How AI is changing the art and science of client listening in 2024

In today’s fiercely competitive environment, client needs and expectations keep evolving as law firms rebrand, merge, poach staff and launch new digital services.?

How can law firms keep their finger on the pulse without having to invest in additional team or consulting resources? The solution is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to discover and respond to client needs faster.

AI has become a topic of conversation around every boardroom table. While AI has been around for years, and comes in many different flavours, ChatGPT has changed the game by making AI seem more accessible. Whether the firm’s stance is to dive in or wait and see, AI has Partners re-evaluating their business processes and how they deliver services to their chosen market.

In the context of client listening, AI has a lot to offer forward-looking law firms.?

AI is enabling previously unimaginable levels of speed, scale and consistency. But that doesn’t mean the machines are taking over. On the contrary, with AI taking on the dull and repetitive tasks, your client listening, BD and marketing teams are freed up to do what humans do best - empathise, communicate, make judgement calls and drive action. In short, if you work in client listening, AI won’t take your job - but someone using AI could.

What is client listening?

What do I mean by client listening? It is the process of gathering, understanding and acting upon insights about the needs, expectations and experiences of both current and prospective clients.

Firms practise client listening so that they can capture, make sense of, and use the voice of the client (and prospective clients) to help guide their decision-making.?

However, where firms differ is with how many clients they choose to listen to, and the extent to which that feedback drives day-to-day decision-making.

Client listening has, traditionally, been a passive process, a seasonal project focusing on research activities, like key client interviews and/or quantitative client surveys. Setting up, running and reporting on client listening was a slow, manual process, so firms did it in batches and limited the number of clients involved.?

The outputs were a combination of raw data (interview transcripts and individual survey responses) and a summary PowerPoint highlighting the themes relevant to different parts of the firm.

Hearing the true voice of the client

Of course, this isn’t the only feedback coming into the business. Clients also share their experiences in public (research, directories, reviews etc) and directly with the firm (complaints, emails, in conversation etc).

Unfortunately for firms with a research-based client listening process, each feedback source goes into a different system, silo or team. This means client listening teams have to manually find and aggregate the disconnected data.

Project-based client listening is hard work. You have been bogged down for too finding data, tagging text and producing static reports. Instead your skills and expertise should be focused on discovering ‘so what’ and driving action.

It may be the way they’ve always done it, but the costs of project-based client listening - missing data, periodic reporting, subjective analysis, expensive consultants - have become too high a price.

The rise of always-on client listening

2020 was the turning point for client listening, with the pandemic disrupting client engagement. Personal relationships, collaboration and service delivery went digital overnight. Boards faced new decisions that old research couldn’t inform. Agile decision-making required generating insights from feedback data quickly, while avoiding individual bias and assumptions.

Forward-looking firms became hungry for fresh client insights. They started looking for ways to adopt a more active approach to client listening – a platform, culture and processes that would give them a competitive advantage by providing a constant flow of actionable insights.

Hallmarks of always-on client listening

To make this work, AI became the foundation of a more active approach to client listening. Always-on client listening has made feedback a more dynamic, client-led process with six common hallmarks.

1 Proactive - Clients can proactively share their feedback when they have something to say, rather than waiting for the firm to ask. What's more, when you are free to ask open questions, you can have a more client-led conversation.

2 Client-led - Clients can use their preferred channel for sharing feedback (surveys, interviews, email, phone etc), rather than being restricted to the one decided by the firm.

3 Client Journey - Clients can share their expectations and experiences at all stages of the client journey, not just when the work is done. As a result, you can gather feedback before it's too late to respond.

4 Opt-out - The insights include a broader range of client voices, because always-on client listening enables an opt-out - rather than an opt-in - feedback culture.?

5 Automated - Client insights are no longer constrained by available resources or manual processing. AI-powered analysis scales effortlessly and runs automatically.?

6 Real-time - With AI doing the heavy lifting, dashboards become a live view of client needs and expectations. All teams within the firm have access to the latest actionable insights, reducing the need to rely on assumptions or old research reports.?

By accelerating the process of collecting, analysing and acting upon client experiences, firms can discover and respond to client needs faster. Always-on client listening turns client intelligence into a flywheel for growth.

Make the move to AI-powered always-on client listening

Making the move to always-on client listening requires an evolution of processes and mindset. Four stepping stones we see MyCustomerLens clients taking to speed up their journey are.

1 Redefine what your firm considers as ‘feedback’.

Bring a fresh pair of eyes to the data sources that could be providing intelligence. Feedback is anything clients and prospects share that can help the firm deliver consistently good services and experiences.?

Complaints, testimonials, informal conversations, directory responses, reviews, conversations at live events. These are all potential sources of feedback and therefore should be saved alongside survey and interview data.

2 Listen across the client journey.?

Traditional client listening focuses on measuring relationships, and therefore gathers feedback after the work is done. Show clients that your firm listens differently, by adding simple ways to collect feedback when you still have time to act on it.?

For example, can clients be asked about their expectations at the start of a matter? This could be as simple as asking what innovation or responsiveness looks like to them, in the context of this piece of work.?

Or you could create an ‘instant feedback’ form that clients can access at any time during the matter. These forms just ask what are we doing well and what could we be doing better? No ratings or closed questions, just space for clients to quickly share what’s on their mind.

3 Link insights to decision-making.?

Set new expectations about how insights should inform actions, by making insight reports a standing agenda item. For example, client insight becomes a standard part of each Board and leadership team meeting, just like financial reports.?

Or add a ‘CX minute’ to the start of every team meeting.? Here someone shares a relevant business lesson from client or personal experiences to help frame the meeting in a client context.

4 Implement an always-on client listening platform.

To get the speed and scale benefits of AI, you will need a platform that easily unifies, analyses and reports on your client feedback. This ensures that the growth in actionable insights doesn’t lead to a rise in consulting fees or manual work. I’m biased of course, but MyCustomerLens is a good one to look at!

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Say goodbye to old assumptions and hello to actionable insights.

Paul Roberts is co-founder of MyCustomerLens | always-on listening , the always-on client listening platform for professional services firms seeking a competitive advantage.

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