Active client listening is a journey, not a destination
In a bid to strengthen relationships, reputations and revenues, firms are seeking to make more agile and evidence-based decisions. But where will this evidence come from?
Traditional professional services are under pressure. Hybrid working, digitised services and new competitive alternatives are all disrupting how clients want to engage and what they expect good service to look like. The stakes couldn't be higher, with some firms already seeing profit-per-partner stagnating or even falling.
Lockdown disrupted traditional client listening
The traditional approach to client listening has been to only ask the top one-per-cent of clients for feedback, and then only after the work is complete. As a result, the clients' voice at the boardroom table is drowning in assumptions.
Lockdown disrupted this passive approach. As everyone moved to remote working, partners suddenly realised they had to make new types of business decisions about what services their firms could and should continue to offer and how those would be delivered. With client needs and expectations changing, decision-making needed to become more agile, and evidence based.
In response, firms started to talk to their clients in a different way. BD and fee-earners were reaching out to ask how their contacts were doing and how their needs were evolving. They were asking different questions and offering fresh perspectives. Boards were suddenly receiving regular updates about what clients and competitors were doing, and what was expected of them.
When the tide retreated, people across these different departments went back to what they were doing before. But partners missed the flow of fresh insights that had helped them to make more agile, and better informed, decisions. Their clients also missed the opportunities to have more rounded conversations.
Based on recent market conversations, and the requests for proposals we received, 2022 will go down as the turning point for active client listening. Firms have started asking for better ways to keep their finger on the pulse by listening to more clients more often. Instead of periodic feedback requests, they're looking to establish a culture of ‘always-on’ listening.
Claire Rason from Client Talk describes this emerging active client listening approach as human-centred and tech-enabled, with the focus shifting from being firm-led to client-led. It blends human conversations and interpretations with the technology to instantly gather, analyse and report on every drop of feedback received. But active client listening also requires a mindset shift. Partners need to be open to hearing what clients want to say, rather than just what the firm wants to know.
For forward-looking firms like Shoosmiths this shift is part of a broader strategy to deliver stand-out client experiences. As senior client culture manager, Aileen Leahy, explains, the firm is committed to having client feedback at the core of their strategy. To do this, they are combining always-on client listening technology with a firm-wide human focus on responding to what is heard.
At Taylor Wessing, client insights manager, Iain Rowlands, says their evolving client listening programme is seeking to be a “trusted adviser” to senior management. To achieve this, the programme is shifting focus to gather more data so that they can discover and share themes and trends across clients. This shift isn't just happening amongst law firms. Consulting firms are increasingly telling me about senior management asking "where's the client feedback" to support business cases and decision-making.
“The traditional approach to client listening has been to only ask the top one-per-cent of clients for feedback, and then only after the work is complete. As a result, the clients' voice at the boardroom table is drowning in assumptions.”
How firms are embracing active client listening
Each year MyCustomerLens runs our Future of Client Listening research to map how professional services are evolving. Based on the trends we've been reporting, 2023 will see a big push to:
- Gather additional sources of client feedback across more stages of the client journey.
- Automate the analysis and reporting so that programme impact can be scaled up without having to hire more people.
- Deliver faster insights to support more agile and evidence-based decisions.
How are firms gathering feedback across the client journey?
Our research has highlighted firms with as many as nine different sources of client feedback. But that's not the same clients responding to the same survey nine times. It's about using different feedback methods to hear from different clients at different stages of the journey. The voice of the client is being heard from formal interviews and surveys to informal comments on calls or at events.
The trend here is using different methods to capture the feedback. After a pitch, firms may receive verbal or written feedback. At the end of the on-boarding process, clients may share feedback in an email or via a web form. During longer pieces of work, there's again the opportunity to check-in verbally, via email or through directing them to a brief form or survey. Boosting response rates and feedback volumes comes from making it easy for clients to share what's on their minds.
How are firms automating the analysis and reporting?
As the client's voice gets louder and feedback volumes rise, the next question is how to manage and use the information. This starts with having a central and flexible place to put the data. Our research has highlighted that "people's heads and notebooks" and "individual files" remain the most likely place the data is stored. This makes for a slow and frustrating process gathering, analysing, and reporting on the insights.
To overcome this, firms are looking for technology platforms that can make sense of both structured and unstructured data. These platforms have three distinct characteristics:
- They make use of modern cloud databases that can easily handle new data formats and feedback sources.
- They support AI-driven text analysis which dramatically reduces the time it takes to analyse verbatim comments.
- The insights are fed into real-time reports that can be accessed across the firm without incurring incremental user licensing fees
How are firms increasing firm-wide engagement with the insights?
With technology delivering instant insights from more clients more often, commercial and client listening teams can focus on the fun stuff - turning the insights into action. We're starting to see client listening insights inform everything from pitch documents and thought leadership through to product development and process improvement.
This starts with engaging the whole firm in collecting feedback. By making it easy for people to collect and share informal feedback, firms are developing a culture of listening and curiosity. Sometimes this needs a nudge from peer pressure, by publishing a list of the teams collecting and sharing the most feedback!
With teams open to hearing more, the days of generic presentations are numbered. Imagine you're about to visit a client. As you wait in reception, your phone shows you a snapshot of the feedback your client shared yesterday along with how it compares to their previous feedback. With a flick of your finger the view changes to show how their comments and sentiment benchmark against other clients in the same sector.
The days of hunting for last year's slide deck are over. New client listening platforms are “always-on” and able to present fresh insights and emerging trends that are cut and sliced by team, practice area, jurisdiction and more.
Active client listening is a journey, not a destination
If your client listening programme is still focused on the top few clients, then fresh insights at your fingertips may seem a long way off. But that's ok, most of your peers are on the same journey. Start by establishing one central place where the data gets stored, analysed, and reported. Then you can expand the ways clients can share feedback with your firm, confident more data can be handled with less time and resources. This frees up your team to identify the “so what” - and engage the business in taking action.
Finally, my thanks to Claire, Aileen and Iain for sharing their insights to support this article.