Client hospitality

This one is about clients… not any management lesson but about their hospitality or how they are as hosts.

The first test is how much they value the meeting and your time and here we are talking about meetings set up in advance. With a majority of the clients, this isn’t much of a problem. The waiting would be minimal. The normal pattern is that the person you have come to meet or his one- down comes out to receive you and guides you to the meeting-room. Here the distinction is that in case of excellent hosts, the meeting room is blocked and you just walk in. In many a case, the search for a vacant meeting room takes a while, but given the space constraint in offices, I would not hold it against the client. However, if you are made to wait alone indefinitely, it would be sacrilege. There was this client, a very large corporate where we were called at a particular time. Waited for 30 minutes, no sign of our contact, at the end of the 45th minute, we told the receptionist that we were leaving for a more important meeting elsewhere. The concerned person called in the afternoon and apologised.

Once you enter a meeting room, sometimes you find a glass jug with water and glasses. One can never be sure if the glasses have been washed after use. Some clients keep paper cups, which are a notch higher. The better ones have a person coming in ( sometimes in uniform as well) with glasses of water on a tray and a polite ask, if we will have coffee or tea. The host sometimes chips in saying green tea is available too. Then there are other clients where instead of glasses of water, they come up with small bottles of packages drinking water.

The critical aspect here is again.. the time. Whether the water and refreshments are offered before the meeting starts or after a while or after pretty long is the measure of hospitality. In many cases, the tea/ coffee is accompanied by plates of biscuits too and we have a client who has jars of biscuits on the meeting room table itself. Another client of ours used to serve excellent flavoured milk and whenever we met, it was called for without asking and the client would insist on a second round before we concluded the meeting.

There are clients who call you for meetings at 2 PM. With the distances being what they are in Mumbai, invariably one needs to skip lunch. Some clients ask if we would like sandwiches and some insist on you eating something but quite a few just keep talking assuming we had just stepped out of a fine-dining place.

Most clients, in case of meetings extending till lunchtime/ beyond take you for lunch at the company canteen, the more leisurely ones invite you for a quick-bite at a nearby restaurant while the no-nonsense but pleasant hosts order a working lunch of sandwiches, pizza and coke. Must talk about two extremes here. A client called me two days before a meeting to figure out if I was a vegetarian or a non- vegetarian. On the meeting day, a delicious Chinese lunch was organised. If this cement-maker was at one end, at the other end was this company, a part of a large group known for its values & ethics. 1,1.30, 2 PM no signs of any lunch. My colleague said his sugar levels were dipping. So finally, I invited the client and others for lunch at a place near his office. His response “ Aap log kha ke aa jao”.

There are clients who ask you in advance if parking slots had to be arranged and call for your vehicle number. Some do not but when requested for parking, they quickly organise the same.

We need to deal with all types of clients because business is business. However, the way a client displays his hospitality reflects in the manner the company conducts its business, its philosophy and in some cases, its finances too.