When professional services firms seek to improve how they deliver their services to their clients, they commonly look to consultants for guidance. With their crisp shirts and MBA degrees, these consultants dive into a weeks-long strategy sprint – they diligently dissect the addressable market, identify opportunities to innovate client offerings, and articulately present their recommendations in a beautiful, six-figure deck. Sometimes, these recommendations help firms launch to new heights of delivering value to their clients. But all too often, these recommendations do not incorporate the most important component: the voice of the clients themselves.
Why client feedback matters
Gathering client feedback is both one of the most important and underinvested functions within professional services firms today. With client feedback, all firms have an opportunity to co-create the future with their clients, and they should. Client feedback provides the most direct line of sight into how firms can provide value to the market, address clients’ unmet needs, and grow their offerings – it creates a real-time information loop to inform decisive action.
Moreover, if done correctly, the act of gathering client feedback itself can win work. Showing your clients that you care what they think builds trust and stickiness, leading to new opportunities.
At PIE, helping firms gather and act on client feedback has been at the heart of our business for 25 years. And from our vantage point, in today’s business environment in which the pace of change is at an all-time high, gathering client feedback has never been more important.
Despite its importance, however, many firms don’t perform client feedback, and when they do, they’re not doing it well.
The client feedback failures
There are several reasons why professional services firms don’t perform client feedback initiatives. The first is cultural. When it comes to selling their services and gaining business, firms have a nasty habit of believing that they “win on brilliance and lose on pricing.” This is a fallacy. There’s a substantive reason why you are or aren’t winning business, even if you haven’t done the work to find out what that reason is. Client feedback will direct you to those reasons.
Another cultural failure is not seeing client feedback as a strategic and continuous need within firms. Leaders commonly delegate client feedback initiatives to specific functions in the organization that perform the activities sporadically and with minimal investment.
The next failure with client feedback is structural. Within professional services firms, power is decentralized, with senior partners owning relationships with key clients. When it comes time to gather client feedback, there is frequent resistance from these partners who do not want to bring their own clients into the process. There are plenty of stated reasons for such resistance: “now isn’t a good time,” “I’m trying to sell more work,” “I don’t have a great relationship with this client,” “I already have a great relationship with this client.”
Yet another failure with client feedback is operational – an overreliance on impersonal, mass-blasted, and generic quantitative surveys. To be clear, quantitative surveys can be effective in uncovering insights if performed correctly, and can be a key part of larger client feedback programs. But just asking “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend…” in a one-question survey is not the same as gathering robust client feedback. Such surveys, performed with no other diligence, do not provide space for nuanced feedback from the right clients. Nor do they create opportunities for client exploration, surprising insights, or actionable feedback for firms to deliver more value to clients. At worst, nameless and cold surveys indicate to key clients that they are not highly valued.
There are other ways that firms bungle their client feedback programs. Designing client feedback programs to be more like sales pitches, selecting only easy clients to get feedback from, and not having a system in place to actually address feedback are common pitfalls. Whatever the reason, far too frequently firms have a client feedback initiative that either never gets off the ground or that is weak, inaccurate, or insufficient to drive insights and action.
Doing client feedback correctly
Now that we’ve talked about all the ways to do client feedback wrong, how do you do it right?
At PIE, we believe in the value of qualitative feedback. Quantitative feedback can be valuable, but the best way to uncover themes and insights about the needs and experiences of clients is through intentionally shaped interviews and conversations.
The foundation of any client feedback program is the client interview, a one-on-one discussion to hear directly from the client on what a service provider does well, what it could do better, and how the provider could better meet the client’s needs.
The first step of creating an impactful client interview is having alignment among leadership as to the goals and priorities of the interview itself. What questions do we want to ask? What do we want to learn? What are some of our own challenges with serving clients that we want to improve? Having buy-in from leadership ensures that a client feedback program will have adequate investment to deliver meaningful and comprehensive learnings.
It is best to have an independent party conduct client interviews, be it an external party to the firm or someone within the firm who is not directly attached to the client delivery team. This approach has the highest chance of yielding the most honest feedback from clients without risking straining the relationship between clients and the delivery team. As one Chief Growth Officer from a $500M+ organization said, “When you have someone who is not the relationship partner asking the questions, you get entirely different answers… having an independent interviewer makes a big difference in the unfiltered feedback you receive.” Said more bluntly by Bryan Rogers, Vice President at Propeller Consulting, “Everybody thinks their relationship is fine – until someone else talks to the client and finds out they’re actually really unhappy about something.”
To create an environment for honest feedback, clients need to know that whatever they say will not negatively impact them. That is why when PIE conducts its Voice of the Client interviews on behalf of its own clients, we operate under the Chatham House Rule, meaning all conversations are unattributed by default.
It is important to do the tough interviews, the interviews with the client who had a poor experience with the firm or that may no longer be buying services from the firm altogether. Learning what went wrong can often be more valuable than discussing what went right, even if it is unpleasant to hear. Another Chief Growth Officer from a $500M+ organization reinforces this sentiment, saying “The conversations with challenging clients are often where you learn the most, because they tell you exactly what you did to lose the work. You are not just getting positive reinforcement – rather, you learn exactly where you can improve.”
Once you have established a strong protocol for interviewing clients, you are ready to move on to the leading client feedback solution: the Client Advisory Board.
Winning with Client Advisory Boards
Client Advisory Boards (CABs) offer the strongest way to receive and act on client feedback. As said by Aniket Maindarkar, Chief Marketing Officer at Firstsource, CABs “are one of the most critical things we do because they allow us to take a look at the real value of our client relationships versus the perceived value of the relationships.”
To build a CAB, a host firm selects several of its key clients who are willing to sit in on a peer group that discusses key challenges, needs, and opportunities that they are facing – for clients, the appeal of joining a CAB is learning from peers on issues facing their industry. Over recurring meetings, a CAB provides continuous and real-time feedback to the host. It also provides the host a forum to test ideas for new services and products that will best meet its clients’ stated needs.
CAB programs have built-in mechanisms that acknowledge and drive action in response to client feedback, meaning that clients who participate in CABs have an active hand in shaping services that they are more likely to purchase. Addressing feedback is critical. As Jonathan Lurie, Director of Business Development at Fried Frank, put it, “Feedback only has value if you act on it. Responding to client feedback is what builds trust and moves relationships forward. And when we ignore those key learnings, it ends up affecting our relationships too.”
CABs are phenomenal business development tools that create deep ties between a firm and its clients. In the many years that PIE has helped its clients develop CABs, we’ve seen host firms achieve strong returns on their investments in building and running a CAB.
Client feedback works – but you have to do it right
Within professional services, so much of winning and losing work comes down to building trust between firms and clients. If a client trusts that a firm can deliver a high-quality service and cares about improving its offerings to increasingly meet its clients’ needs, that client will remain loyal.
There is no better way to show your clients that you care and build trust with them than to ask them for feedback, and then acknowledge and act on that feedback. It’s easy to do customer feedback incorrectly, but if done well, it will serve as the backbone of your firm’s business development efforts.
Learn more about Client Advisory Boards