-up that lets people fill in some tangible feedback on why they scored the way they did. It gives leaders a great snapshot into how the firm is feeling at any given time.

But then you need to drill into that. You need to understand what’s happening over time as you see trends. If you see that people are feeling frazzled or burned out, you need to understand why. If you’re seeing a disconnect between what you tell clients the experience is going to be and what’s actually being delivered, then some of that internal measurement and [00:17:00] process analysis — doing customer journey mapping and internal process mapping — helps you really uncover where the disconnect is happening so that you can triage each of those individual points and think about what you can do better.

Steven Gallo: Even just that effort — that exercise being successful — is a demonstration of why culture is important. You need your people to actually be honest with you and answer that question honestly, which sometimes is easier said than done. But it speaks to why this is so important.

Jerry Gennaria: Yeah. Depending on where you are as a firm, this is a journey. Some firms are in different places. For the leadership of a firm, it is imperative that you come into this with some humility and some openness [00:18:00] to what the data is going to tell you. We can all live in a land of wishes and make believe — or we can look at the data, be open and honest with ourselves and with our firm, and work on the things that need to be fixed. Every firm has something they can improve on.

Steven Gallo: Exactly. And obviously when we’re talking about client experience, getting it from the horse’s mouth is going to be ideal. But do all firms need to start with client feedback, or are there other entry points? Sometimes getting client feedback can feel intimidating.

Jerry Gennaria: The other thing about client perspective is it’s often going to be focused specifically on the experience. When I’m thinking about brand — what’s driving value and what’s helping me win business — absolutely, the client experience matters. Are we delivering on the promise we’re making? But there’s also that internal point of view. [00:19:00]

So other entry points: one is the internal research you do with your own team. But another place to start is asking, what are you about? What is that unique point of view? When we think about the experience you’re trying to create for your clients, hopefully that experience is more than just “we deliver on time and on budget.” That’s table stakes. So what is more than that? What is the unique approach and point of view you’re bringing to the work that you can actually measure?

Your clients aren’t necessarily going to tell you — they don’t understand it yet, they haven’t lived it yet. Maybe you haven’t defined it very well. Clients are going to focus on what’s right in front of them. Think about going to a restaurant like Chick-fil-A. If somebody asks you to do a survey afterward, what are you going to measure? You’re going to measure the quality of the food. [00:20:00] You’re going to measure the quality of the service. But you’re generally not going to tell them about something else they could be doing or another product they could be providing, because maybe you just don’t know.

Thinking internally about what that unique point of view is gives you a platform to say, “This is what we’re about, and this is how we’re going to shape our internal and external experiences to deliver on that.”

Steven Gallo: When we think about the customer and client experience — even an example like McDonald’s versus Chick-fil-A — some of those things that may seem intangible you can really measure when you think about how you walk away from those experiences. Can you dig into that a little bit in terms of how that parallel plays out [00:21:00] for a B2B professional services firm?

Jerry Gennaria: Let’s talk about McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A for just a second, and then what that means for AEC and professional services.

If we take a step back and think about the food at McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, the difference in quality of the product is not that great. People will argue different sides of it.

Steven Gallo: Now you’ll bring out all the evangelists.

Jerry Gennaria: I love Chick-fil-A. I think their food is good. But it’s not fine dining.

Steven Gallo: Sure.

Jerry Gennaria: Where is the difference? The difference is in the experience. Chick-fil-A has somehow mastered the ability to have teenagers consistently say “my pleasure” when you say thank you — every time, never fails. And if you have a teenager and you’ve ever tried to get them to do [00:22:00] anything, getting them to do it every time without fail, with a smile on their face — I don’t know how they do that. It’s impressive.

And it extends beyond that. They’re thinking innovatively about the experience — thinking about how to get people through the line as fast as possible, not because they want to turn over customers faster, but because it’s better for the customer. Their mobile app, the ability to scan a QR code at the drive-through — they’re constantly thinking about new ways to make that better.

And if you’ve sat in that drive-through line, they’re not just thinking about you — they’re also thinking about the team members. At peak times, they’ll have multiple team members out there. Even though it’s a higher cost to have more staff, they’re also building [00:23:00] infrastructure for those team members — little stations where they can stay warm or cool. They’re thinking about not just the customer, but also the employee, and how those two things connect.

We’re not going to get a smile and a “my pleasure” from somebody who’s freezing to death or boiling hot. So you take care of the employee, they take care of the customer. And that’s where this starts to extend into AEC or any kind of professional services. Yes, we have to deliver the product — the design, the building, whatever we’re doing. But how do we make the experience different and better? How can we be thinking innovatively about that?

That often comes from the inside. You can talk to your customers, understand the pain points they’re having. But I think the biggest opportunity is actually to look outside [00:24:00] of our businesses — outside of the world of professional services and AEC — and think about what the experiences are when we go somewhere else, like a Chick-fil-A or a Disney, and what about those might translate into our business, creating a better experience for our team and our clients and potentially even driving revenue.

Think about Disney: the park is vast, and some rides have really long lines. At any other park, that’s a terrible experience. At Disney, they’ve thought about this in depth. The line is carefully designed to make it as pleasant an experience as possible and minimize your ability to see how long it actually is.

Stop for a second and think about what that means for professional services. [00:25:00] If our customers think they’re way back in the queue and they’re seeing something that gives them visibility into a long wait time or response time, that creates a bad experience — even if the wait time might be unavoidable. That could be as simple as putting a process in place that says when a customer reaches out, we’re going to respond within a certain period of time. Or we’re going to reach out proactively on a certain cadence, regardless of whether we have something to say — even if it’s just to inform them that things are going to be a little later than planned. That’s all about curating that experience.

But Disney takes it a step further with the FastPass. Now you can jump the line, which has created an opportunity [00:26:00] both for the guest to have a better experience on their terms and a revenue opportunity for Disney as well. They’re giving customers what they want, and at the same time, they’re able to monetize that.

So we need to be thinking innovatively about experience and looking outside our own businesses to figure out how we can apply the things that make us happy as consumers.

Steven Gallo: Absolutely. There are so many lessons to be learned when you look outside of your own sector. OK, so we’ve talked about collecting this data, understanding that baseline. But to shift from data to change — how do you make that jump? You’ve identified a pattern in the data. How do you trace that pattern back to its [00:27:00] root cause to actually do something about it?

Jerry Gennaria: This is where our MBA friends have developed a technique that we really like — and I think they stole it from toddlers.

If you have kids in your life at that toddler age who have started to learn how to talk, you’ve experienced this.

Steven Gallo: She turns four in a week.

Jerry Gennaria: Perfect.

Steven Gallo: In the thick of it.

Jerry Gennaria: I’m guessing she asks you a lot of questions.

Steven Gallo: Incessantly.

Jerry Gennaria: And I’m guessing when you answer, it’s usually followed by a very specific question: why?

Steven Gallo: Precisely.

Jerry Gennaria: Toddlers have an unlimited capacity to ask why. What they’re doing is what our MBA friends call root cause analysis — sometimes called the Five Whys. [00:28:00] You can do diagrams like the fishbone diagram to figure it out, but really all you’re doing is saying: we heard this. Why is that happening? And you don’t just answer that question — you continue to drill down and drill down, continually asking why until you get to the root cause.

There are probably things that need to be fixed along the way, but those are often symptoms of the underlying problem. It’s no different than going to the doctor. A good doctor doesn’t just give you medication to deal with the symptoms — they try to drill down and figure out why you’re experiencing them. If you’re feeling lightheaded and dizzy, they can treat the symptoms. Maybe the real problem is low blood pressure. But if you drill a little further, maybe it’s anemia, an iron deficiency. Maybe [00:29:00] iron supplements help. But maybe you should drill deeper still. Maybe there’s an autoimmune condition causing the iron deficiency that’s causing you to be dizzy. That’s the kind of root cause analysis we need — becoming detectives in our own organizations.

Steven Gallo: Detectives, indeed. That requires persistence and follow-up. And I’ll remember that the next time — I’ll think, she’s developing a great investigative skill.

Jerry Gennaria: You have a background in journalism — it’s the same thing you were taught in journalism school. You don’t take the first answer someone gives you. You drill deeper and deeper until you get to something foundational.

Steven Gallo: Absolutely. It’s easy to stop short. That’s where you really have to mine for the gold. [00:30:00] You mentioned process in general — in operations, that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle because “this is just the way we do things.” But what’s the relationship between culture and process? They’re not mutually exclusive. And which one wins if and when they’re in conflict?

Jerry Gennaria: Culture, every time. Culture wins every single time, because culture is the unwritten rules of how your organization operates. Process is the written rules.

Here’s a good example. If the written rule is you have to do your timesheets by end of day on Friday every week, and most people do that, but there are a couple of people who don’t — and nothing ever happens to them. [00:31:00] Maybe they’re high performers in other areas. Maybe they’re really good at business development, or maybe they’re the person the client always wants to talk to. What’s happening? We have a written rule: do your timesheets by end of the week. We have an unwritten rule that says, do your timesheets by end of the week — unless you’re Bob or Sue, who the clients love or who’s bringing in a lot of money, in which case you get a pass.

That’s a relatively innocuous example. We see toxic cultures built on the foundation of this is what we say you should do, and this is what we tolerate. It’s not about the unwritten rules of what you should or shouldn’t do. It’s really about what we tolerate as an organization. That’s what betrays our values, and our values are what drive [00:32:00] everything the process says we’re supposed to do.

Steven Gallo: There is someone out there who needed to hear that today. That’s a hard truth, but it’s so true. Jerry, in that context — is there anything leaders can do to help foster that? Is there one idea to walk away with, one shift someone can make today? Because it can seem daunting.

Jerry Gennaria: You have to embed your ideals of what the customer experience is in your culture. And there’s an analogy that I think is very relevant in this business: safety. Safety is an incredibly important aspect of the AEC industry — especially in construction, but not limited to it. Our project executives and managers are on jobsites. We make sure they have personal protective equipment. We make sure that if you’re working [00:33:00] at height, you’re tied in. We have endless steps and protocols.

Back in the day, maybe we were doing that because OSHA might stop by. But there has been a tremendous shift over the years to this being a culture of safety — the ability for anyone in the organization to raise their hand and say, “I see something that isn’t right, and we need to stop and fix this.” Toyota popularized this with the ability of anyone on the production line to hit a stop button and say there’s a problem. If we let this persist, it’s going to show up in our production rate or in the quality of the product coming out the other end of the assembly line.

The same applies to customer experience and internal culture. We have to create a culture that says: this is what the experience is supposed to be for our employees and for our [00:34:00] clients. And not just the people who are frontline facing — all of us are part of creating that experience. You may be the one taking the phone call from the client or making the delivery, but you’re supported by other people. That experience extends to the invoices you’re sending, to every element of the business. We have to make this a total-package commitment within the organization.

Steven Gallo: Every touchpoint is an opportunity to communicate culture, to reinforce that message. And even those little moments add up.

Jerry Gennaria: Absolutely. And this is a huge opportunity. Fewer than 25% of AEC firms have any kind of real, legitimate customer experience initiative going on right now. That means [00:35:00] if you’re not one of them, somebody is out there doing a better job with your customers — or your potential customers. If you’re the one who makes the first move or advantage, what is the close rate going to be? What is the win rate going to be? What is the retention rate of employees and clients going to be?

Steven Gallo: So much to think about. You’ve given us a lot today, Jerry. Anything else you’d like to leave listeners with that we haven’t covered?

Jerry Gennaria: Yeah. The biggest thing is to remember: your brand is not your logo. It’s not the look and feel. It’s not your website. It’s not even what you say about yourself. It’s the experience that people have with you. You can’t directly manage that experience — we can’t feel feelings for other people — but we can create an environment [00:36:00] where we’re connecting our culture and our differentiation to that experience. And we start by measuring it. We find the gaps. We don’t think about the gaps as failures. We think about them as opportunities to capture value that we’re leaving on the table every day.

Steven Gallo: So good. We’ve been talking to Jerry Gennaria of TOKY today. Sincerely appreciate your time. Thank you for coming on.

Jerry Gennaria: Thank you. I appreciate it.