Listening to Your Clients...and the Survey Says?

Developing a client relationship management strategy is a long and arduous process requiring a thorough evaluation of your services. The question is where do you start?Â The most obvious place is to ask your clients what they think of the services you provide, but as Chris Pullen has discovered there is more to carrying out a client survey than meets the eye...

Most law firms spend a lot of time and money investing in marketing communications (MARCOMS). Brochures, newsletters, seminars, advertising, websites are all methods we employ to push information out to our clients. We tell them how many partners we have, how many fee earners, our service range, our legal expertise etc.

The problem is that most of this communication is one way. We are doing the talking, but is the client listening? More importantly, are we listening to the client? The answer is all too frequently no, or at least not in a systematic measurable way. All too often I've heard it said that "Well, if were still getting instructions from the client, they must be happy with the work were doing". Not necessarily. Do we know for instance how much of the clients total legal work we are getting; 'their share of wallet'. Is there any other work that we could do for them? Is the client happy with all aspects of the service we are providing or is there room for improvement?

The Need to Know

The answer to these and many other related questions is frequently "I don't know". We must know. We need to find out. Unless we know the answer to these questions, how do we know whether we are providing a quality service? How do we know whether the client is a positive supporter of the firm or whether they are neutral or even slightly negative about the service we offer? In our business, word of mouth recommendations are extremely important, but word of mouth can be positive or negative. This is where a client satisfaction survey can be of great benefit. Not only can it serve to strengthen the relationship, it can also provide some very clear guidance on strategic issues, effective marketing methods and an ability to measure and monitor the quality of the service that you are providing.

Quality is far too important an issue to be left to 'gut feel' or any other of our own internal or subjective measures of quality. The only people that can only truly assess the quality of service we are providing is our clients. I've heard it said that we regularly ask our clients how we performed on the most recent job we did for them. But, are you asking the right questions? For example, simply asking if everything went OK will not necessarily elicit much by way of a response. The job may well have gone OK in general terms, otherwise the client will probably have told you. However, because you asked a fairly imprecise question, it means you likely to get a fairly imprecise response. As a result, you'll fail to find out the details, the specific answers to specific questions that will give you a much better picture of the overall quality of the service you are providing.

How responsive were we?
Were our bills accurate and timely?
How did our assistants perform?
Did our IT perform satisfactory?

There are a hundred and one different questions you could ask that will tell you a lot more about the client's overall perception of the firm and its services and provide a true measure of the quality of the service you are providing.

Getting Started

Assuming that you have agreed the principle of a client survey, there are a number of key decisions you will need take to get it off the ground. Many of those decisions will be directly influenced by your overall objective for conducting the survey. For example, is it a cosmetic exercise designed to demonstrate to your clients that you have a client feedback system in operation, or do you really want the answers to some important questions and issues that go to the very heart of the service you are providing? If it is the former, cosmetic exercise, this can be done quite easily and cheaply, by means of handing or sending the client a short questionnaire to complete following each piece of work. You will get some feedback, though I would question the value of those post-matter completion forms, as they are usually very specific to the delivery mechanism and therefore limited in their scope. Postal surveys can have a role to play, particularly where budget and speed of response is a factor.

However, if you want to explore issues with your clients and get quality feedback, I would always recommend a qualitative survey featuring your top twenty to thirty clients. A qualitative survey usually involves someone sitting down with a client and asking a series of questions, which may take anywhere up to an hour or so to complete. But won't the clients objects at this imposition upon their time? The short answer is usually no; in fact, quite often it's the reverse. Clients appreciate the opportunity to talk about the service they receive and how it can be improved. When we did our first client satisfaction survey back in 1995, I think the one thing that surprised us was how pleased the clients were just to participate in the survey. In client relationship terms, simply commissioning the survey was an extremely positive step.

Externalising the Process

In my experience, appointing an external consultant to conduct the interviews is more beneficial than relying upon the internal route. An external consultant is seen by the client to be 'neutral'. They have no real knowledge of the people involved so the reporting is objective and uncluttered by any political or personality considerations. It also sends a clear message to the client: we value your business; we value it enough to employ external consultants and to send them to your office to enable you to tell us what you think about the quality of our services.

Employing an external consultant is undoubtedly a more expensive option, but like many other things in life, you get what you pay for. Once you have decided how you're going to do it, the next question is which of your clients should participate in the survey. Given the Pareto principle of eighty percent of your business coming from twenty percent of your clients, you should concentrate on your top clients. Your top twenty to thirty clients are probably the core of the survey work, but you should also consider adding one or two referral sources or intermediaries such as the accountants, if they are an important source of work for you. You should also consider one or two lapsed clients, who, for whatever reason, no longer give you the same volume of work as in the past. One or two new clients that have only been exposed to the firm for a short period of time may give you an interesting contrast to some of your more established clients.

The Questionnaire

So, you have decided who to talk to and how you are going to do it. The next issue to resolve is what you are going to ask. There are a vast number of questions you could ask, but you need to remember that the client will only have a limited amount of time so the questionnaire should ideally take no longer than approximately 45 minutes to complete. That still gives you quite a lot of scope. The nature of the questions will largely be determined by the individual characteristics of your firm. However, here are a few of the more general categories that you might consider including in your survey:

Marketing positioning/branding.
Choice and use of lawyers.
Existing services.
Quality of services.
Share of wallet.
Current legal issues.
IT effectiveness.
Marketing effectiveness.
Fees and billing.
Future needs.

Some of the more interesting responses often come from the questions concerning existing services and share of wallet. There is often an assumption made by law firms that the client is fully aware of the range of services available to his/her firm. It is often the case, however, that the client is blissfully unaware of the range of services that may be available. Just because you send information to the client about all the other services you have to offer, it doesn't necessarily mean that the client avidly reads and absorbs that information. Of course, clients may choose not to use your firm for certain types of work, preferring others in the field. That's fine, provided it is a positive choice based upon reasonable knowledge of your expertise in that area. What is hugely frustrating is the client saying "Oh, I didn't know you did that", with the clear inference that, had he known, you might well have been instructed.

Share of wallet is another important topic if one accepts the principle that it is considerably easier to win more work from existing clients than from new clients. However, winning more work requires some knowledge of what other work is available and perhaps more importantly, who the competition is for this type of work. These are fundamental questions that you need to know the answer to before you can embark upon any cross marketing initiatives.

Follow Up

Once the survey has been conducted, in common with many other marketing activities, the vital stage is the follow-up. Assuming the survey does throw up several issues that need to be addressed, not only do you need to deal with them, you also need to demonstrate to the client that you have addressed them, or at least that you are taking action as a result. Not only would it be a waste of money in relation to the survey itself, it would also be potentially damaging to the relationship if the client raised issues or concerns and then felt that absolutely nothing had been done about them.

At the very least, any concerns or issues raised should be acknowledged after the survey. This may take the form of a letter, a telephone call or a visit, or a combination of these, by either the client partner or perhaps the managing partner, given the relative importance of those clients. It may even be worthwhile sending participating clients a copy of the main findings, together with a short summary of action proposed to address the issues arising. Dependent upon the result of the survey, a small action group may be required to consider the issues and implement changes.

In summary, a client satisfaction survey can be an extremely important tool in engineering or maintaining an effective CRM programme. Done well, it can prove to be a goldmine of valuable information that can help direct business and marketing strategy well into the future.

Chris Pullen, Marketing Director, Rowe & Mawe