The cost of winning new clients—including advertising, price promotions and other incentives—is estimated at five times the cost of retaining existing ones. A statistic like that leaves no doubt as to how imperative it is to invest in retention efforts.

Enhancing the customer experience is key. One way to accomplish this is to create a business environment that encourages and teaches employees to "walk in the customer's shoes" so that their needs are met, and they feel listened to, respected and well served.

A 'client first' business culture

Creating a culture that anticipates client needs and expectations involves identifying, training, motivating and rewarding front-line employees who interact regularly with customers. Leading service firms create a client-centric culture by infusing "perspective taking" throughout their core service strategy.

Perspective taking is the ability to feel what the other person feels and in turn genuinely expressing empathy to convey that understanding. A strong culture of perspective taking enables any firm to differentiate itself in the all-important area of client service, helping the organization to become truly empathetic to its customers.

While most organizations talk about customer service, few excel at delivering it. Aon's monitoring of millions of call center calls reveals that front-line employees only exceed customer expectations 27 percent of the time. When they do, it's normally related to procedural courtesies and process-related behaviors. Front-line employees, and the organizations that employ them, rarely project to customers a sense that they're understood and cared for.

Customers are now more demanding, and have more complex needs, and the burden—or, more appropriately, opportunity—to please the customer increasingly lies with front-line employees. The more these employees take the customer's perspective, the more likely they are to go out of their way to help customers and solve their increasingly complex problems.

The missing ingredient: empathy

Best-practice service organizations typically have strategies in place to monitor and evaluate how customers are treated. However, even those with fairly solid client-centric cultures miss an important point by not sufficiently considering the emotional components of building client relationships—the ability to understand and feel what another person is going through and to be able to see a complex situation from that person's perspective. By seeking out employees who demonstrate empathy, the success an organization experiences could well be profound.

Although emotionally based, perspective taking has a solid grounding and is not a difficult concept to understand. It can readily be put into action through careful selection, training and performance management of front-line staff.

1. Human Resource Selection: The first step is identifying individuals in the hiring process who have natural tendencies toward empathy and understanding. This dispositional difference is important, and organizations must develop methods to evaluate and measure it in applicants.

Techniques include personality indicators that target empathy, flexibility and agreeableness, as well as simulated role-playing exercises that uncover emotional intelligence, or the ability to recognize and identify with what others are feeling. Structured behavioral interview questions can be designed to reveal perspective-taking skills or tendencies. For example, asking applicants to describe a time when they had to persuade someone to share a particular viewpoint would reveal a disposition toward perspective taking if their response shows that it was adopting the other person's perspective that made the task possible.