‘How did I do?’ and ‘Could I have done any better?’ aren’t questions that most professional services partners ask out loud, too often. There are, however, an increasing number of professional services marketers asking just that. James Lumley meets the client listeners.
“If you spend £1.50 on an eBay purchase, you might get an email asking you what your customer experience was like,” says Graham Archbold, founder of client listening agency Chorus Insight.
“That’s clearly a bit unnecessary,” he says. “But it really is important to know what your clients think of you.”
His point is clear: consumer businesses have long been keen to engage with their customers and seek almost immediate feedback, so much so that many of us suffer from survey fatigue. But they are doing it for a good reason. And this trend of asking customers/clients the questions ‘How did we do?’ and ‘How could we have done better?’ is becoming increasingly established in professional services.
Take-up isn’t regular: some firms might commission a big client listening survey every couple of years. Others use their client satisfaction score, calculated by client outreach, as a rolling KPI. Even so, most firms are doing it one way or another.
Why? What are the concrete benefits?
Anna Lake, of Anna Lake Insight, has a clear answer. “It helps you retain business and attract new clients,” she says, naming the two main goals of marketing.
Lake works mostly with law and accounting practices. Much of her work involves multiple in-depth interviews, and from that she provides a comprehensive report.
On average, her clients commission her every year or two, or when something has changed in the business, but some engage her to interview clients across the year. And in her experience, the most valuable thing she brings is conversation.
“Surveys often get left in people’s inboxes. My approach is conversational,” she says. “I have topic areas that I cover, but I don’t sit there and say ‘Rate the firm between one and ten on this basis and then give them a list of areas on which to score.’
“Instead, I listen and pick up points that people have said, often in their introduction, and then dig down into particular areas. You can’t do that in a survey.”
Her reports, she says, are a “great tool for organic growth. Client conversations are an opportunity not just to look backwards at what has happened before, but to talk about future opportunities.”
If a client is unhappy you want to know
“You do have to be careful about survey fatigue,” says Chorus’ Archbold. “On the other hand, though, if a client is unhappy, you want to know about it as soon as possible because the sooner you know, the sooner you can address it. If the first time you find out is when they’ve sacked you, that’s too late.”
In fact, given the nature of professional services relationships, firms that don’t do client listening might not even know they have been replaced by a rival.
“There are quite a lot of partners kidding themselves that one of those clients they last spoke to three years ago will call up soon with another job,” Archbold says.
What, then, is the correct balance? How often can you client-listen?
He is clear that, while they don’t want to be bothered daily, clients who are spending significant sums expect their service providers to ask for feedback on some sort of a regular basis.
“Important clients now expect to be consulted annually at the very least,” says Archbold.
Whether or not that is enough depends on the client. He recommends firms get in touch with clients every time billings exceed a certain amount, and when people who deal with the client on a day-to-day basis think it is a good idea.
“It should be a combination of both, really,” says Archbold. “Something deep and relationship-based, and something short and sweet whenever a client spends a decent amount.”
Client listing as a KPI
“We have just launched our 2030 strategy, and one of the key pillars is ‘clients at the heart of the business’,” says Kirsty Shenton, Mills & Reeves’ head of Client Development.
To do this, the firm has made the client recommendation metric a KPI with a target of 95%.
“We believe that if a client will put their reputation on the line by recommending us, then that is as good as it gets. We have also worked out that striving for a really high recommendation rating drives us to build strong, loyal relationships that allow us to collaborate at a higher level,” she says.
This strategy relies on a lot of client listening. One thousand pieces a year. That’s made up of AI-driven web surveys, deep-dive interviews and secondment debriefs. What are the results? The clients appear to be stickier, more satisfied and more profitable.
“Over the last four years we have seen only three or four changes in our top-50 client base, and we have also seen a massive uptick in the revenue generated from those clients,” she says.
As well as running a programme of constant feedback, many clients also have an annual deep dive review.
“We call it ‘fearless feedback’, and it is timely, honest, and only done for the purposes of continuous improvement.
“Also, as a principle, ‘we always close the feedback loop’, which means that every bit of feedback is, in some way or another, acted on.”
Why did they choose such a ridiculously high target? “Because it is ridiculously high,” says Shenton.
Even so, the firm isn’t far off hitting it.
Dashboards, CRM and the future
Grant Thornton’s fully integrated client listening programme is run by the firm’s Head of Client Insight, Shaendel Hallett.
“We run both quantitative and qualitative research through surveys and interviews,” she says. “Around 30% of our questions are about how we did, the other 70% is about ascertaining future needs and improvements.”
Grant Thornton is Hallett’s first professional services job. Before, she was at companies including BP and EasyJet.
The firm generates a large amount of information which can be used in various different ways. Algorithms and workflow tools highlight testimonials for marketing and much more besides. For example, data from a recent client listening survey was used to create a thought leadership campaign.
“Culturally, we are on the way to client listening being embedded,” she says. “We can demonstrate ROI, and we have client voice champions that sit in many teams, and that really helps.”
A few years ago, client listening at the firm was close to being a compliance tool. “We’ve tried to change it into something that people want to be part of, that they understand, and that they trust, because at the end of this, it is all about relationships.”
The plan for the future? Greater integration driven by a new CRM platform, she says.
The good, the bad and the ugly
Of course, not all comments are positive. What typically goes wrong and how do you deal with a stinker?
“Critical feedback is the most valuable feedback,” says Archbold. “That’s where you get a chance to rescue the relationship.
“Sometimes you get briefed by a partner that they have been working with the client for years and they get on really well. Then, when you carry out the interview, you realise that they have no idea how things are going, and if things don’t change the relationship is going to be dead in the water.
“If you get really stinking feedback like that, you need to tell the relationship partner immediately, but you also need to present it in such a way that dissuades the partner from picking up the phone and berating the client. That is why it is important to have an independent person in the middle, to provide a buffer zone,” he says.
Then it is time for grown-up conversations about whether it is just a clash of personality or something deeper.
Total howlers are relatively rare. Irritations less so, and sorting them is also very important.
“Billing practices are a recurring theme,” says Anna Lake. “Not price, but things like lumping together bills that relate to different things. Clients also can get upset when they are paying hundreds of thousands of pounds, and the firm decides to charge them for photocopying. Or a trainee sits in on a meeting for experience and the firm bills for their time.
“Often, these are things reported by clients who are otherwise really very happy, but things like this niggle and fester. It is rarely about the money. More the principle.”
Mills & Reeve’s Kirsty Shenton agrees. When they started to embrace client listening, they soon discovered some easy wins.
“We realised that one of the things we could improve on was responsiveness,” she says. “A typical example would be a client emailing a lawyer with something small, and the busy lawyer ignoring the email until they finished what they were doing and could address it properly.
“We coined a phrase: response is respect. We made it clear that all emails should be answered within 24 hours even if there was nothing substantive to say. Email back to ask what the deadline is, for example. The answer might be ‘next week’.”
The problem, she points out, wasn’t really responsiveness. It was communication. And it was easily solved. And probably wouldn’t have been identified without a client listening outreach.
People people
Good feedback also has a running theme. Like most things in professional services marketing, it comes down to people and relationships.
“People want to work with great people,” says Anna Lake. “They always have, and they always will.
“When I get a glowing comment from clients, it is rarely because the service provider wrote a great contract or produced a fantastic set of accounts. Advice is certainly important, but you really need the people as well.”
Or, as Shenton put it: “At Mills & Reeve we realised some time ago that being really good at law is not enough.”
James Lumley, freelance journalist, corporate writer, trainer and coach. www.byline.london