How do you measure up on client satisfaction?
By Martin Stanton
Many mid-tier and larger professional service firms spend tens of thousands of pounds on complex client care programmes, but such models are not particularly helpful for the smaller, usually regional firms. Yet there are ways of ensuring the satisfaction levels of the clients of these types of organisation without such major expenditure.
Ultimately, the reasons why professional firms carry out client surveys are to ensure clients’ loyalty and guarantee their income stream. Additionally, the survey itself will often uncover new services that can be provided to clients, and reduce the risk of losing those clients as a result of perceived poor service. This can be done within a far more reasonable budget than is often believed, frequently below £1,000 using an outside company, providing a number of rules are followed.
The implementation of a client satisfaction survey can be summarised into the following nine activities.
1. Select the clients to survey.
In better economic times this was done on a purely random basis, providing a good spread of types and sizes of client. Now firms will often decide to select their top 10 or 20 fee generators. However, it is useful to be a little selective by choosing within parameters such as oldest, newest, largest, smallest, easiest to manage, and most difficult to manage.
2. Select the questions to ask.
The questions will usually be of two types – the first will make a statement such as “ABC Solicitors responds to telephone calls very promptly”, then asks the interviewee to answer within a range of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. The second will ask a pure question such as “how good is ABC Solicitor’s response to telephone queries” with options between “very poor”, and “excellent”.
In designing the questions it is important ensure that a number of key areas are covered. (a) All touchpoints between your organisation and your client must be tested, including, for instance, account management, credit control, and marketing. (b) You must test your USPs to ensure that they are still working for you. (c) Ensure that the knowledge of any new services has been communicated to your clients. This last one can often develop new revenue after the survey. It is important to limit the number of questions asked – perhaps between 15 and 25 – in order to remain within the boredom threshold of the interviewee.
3. Send a letter to the clients who are to be surveyed.
With the letter you should attach a copy of the questions. The fact that you are carrying out the survey will provide good PR, and the list of questions will enable the contact to consider his or her answers, and perhaps refer to others.
4. Carry out the telephone survey.
It is important to do “direct contact” surveys, rather than those done by internet, unless you are surveying thousands of clients. The benefit of direct contact is that, should you get a “poor” or “very poor” response, you can question the interviewee for the reasons for the bad rating.
5. Drilling down.
Ensure that, during the survey, you explore or “drill down” into the reasons for any poor responses. Often such an answer is given as a result of a previous misunderstanding or poor communication. By finding the source of the unhappiness, you are close to finding a solution. Whilst drilling down, it is important to get as much detail as possible and, although uncomfortable, you should persuade the contact to name names!
6. Analyse the data.
Carry out an effective analysis of the data that you have collected. It is key that you can interpret the results in a number of different ways. The most important two are to measure the quality of the touchpoints between all your departments against a single client, and all your clients against a single touchpoint.
7. Interpret the results.
Having carried out the survey it is important for the management team to understand the results. This is as important for understanding whether your USPs are still valid, as for concluding that you are close to losing a client. Furthermore, the survey will provide you with intelligence as to whether actions, such as training, are required within departments.
8. Implement the changes.
Inevitably the survey may result in a need for some changes within the organisation. These may include training, re-induction, redeployment of staff, or changes in procedures. It may also just require taking a client out for lunch and describing the changes to them. These changes should be planned, scheduled, and presented to relevant staff in a constructive manner, with timescales and milestones. Having carried out the survey, it is useful to provide feedback to those interviewed on the results and the changes being implemented.
9. Monitor the effect of the changes.
Having made changes it is important to make an “impact” assessment of how they are improving the relationship with clients. This can be done by contacting the particular clients that expressed concerns in a certain direction, or by doing a further mini-survey.
It is possible to do a survey yourselves. Providing you have the available resources and someone with the skills to carry out the telephone interviews, there is nothing intrinsically difficult about surveys.
Many firms, however, prefer to use a specialist company as they provide good interviewing skills, objectivity in their analysis of the data, and can be honest about any criticisms.
Richard Cripps, managing partner of law firm Gullands, in Maidstone, used a specialist firm. He said: “Bringing in an organisation to carry out a client satisfaction survey enabled me to understand our clients far better and, as a direct result of the survey, we managed to retain a £20k per annum client. We were about to lose them as a result of a misunderstanding about the services we could offer. That client is now very happy, and we will ensure that our future communications are clear and unambiguous. Furthermore, the survey has enabled us to redesign our staff induction and training programmes focussing on what our clients actually want rather than what we think they want.”
In today’s competitive world, client satisfaction surveys are becoming a de facto part of the marketing mix. Most professional firms are introducing Client Care programmes, and the survey is the best tool to design and measure that programme. Following the simple procedures outlined above will help to retain and grow your existing clients whilst laying a firm foundation of developing new clients by referral and other more traditional marketing methods.