Amy Shah
Senior Vice President
Sapient
Excellence in Client Services
It pays to be curious. Just ask Amy Shah, senior vice president, Sapient, whose leadership helped the firm's Manhattan office's staff grow 27 percent in an historic downturn. Actually, if you really did ask Shah, she would replay that curiosity pays for itself, and that valuable client relationships are more of a pleasant, ancillary benefit.
A few weeks ago, she reconnected with an old client in the financial services industry. He was working for a bank and mentioned a new product line. Shah realized a current client in a different industry, media, was working on a similar product, from different angles. Shah quickly introduced the two executives over dinner, so they could discuss her idea of how they might learn from each other.
Sapient may not do any work for either client, even if they do partner, and that's perfectly fine with Shah. "Connecting the dots is not at all about, 'Hey, am I going to get a project out of this?' " she asserts. "It's about curiosity and passion for what your [current and former] clients are doing, and it's about building a long-term relationship. But I think that the long-term relationship is the outcome of the curiosity and the passion—it's not the reason for being curious and passionate."
Successful client service is sometimes counterintuitive, notes Shah. She recently met with a New York University business school administrator to glean his latest thoughts on marketing. The session had nothing to do with current client work and it may or may not contribute to any upcoming business pitches.
And that doesn't matter, says Shah.
"You have to take the initiative to go outside of your client companies and your own organization even though you don't have a
lot of time in your day," she notes. "You have to go out of your way to stay relevant so you can share leading-edge ideas with companies. I don't see enough people doing that in consulting, frankly. … There is a tendency in the profession to get focused on one client and then forget about what else is out there. Eventually, that can become a disservice to your client."
—Eric Krell
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