Is your client listening programme creating feedback intelligence?
Paul Roberts
Customer Experience | Always On Client Listening | SaaS | Customer Insight | CEO MyCustomerLens - always-on listening
If you work in professional services then you know strong relationships matter. Whether competing for clients or talent, the firms who discover and respond to needs quickly have a competitive advantage. At the heart of this relationship building process is your client listening programme.
So recent research by MyCustomerLens asked firms how they would future-proof their client listening programmes. Managing Partners, Marketing Directors, and Client Listening Heads told a similar story. They want to listen to more clients more often and do more with what they hear. In short, they want more feedback intelligence.
“(Voice of the client) has come right up the priority list. We don’t do enough of it, and what we do isn’t very sophisticated. We are behind the curve and need to improve.”
Managing Partner, Law Firm – Voice of the Client Benchmarking Study, June 2021
The professional services sector is evolving
Whether they like it or not, professional services firms are now part of the experience economy. According to McKinsey's Global Survey of executives, in just a few months, the COVID-19 crisis brought about years of change in the way companies in all sectors and regions do business. It shifted customer needs and expectations and how firms deliver on them. As a result, professional services firms are now competing on the quality of the entire customer experience. Expertise alone is not enough.?
In response, forward-looking firms are moving on from traditional customer feedback processes. Sporadic research and annual surveys are being replaced by an 'always-on' model of customer feedback. Behind the scenes, firms are shifting from a disconnected “I know my clients” model to a holistic “we know our clients” model. This shift is unifying the multiple sources of client-related feedback. It's also making fresh and relevant insights available to all decision-makers. Ultimately, continuous feedback intelligence is fuelling future business growth and differentiation.
What is feedback intelligence?
Feedback intelligence is the shared actionable insights created by listening to your customers. These customers could be your clients, employees or partners. For the purposes of this article I've focused on client-related insights, but the same principles apply for insights from employees and partners. The insights tell decision-makers what their customers are experiencing now, and what they need and expect next.?
So feedback intelligence is the output of a client listening programme. Raw feedback goes in the top, actionable insights come out the bottom. But what firms are discovering, is that the traditional way of doing this doesn't meet the demands of the post-pandemic world.
Losing touch with clients happens too slowly to notice,
until it's too late to respond
The challenges faced when scaling up client listening
So what's stopping firms from listening to more clients more often? While there is a myriad of firm-specific reasons, several common challenges emerged from our Future of Client Listening research earlier this year.
Challenge 1 - Disconnected feedback data is stuck in different silos
Client-related feedback is shared in many different places and formats. From interviews and surveys, to online reviews and complaints. Sometimes it's a passing comment in a client meeting or email. As a result, feedback gets stored in many different places. Gathering it all up is hard. This creates blind spots across the firm, as different teams have different information.?
To generate more feedback intelligence, firms need a single source of truth for client listening. A central place to collect formal and informal feedback.?
Challenge 2 - Analysing and reporting on feedback is a manual process
Closed questions produce data that's easy to graph, but hard to action. By closing down the range of options, multiple-choice questions limit the ability to understand 'why'. In contrast, open questions give people the space to share what's on their mind. They can reveal new needs, emotions and expectations. But how do you make sense of all that unstructured data??
Many firms are still having to manually review verbatim comments. It is a slow and subjective process. The ability to 'tag' responses helps a bit, but it's still not consistent or scalable. With clients sharing more verbatim feedback in more places than ever before, a new solution is needed.
To scale up client listening, firms are seeking ways to automate text analysis. That means taking advantage of AI. Dedicated machine learning algorithms that instantly turn raw feedback into actionable insights. Automating text analysis is central to creating more feedback intelligence.
Challenge 3 - Requesting feedback is a subjective process
"Now's not the right time to ask for feedback". I get it, fee earners would rather clients responded to emails than surveys. But when is the right time? Only asking when the work is done, or when the client is in a good mood, is a false economy. At best it limits the breadth of feedback. At worst, it generates feedback when it's too late to respond.
Forward-looking firms are moving to an always-on approach to client listening. They want to make it easy to share feedback when the client is ready to share, not just when the firm is ready to ask.
This continuous listening becomes possible when feedback analysis becomes automated.
Challenge 4 - Experiences are only seen in the rear-view mirror
Manual feedback analysis takes time. When it's combined with periodic feedback, the insights lose their impact. In the post-pandemic world, decision-makers need to have their finger on the pulse. They want to see emerging trends, new needs and expectations. They want to see the impact of the decisions and actions they've taken. But no matter how good the insights are, if they're out of date they struggle to compete against recent anecdotes and assumptions.
One of the attractions of always-on client listening is the fresh insights. Client listening teams are seeing what clients are experiencing right now. This makes it easier to align the business and deliver a differentiated brand experience.
?“The Managing Partner and the Board have come to realise the importance of client reviews and testimonials. We've had a lot of clients mention that they've come to us because of our client service (word of mouth referrals) and because of the google reviews that we have.”
Marketing Director, Law Firm – Voice of the Client Benchmarking Study, June 2021
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The feedback intelligence flywheel
1. Always be listening
Traditionally, formal feedback has only been collected at the end of a client project. While this provides a valuable snapshot, actionable insights are being missed. That's because feedback provides the richest insights when it's fresh.?
For example, the best time to ask about how clients found your firm, is at the start of the engagement. The best time to ask about how you can improve their experience is when you still have time to change things.?
Always be listening, means collecting feedback across the whole client journey using both formal and informal channels. This doesn't mean sending lots of surveys. It means consistently asking 1 or 2 questions at different touch-points. For example:
While onboarding a new client - "what was it that made you choose us?
"When a project starts - "what would a great experience look like to you?"
Halfway through a project - "how are we doing?"
You are probably asking these questions already. Future-proof client listening means asking all your clients and recording the responses.?
2. Centralise your feedback data
Clients are willing to share more feedback in more places than ever before. As well as surveys and interviews, they're sharing online reviews, verbal comments, and complaints. This isn't just personal clients. Corporate clients are also getting used to rating services and writing reviews. Most likely your feedback data is ending up in different places, which makes it hard to analyse. Our recent survey across professional services revealed that feedback is most likely to be stored in:
To be able to spot emerging themes, root causes, and new testimonials, you need all your feedback in one place. To start with this could be a shared folder, shared spreadsheet, or Slack channel. Somewhere that everyone can save relevant documents, research, and anecdotal feedback. From here, the progression is to a shared database that makes text analysis easy and scalable. Future-proof client listening means having a single source of truth. One central place where everyone goes to find client-related insights.
3. Automate the text analysis
Unstructured verbatim comments provide the richest insights. You discover what's happening on the ground, in the client's own words. But traditionally firms have had to trade insight against speed. Manually analysing text feedback takes time. It also becomes subjective and inconsistent as more people get involved. The choice became "a quick survey" or in-depth research. But not anymore.
Automating text analysis enables firms to use the most appropriate feedback channel each time. Industry-specific algorithms can analyse large volumes of text instantly. Using AI significantly accelerates feedback intelligence. It also increases consistency and ensures new themes get spotted sooner.
Once firms are benefiting from automated AI analysis, they can scale up their client listening. They're no longer limited by the people available to review or tag feedback. Removing the resource constraints means feedback can be collected from more clients more often. This frees up the client listening teams to focus on the high-value work. They spend their time defining 'so what' and orchestrating firm-wide responses.?
4. Give results context
How do you know what insights are significant? By putting them in a wider context. Insights become actionable when they can be benchmarked over time and across sectors, offices, and business lines. This comparison is not just about satisfaction ratings. Benchmarking text analysis helps decision-makers to see the full picture by highlighting:
Feedback intelligence accelerates when firms have the ability to compare insights in real-time. As new feedback comes in, the big picture evolves. Firms no longer have to rely on guesswork and assumptions. Continuous feedback and automated analysis enable faster and more informed decisions.
5. Close the loop
Having collected, analysed, and summarised your client-related feedback, it's time to close the loop. Report back to clients and employees about what you've heard and what you're doing in response. For your clients, this could be creating a regular section in your client newsletter that has a 'you said', 'we did' table. This consistent transparency has two important benefits. It shows the clients who are sharing feedback, that you are genuinely listening. It also shows the other clients that their peers are sharing feedback and getting a response. Both benefits build trust and improve future response rates.
Secondly, you must close the loop with employees. Share what you've heard from them and your clients, what you're planning to do about it, and how it may impact them. Also, take the opportunity to celebrate success. Make sharing and collecting feedback a positive experience, by highlighting examples of great client experiences. Some of our more client-centric firms even have quarterly awards for staff who get the best customer or peer feedback.
Future-proof client listening means closing the loop with both clients and employees. This builds trust, drives up future response rates, and creates a platform for celebrating success.
Summary - turning disconnected data into shared feedback intelligence
Forward-looking firms are developing feedback intelligence by adopting an 'always-on' client listening process. This enables them to reduce decision-making blind spots by hearing from more clients, more often. They're also able to do more with the data they collect.
To start realising these benefits, your firm can adopt 5 principles today:
Further reading
#feedbackintelligence #clientlistening #clientexperience #feedback #cx