How’s Your Customer Service?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development   CRM   Stakeholder Management  

I recently saw a list of important skills for 2024, and one of the items on that list stood out: customer service. I don’t disagree, as it’s an important skill in any year. But it did make me think: How many PMs feel that great customer service is something that they need to deliver? I’m guessing that it’s not too many.

There are probably a few reasons for that. Project managers likely don’t feel that they have to “win” a customer. They are assigned to a project, and whether we view the customer as the sponsor, the client group that will receive the solution, or even the team, the decisions have already been made—the sale has been completed, if you will.

There’s also the sense that it’s a monopoly environment. There aren’t a whole lot of other PMs just sitting around waiting to take over if stakeholders don’t like the first one.

Also, let’s be honest: Project managers aren’t exactly short of work. While technology certainly helps with a lot of the administrative tasks these days, there is a lot of team development and management, people leadership, problem solving and the rest. Not to mention the environment of near-continuous change in order to ensure that what is being delivered aligns with what the organization needs. (The last thing that a PM needs is more work!)

However, from a …

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