What is ‘client experience’? And should we care? Byline.London’s James Lumley asks the experts and discovers that it’s much more than a survey.
There is a newish buzzword going round marketing departments at professional services firms: client experience. It’s the professional services form of what consumer marketeers call ‘customer experience’ and Monique
Hogan, Associate Director Commercial Positioning at Grant Thornton International, thinks a lot of people are getting confused.
“I’ve lost count of the times I ask people if they have a client experience programme in place and they say ‘Yes, we do client listening.’”
Her response? “Yeah. that’s a start.” Because, while listening to your clients is always a good idea, client experience is so much more than that. In fact, it can even be argued that it’s… everything.
Start at the very beginning
“Client experience doesn’t start with client listening,” Hogan says. “The experience that our clients have begins from the moment they see us. It’s how our brand is positioned. It’s the first person they meet that works for us. It’s how that interaction happened.”
And it grows, through the pitch, the onboarding, the work, and the bill. And, like condiments, it’s enhanced by added value actions, like the industry briefing sent unprompted, the referral made when the firm had nothing to gain.
The message to the client is that the firm cares about them and cares about the work. And will pull out all the stops to make things go as well as possible. Because this job is more than just a transaction.
“That’s a massive client experience piece,” Hogan says. “It should be the responsibility of everyone to ensure that a client has the best experience possible.”
Client experience, she points out, happens at every touchpoint.
The bar is set elsewhere
Who decides whether the experience is any good? Not you.
“Clients aren’t comparing you to the law firm down the road,” says Anna Lake of Client Talk. “They’re comparing you to Tesco, Amazon, the expensive restaurant they went to last week.” In fact, anywhere and everywhere that offers a service or a product. It might not seem fair, but client experience doesn’t compare oranges with oranges.
Jane Richardson at accountants Kreston Reeves tells her firm the same thing. “You’re no longer measured against your peers. Once you put yourself in the shoes of businesses you buy from and then think about that customer experience, you suddenly realise the bar is actually a lot higher than you’re probably delivering.”
And clients are starting their own inverted client experience programme, measuring formally the service they get.
Neobank Revolut recently scrapped its traditional legal panel for a model that scores firms quarterly on responsiveness, billing quality and how well the relationship is managed.
Lake watched the profession’s reaction on LinkedIn: comments, mostly from lawyers, saying that won’t work, because “it’s all about relationships”.
Hold that thought.
Ask at reception
If the experience is every touchpoint, then everyone in the firm can deliver it.
Kirsty Shenton, Head of Client Development at Mills & Reeve, is unequivocal. “Every single person in our organisation has a part to play, whether you’re in the post room, or whether you are a senior partner out there on the front line.” Her team does as much client experience development work with business services and support teams as with her lawyers.
The clients confirm the wisdom of this. Mills & Reeve’s feedback regularly names a receptionist in the firm’s London office, as well as exec assistants and members of the facilities team. A client recently mentioned somebody who “made them a really great cup of tea”, Shenton says.
Kreston Reeves has built that principle in too. Its client experience programme deliberately includes people from finance, HR and IT, not just the client-facing teams, “because as good as one person can be client-facing, if things are disjointed internally, how teams deliver to a client has a huge knock-on impact”, Richardson says.
Great expectations
Ask what clients actually complain about and it is rarely the work. What sours a relationship is the gap between what the client expected and what happened. And nowhere does that gap open wider than around the bill.
“If you estimate really well, you’re much less likely to go over at the end,” says Shenton, pointing out that doing a really good job of scoping a project with a client pays repeated dividends later on.
Hogan sees “no surprise fees” written into proposals as a selling point. Keep the client updated as the number moves, she says, and “it puts them in control of their budget”.
And money is not the only expectation that needs managing. Time matters just as much.
At Kreston Pedabo in Nigeria, Tyna Adediran, Head of Management Consulting and Business Development, has rules. “You can’t wait for 24 hours and then respond to an email and say I’ll get back to you. Why did you wait 24 hours?” The full answer can come later. The acknowledgement cannot.
Kreston Reeves has gone one step further and written the rules down: internal client charters set out expectations, service line by service line. Its client satisfaction score currently stands at 9.2 out of 10.
Caroline Bateman, Head of Business Development at Devon firm Tozers, offers the tip that costs least of all: remember that the client cannot see your desk.
“You’re busy. The clients don’t know you’re busy. They don’t care if you’re busy or not.” Nothing happening on the case? The client doesn’t know that either. “All it takes is a quick email to say: nothing’s happening, I’m still waiting on this, I’ll let you know when something’s happening.”
Even a bleak prognosis beats silence. Scope the job honestly, says Shenton, and you can look the client in the eye and say: “We can achieve that outcome, but I want to set your expectations now. We’re in for a rough ride.”
Culture
Everything above is behaviour. And firm-wide behaviour has another name.
“A lot of that is to do with behaviour change, and that’s blooming hard,” says Lake. “It’s the cultural piece, and cultural pieces are hard.” Her diagnosis of why some firms stall is structural: “Traditional firms are not built to be able to make the difficult changes necessary to really move the dial.”
The firms that manage it stop making the change optional. Hogan’s formula: “It needs a top-down mandate and a bottom-up training.”
What happens when the change is optional? A story from one firm shows the cost. A long-standing client relationship had quietly gone sour, and nobody inside the firm knew, because the partner who ran it had never let a colleague anywhere near the client. When he retired, the truth surfaced: the client had been close to walking. The firm went in, asked what it would take to put things right, and changed the team entirely. That relationship is now among the strongest it has.
At Kreston Pedabo in Nigeria, Adediran is building the culture
against a deadline. Beyond the two co-founders, the firm has eight partners, some of whom are holding client relationships that go back decades, and one of them is approaching retirement. “If a habit and a culture is not built around their responsiveness, business will be lost. Clients and their representatives are now being mapped across cadres to build continuity into it all.”
Why bother?
“Every single one of our clients is somebody else’s business development target,” says Shenton.
Lake completes the thought: “The firms who do it better than you will come for your clients, and clients will vote with their feet.”
Adediran has the invoices to prove it. “We have won a lot of work from the big four over the years, and a lot of it has really been because clients felt they didn’t have time for them,” she says.
She’s clear that even though they are smaller, they don’t undercut on fees. Their clients, she says, are happy to pay a fair price for a good service and for the attention. They just don’t want it to feel transactional.
Measure, then move
The good news is that all of this is eminently measurable. This is where client listening earns its keep: as a diagnostic.
Mills & Reeve gathers around a thousand pieces of client feedback a year and plots them against a set of published client commitments in service of a stated ambition: a 95% client recommendation rate.
“Client listening for us is very much the mechanism by which we monitor how well we’re doing on that client experience,” Shenton says. When the data flagged pricing and out-of-scope conversations as the sticking points, the firm built defined activities around fixing them, then used the same listening to check the fix was working.
Graham Archbold, founder of research consultancy Chorus Insight, is a listening specialist, and he pushes the measurement one layer deeper, because clients might say one thing and do another.
“You want to look at their actual behaviour,” he says.
“They say that ‘if you discounted stuff, we’d buy more’. But when you do that, do they buy more?”
Professional firms, he points out, are very good at metrics; they produce them for a living. Client experience is what happens when you act on them.
Which is exactly what Revolut has understood. Its quarterly scorecard is client listening, inverted, running in the other direction, and firms on the receiving end are expected to do the one thing firms find hardest with their own feedback: act on it.
A relationship business
Back to those lawyers on LinkedIn, the ones who dismissed Revolut’s scorecard because they think they win their work based on relationships, not metrics.
They are half right. It is about the relationship. The relationship that starts when the client walks into reception and someone knows their name. The relationship with the assistant who returns the call, the finance team that gets the bill right, the post room that gets the bundle to court. The decades-long relationship that survives a partner’s retirement. Every touchpoint of the firm, every time.
The relationship that’s bigger and more sticky than the relationship between a partner and a client. ■
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James Lumley, freelance journalist, corporate writer, trainer and coach. www.byline.london
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