Feedback from clients is absolutely vital when it comes to shaping your business, planning for the future and dealing with current issues; both of the obvious and hidden variety. It’s really critical if you want to hold onto your clients to know how you are perceived and what you can do to strengthen relationships.
By giving clients an opportunity to comment on your service and by acting upon this feedback you can improve retention rates and even discover new business opportunities. Conversely if you don’t ask, you’re just making assumptions and if incorrect this can put your relationship at risk and opens the door for competitors. So if you’re committed to retaining clients (and who isn’t), surely it’s time find out what clients have to say.
The Process
Whether you are about to embrace client research for the first time, or wish to extend your current approach, our Marketing Support Consultants can advise on:
- Client Satisfaction Surveys
- Telephone interviews
- Face to face interviews
- Mystery shopping
And provide:
- Consultancy and planning for these activities, including gaining buy-in for the research process and management of the communication process with clients
- Research and development of satisfaction surveys and interview questions
- Survey design and distribution
- Conduct client interviews and arrange mystery shopping
- Results analysis, interpretation and recommendations
Client Satisfaction Surveys
Surveys are an effective way to gain feedback on general service issues; they can also identify which member of staff are going the extra mile and which departments need a little extra support.
One option is to mail out client satisfaction surveys, but that involves print and postage costs and then keying in results when returned in your Freepost envelope. So instead you could automate your case management system to email a link to your survey when a case is closed. The recipient then follows simple instructions to complete an online survey. Alternatively you could have a nice big button on the home page of your website, letting everyone know that you take client satisfaction seriously!
Our service solution is designed to make collating this data a totally pain free process. All you have to do is pick a survey style, decide on your questions and how you want the answers displayed (drop down, multiple choice, free text etc) it’s then designed for you. With the intuitive interface it’s simple to select your recipients and, even better than that, the software will do all the clever statistical stuff once the data is returned, leaving you free to act on the results!
Telephone interviews
Telephone interviews tend to be more effective than surveys in eliciting answers to “open” questions, which give clients opportunities to expand on topics and issues. This is turn provides deeper insight into how the firm is perceived and what aspects of the service are most important to clients.
To provide meaningful results our Marketing Support Consultants will discuss research objectives and current issues with you before designing a questionnaire. They will agree with you a process for selecting clients to be interviewed, inviting them to take part, setting up and conducting interviews and sharing results. But most important of all they will include follow up to check that any constructive criticism is acted upon and improvements introduced. Critical to all client research are the outcomes and delivering continuous improvement.
Face to face interview
While many might assume that their clients won’t have time for face to face interviews, in fact many clients prefer this approach as it gives them time, usually away from their desk, to consider what it is they want from their law firm and how well your firm is meeting these expectations. Clients who value the relationship with their lawyers view client research positively and welcome the opportunity to express their views and observations.
Our approach for such a research project would follow the process described above for Telephone Interviews. In addition we could ask some clients for permission to film follow up interviews to explore further particular points they raised. The filmed interviews can then be used for training purposes to spark debate on client care and service delivery issues. This can be an extremely powerful way to highlight client issues and concerns, as it’s hard for lawyers not to engage with the feedback when it comes ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ so to speak.
Mystery shopping
It’s often very revealing to experience things from the clients perspective and mystery shopping is one way to achieve this. The technique involves calls being made to named lawyers to find out how the calls are handled and how quickly they are answered. Mystery shopping is a quick way to discover if your firm is getting the basics right and can be repeated at regular intervals to track trends. In addition to circulating the results of the exercise, we would always recommend playing back selected calls to remind partners and staff how vital it is that they answer calls promptly and professionally.
Within a competitive legal market no firm can afford to be complacent. It’s really important to constantly evaluate what you do and to check that your service meets changing client expectations.
Getting Started Checklist
It’s important to consider the following:
- How do you currently gain feedback from clients?
- How effective is this?
- What aspects of your service do you want feedback on?
- How valuable would feedback from key clients be?
- What type of research is most appropriate for your firm?
- What will you do with the findings?
- Timeframe and budget
Fee Structure
As clients want certainty on fees we will conduct each type of client research on a fixed fee basis. The charge would be based on the time involved, sample size etc. Please call David Gilroy now on 0117 325 0202 to discuss costs or any other element of the service. We look forward to hearing from you!
