Listen to Understand

As a service provider, your success is assessed based on how clients view the services you provide. The question to be asked is, are you harnessing objective assessment/ feedback by actively soliciting it? This is not to overburden you with the “let’s set up another process” perspective but more because client feedback is critical for client re-engagement. In a very robust but highly competitive legal market, differentiators such as “large firm” or a “full-service firm” stand quite redundant. How you seek feedback and how you implement it, can be your competitive advantage because it allows you to continually improve, stay at par with competitors, and clearly state your value add.

An effective client feedback mechanism enables an effective way of ensuring you have a 360-degree view of the client’s journey with the firm. Taking a data-driven approach to extrapolate a bespoke solution, will play a key role. Your feedback seeking has to be driven broadly by how you want to measure ROI on the client’s personal experience, the client’s experience on the business side of things and how to correlate these two aspects successfully.

While setting up a client re-engagement campaign, one must also have an idea about the maturity of the firm’s practice management process, broader strategy, and the firm’s lifecycle.

It is imperative to build a client re-engagement strategy, keeping in mind the firm’s internal workings and long term goals.

To introduce you to the stages, we have broadly bucketed different stages a firm may catch itself in:

• Ad hoc stage, a firm may not have a BD team, some BD activities maybe ongoing but in an unorganized fashion.
• Reactive stage, a firm may have a central BD/admin team but the process of BD may be reactive, chaotic, tactical, and dependent on an individual’s performance.
• Developing stage, a firm may have hired a team of BD managers who have limited influence, authority or innovation, resulting in the standard BD process being used by only pockets of the firm.
• Managed stage, the firm may have hired experienced BD managers/directors for groups or teams who enjoy authority, autonomy and experience to hold the firm’s members accountable to follow due process.
• Optimized stage, the firm’s process is documented, controlled, and measured using quantifiable data, driven by collective and individual goals. There is a standard, defined business development process used consistently across the firm.
• Differentiated stage, the firm uses quantifiable data and predictive or automated technology to drive proactive processes. The BD team members are seen as experts and advisors who innovate and drive the strategic outcome. The standard-defined process is continually monitored, refined, and improved.

When it comes to client re-engagement strategy at a firm, it is imperative to understand the past and current status of relevant key business areas (concerning client engagement) and to identify the loopholes (for example reasons for disengagement). This exercise lends a macro and micro-level view of the firm’s management on various BD initiatives and helps see patterns and gain insights into the ways clients use (or don’t use) the firm’s services.

The Grey Matter continues to work towards bridging the gaps, handholding internal teams to strengthen internal data and ensure best practices, enabling the firm to seek feedback that is honest, useful, and actionable.

By Neha Kashyap and Niharika Rana at The Grey Matter