A feedback culture must be fearless
Client Listening is a well-known phrase and activity with many firms having a formal process of gathering feedback. But the listening is the easy part. Kirsty Shenton, Head of Client Care at Mills & Reeve, talks us through the importance of what you do next.
A feedback culture must be fearless
Client Listening is a well-known phrase and activity with many firms having a formal process of gathering feedback. But the listening is the easy part. Kirsty Shenton, Head of Client Care at Mills & Reeve, talks us through the importance of what you do next.
Client listening is the sharp end of the client development team’s remit within any firm; it’s the most rewarding part of the role when you can actually get to sit in front of the client and ask, “how are we doing?”
Listening to clients to understand their wants and needs requires a conscious decision and intention to listen, to understand and interpret what is being said. Good listening can have significant commercial advantage, yielding increases in revenue and strengthening relationships. However, in my experience the advantage is only achieved if the starting intention is right.
Before you embark on your client listening journey, ask a few questions:
1. How will client listening contribute to your strategy? 2. What are you hoping to achieve from the client listening? 3. What will you do with the insight gained? 4. What happens next?
Fearless feedback culture
Client surveys are not new. Professional service firms have adopted them for some time. What is changing is the approach. Some have taken a lead in this embedding client feedback into the heart of their firm’s strategy. But where do you start in designing and future proofing your client listening?
It starts with culture. Culture is everything. Firms need to be “culturally ready” to seek client views regularly and widely through feedback. They also need to be ready to evolve their culture to really absorb the client voice, making clients front and centre of all activity.
At Mills & Reeve we have coined the phrase “fearless feedback” – reflecting on the need to seek opinions from our clients on our performance that is direct, honest, timely, constructive, and provided with good intention for the purposes of continuous improvement. Fearless feedback helps create a culture where people are encouraged to look for improvement, to speak up, take responsibility and are accountable for the outcomes.
In summary, fearless feedback encourages everyone to listen openly and act where necessary. Creating this kind of culture takes time and often requires thinking differently and doing things differently, challenging the status quo and changing behaviours. Buy-in at board and senior management level is essential. It is also important to align your people and client strategies to ensure that all activity is driving your firm forward in a single direction.
A good starting place is to centre your client listening around your firm’s overall strategy; what are your strategy objectives and how will client feedback play into achieving those?
Our strategic goal is to be a Leader in Client Experience by 2025, we have defined this using a Client Recommendation score (CREC) to ensure the aim is both tangible and measurable. Setting ourselves the ambitious goal of achieving a 95% CREC by 2025 – client listening is critical to measuring our progression towards this goal.
The next step is to look at your different client personas. In the old days of marketing, we used to refer to this as “segmentation” but categorising clients purely on organisation type can be crude and inaccurate. Identifying client personas, for example by considering the various individuals across the client organisation and their position within it, allows you to reflect on the intangibles such as their wants, needs, challenges and emotional responses and how this drives their decision making.
Once you have analysed your client personas, look at mapping your clients’ journey. What does it feel like to be a client of my firm? What are all the touch points a client experiences?
Recent research in the legal sector suggests there is often a disconnect between internal and external perception, with around 75% of lawyers thinking their client service is above average, yet only 40% of clients agreed. So be prepared to dig deep and really challenge yourselves to understand where the pinch points are.
Gathering internal feedback on the client journey, particularly when compared to external sources, can be incredibly useful in identifying the nature of the improvement point – some being process driven and others behaviour-led. Use your client listening to build the picture, to really understand the client’s persona and what their perception is of engagement at each of the touch points and how this determines their relationship with you.
“Good listening can have significant commercial advantage, yielding increases in revenue and strengthening relationships. However, in my experience the advantage is only achieved if the starting intention is right.”
“Good listening can have significant commercial advantage, yielding increases in revenue and strengthening relationships. However, in my experience the advantage is only achieved if the starting intention is right.”
Closing the feedback loop
So, you have mapped your client journey, understood your client personas, and got your client listening methodology in place and client feedback is in abundance. What next?
Arguably this is the most critical part of the process, how do you close the feedback loop? Interpret what you have heard and use the feedback to deliver value and commercial advantage to your business, whilst ensuring the clients see demonstrable actions and change from sharing their thoughts with you. In my experience client listening outcomes need to be absorbed at different levels:
• Individual feedback • Practice area / team feedback • Firmwide level
Individual feedback
Assuming your team are culturally ready - and feedback is given under the fearless feedback principle - individual feedback is very powerful. Outcomes should be included in performance reviews and tracked over time against objectives and training requirements based on continuous improvement.
It is here the alignment of your people strategy is critical. For instance, look at everyone’s roles and responsibilities – not just the fee earners but everyone in the firm and how they align to your client strategy. Is everyone demonstrating the behaviours that your clients are expecting? Do fee earner objectives align with those of your clients? Very rarely is it the core service delivery i.e., the advice that is subject to criticism from clients. It tends to be the interpersonal skills such as communication and expectation management, as well as the fundamental hygiene factors of service delivery including consistency across teams and of course estimating and pricing.
Practice area/team feedback
Continuous improvement in client experience is a collaborative process. If you are seeking real change at a behavioural level, then this needs to be built at individual team or practise group level.
Where change is collaborative and relevant to groups it is more likely to be effective. Provide these groups with frequent summaries and support them to make collective improvements. Dig into what the clients are really saying. For example, if feedback suggests that deadlines are being missed – ask why this is and what can be done to improve it across the team or practice area.
Build this into a continuous improvement plan, focussing on the areas that will make a real difference to their clients’ experience based on the feedback the clients have given. For example, if making time for supervision is causing problems in meeting client deadlines then re-engineer how supervision is completed.
Firmwide level
At a corporate level, the feedback should be used to identify where the gaps in client experience are holistically and build initiatives to address the need for behavioural change through communication and training. Let’s say your firm’s inception/client onboarding process is receiving poor feedback, then review and train staff on the improvement. Don’t forget to respond to the clients to say we listened, and we have improved.
If you are continually getting poor feedback on pricing, dig deep and look at why, is it the absolute price or is it the behaviours around cost management that need to be addressed.
Feedback across all audiences is an iterative process, to really absorb the voice of the client into your business and drive a client centric culture use the simple formula:
• Listen (to your clients) • Act (build your plans for improvement) • Measure (success against improvement objectives) • Listen again (feedback to the client and listen again)
Conclusion
Feedback should be a collaborative and cohesive process, ensuring everyone is onboard and involved.
For it to be effective the board and senior management must be committed to listening to clients and acting on the feedback, setting minimum standards of expectation from everyone within the organisation. Communication and training are key, but before any of this can happen get your culture right!
Top Tips
• Engage – communicate to get early buy-in right across the business. • Be “culturally ready” - to embrace the feedback and use it for continuous improvement. • Be fearless - seek opinions on performance that is direct, honest, timely and constructive with good intention. • Strategy alignment – clients, people, processes all pointing in the same direction. • Close the feedback loop – listen, act, measure, listen again.