Client First (#45)
Two Words, Many Meanings
🔵⚪️🔴 Hello,
In my work role in Client Services, I often feel like a translator.
Not because my first degree is in linguistics. And not just in the literal sense - though working from Asia Pacific with Europe and Americas, talking daily across geographies and time zones, connecting the dots between client requirements and our capabilities, the languages do sometimes feel genuinely different. But in a deeper sense. Standing between teams and people that critically depend on each other, yet don’t always fully hear each other even though the words we use are exactly the same.
Want an example? Let’s take just one phrase we constantly hear.
CLIENT FIRST.
Sounds so familiar, but does it actually mean the same thing to everyone who says it? Let’s test with three simple questions.
Who is the CLIENT?
Externally, it’s fairly straightforward. The CLIENT is someone with a need you are able to meet wit your products or services, who values what you bring enough to trust you, choose you among all available options - and pay for it.
Internally, the picture blurs quickly. The further you sit from the firm’s actual clients, the more the notion of client shifts. Your client becomes your internal stakeholder, the team that depends on your output. And if we are being truly honest 😊 - the further you are from the external client, the more your most immediate client, the one whose satisfaction most directly shapes your day, is your boss.
This is not a criticism. It is a structural reality. And it matters enormously for how Client First actually lands across an organisation.
What does FIRST mean?
Even if we agree on who the Client is, the word FIRST carries its own quiet ambiguity.
Does it mean priority - when client needs come before internal considerations when there is conflict? Does it mean sequence - that we start with the client when designing decisions and processes? Or does it mean purpose - the client is the north star, the reason we exist?
These sound similar, yet lead to different behaviours. Interpreted as purpose, Client First is a values statement - warm, motivating, orienting. Interpreted as priority, it becomes an operational instruction - and immediately raises uncomfortable questions about exactly when client needs override efficiency, capacity or risk appetite. Nobody notices that the shared meaning is in fact an illusion - until a dilemma pops up and makes hidden questions suddenly, uncomfortably visible.
Which Client goes first?
When clients are many and resources are finite - and they always are - which client goes first? Anyone who has worked in client servicing or onboarding knows this is not theoretical. It is a daily reality. Constant prioritisation and reprioritisation. The phrase “Client First” offers no guidance here. It simply assumes the question away.
Two words, many meanings. “Client First” sounds like consensus. But in different rooms, spoken by people with different roles and different distances from the actual client, it means something genuinely different.
This is why I find the client servicing role so fascinating. It sits right inside these questions - feeling the excitement of the client relationship and the weight of operational reality simultaneously. The consequences of promises made. The constraints of finite resources.
And this is why it feels a little like being a translator. The translator’s job is not to impose the right meaning. It is to make the different meanings visible to each other. To slow down long enough to ask — when we say “Client First”, are we really talking about the same thing?
So, who is your Client? Not the official answer. The real one - the person whose satisfaction most directly shapes your decisions day to day.
Musically, being a translator may feel like a bass player in a jazz trio. Translating melody into rhythm and the other way around. Here is one beautiful example to get you carried away. “A Night in Tunisia”. I love the version of this Dizzy Gillespie standard by Jesus Molina, Roni Kaspi and Sam Smith. Love the drums. Love the baseline. Love the energy and groove. Love when my days feel a bit like this music.
Happy Friday 🔵⚪️🔴 whatever day of the week it is.
Arina