AI and automation - how firms are expanding the impact of their client listening programmes | Blog

AI and automation - how firms are expanding the impact of their client listening programmes

AI is transforming marketing and BD approaches across professional services, and this includes how firms are listening to and responding to their clients.

As firms make the move to an ‘always-on’ approach to client listening, AI is helping them to discover new insights about their brand, relationship management and service delivery.

Clients see overlaps not distinctions

The ‘ah-ha’ is that clients don’t see these activities as distinct areas. So while brand (Marketing), service delivery (fee-earners) and relationship management (BD/Account Teams/Partners) are managed by different parts of the firm, clients don’t look at them in isolation - they see the overlaps not the distinctions.

At a simple level, brand is your firm’s promise to current and potential clients while service delivery and relationship management is how your promise gets delivered. If your brand promise does not consistently match client reality, it undermines a client’s trust in your firm. They’re less likely to believe you will deliver on future promises, whether they’re made formally in a proposal or informally during conversations.

3 routes to organic growth

Why does this matter? For many professional services firms, organic growth is a strategic priority. This could be through:

Winning new clients, often through positive word of mouth,
Increasing revenue and share of wallet amongst existing clients;
Reducing client &/or revenue churn.

In each case, new revenues and award nominations come from clients or prospective clients noticing what makes your firm different, believing those promises and then talking positively about their experiences to others. This virtuous circle is fuelled by brand, relationship management and service delivery.

AI and Brand differentiation

So what differentiates your firm from your competitors? Is it the expertise of your teams, how responsive or friendly you are to clients, your wider network, how you innovate…?

As firms grow it becomes harder to remain different. For example, it’s hard to maintain your approachability when clients are dealing with multiple teams, online chat and outsourced phone answering. It’s hard to demonstrate innovation when your competitors are all using Copilot as well.

This is where a strong and authentic brand leads the way. It defines the behaviours and processes that make your firm different. It captures how you want clients to experience the brand and talk about it in their own words. In short, it’s defined both ‘inside-out’ (how your firm works) and ‘outside-in’ (how your clients experience it).

Dedicated AI algorithms can then help you measure your brand alignment in real-time. Assuming your client listening is gathering feedback from different types of clients, and at different stages of their client journey, you have a continuous flow of potential brand and CX insights.

Specially tuned algorithms can take your clients’ unstructured text comments and automatically discover which aspects of your brand and desired experience they are talking about - and which aspects they’re not. We explored this last bit in our article on the sound of silence and what firms are missing in their client feedback; specifically how AI shows you what your clients are not saying.

AI and automation can compare how you hope clients will experience your brand with how they are actually experiencing it. By having these insights ‘on tap’ you can quickly respond to the experiences of individual clients, as well as getting to the root causes of more common gaps and experiences.

AI and Service Delivery

Service delivery is where your firm’s brand comes to life. Clients have hired you for a reason, and this is where they get the benefits of that decision.

From the client’s perspective, they have chosen your firm because it appeared different from the others they could have chosen. Now they are expecting to see proof that they made a good decision.

That means your firm’s brand - the promises it makes - and your firm’s service delivery - the client’s reality - need to be closely aligned. However, client listening often highlights that there are gaps and blindspots.

For example, a firm’s brand/promise includes being modern and innovative. The client expects fresh thinking, innovative use of new technologies and different presentations. But if apps are not used to communicate well, if Large Language Models (LLMs) are only being used in the background, and brainstorming sessions lead to predictable outputs then client expectations don’t get met.

This means that fee-earners need to be aware of what the firm’s brand is promising to clients and how they need to work to deliver it.

Otherwise organic growth is at risk.

Yes, in part clients are buying the expertise and time of specific individuals. But if your firm is dependent on individuals delivering individual experiences then:

Your firm’s brand becomes the sum total of individual client experiences, which creates a very confusing and inconsistent story in the market
You will find it very hard to expand the revenues from that client, because fee-earners won’t be confident that colleagues will deliver the same experience as them

AI and automation can put real-time reporting at the fingertips of your delivery teams. Enabling them to see for themselves when client expectations are being exceeded or missed. Rather than sending them the raw data when a survey or interview has been submitted, you can send them insights.

You can show them which aspects of the firm’s brand their clients are seeing, and what they’re not. You can compare this to the expectations the client shared during the pitch feedback or onboarding process - assuming they were asked the question. You can compare the experiences to other similar clients, to give the results context.

AI and Relationship Management

Completing the Venn Diagram, relationship management pulls the brand and service delivery together. It links the client journey and ensures the firm strengthens its overall relationship with key clients.

To be successful, Marketing, BD and other teams responsible for relationship management must understand both the brand promises and client reality delivered by your firm. For example we often see gaps where firms highlight their broad network of experts and yet very few key client interviews raise actions about introducing other parts of the business.

AI and automation can fill these gaps by analysing actions in the same way that client feedback is analysed. This enables the account teams and relationship partners to quickly see where efforts are being made to grow the relationship and revenues - and where delivery and relationships are only focused on more of the same.

Using AI to realise the benefits of automation

Generating these benefits requires more than just survey tools that have ‘now with AI’ stickers on them. AI is a very broad label for a wide range of technologies. Adding AI won’t magically generate the insights you need to drive organic growth.

The value of AI comes in the automations it can drive, and hence the ability for client listening programmes to increase their scale and impact.

Client listening teams are usually under-resourced, and looking for ways to do more with the same resources. So AI should be helping client listening teams to move up the value chain.

The key consideration is what aspects of the process should AI take over? An LLM like Copilot or ChatGPT does its thinking inside a ‘black box’, where it’s hard to know what it considered or ignored in creating its summary.

Other forms of AI, like the algorithms used by MyCustomerLens, do their thinking in plain sight. This consistency enables both analysis and reporting to be automated. With the repetitive work done automatically, those responsible for client insights can focus on the higher value-add activities - discovering the ‘so what’ and then driving engagement and action across the firm.

This AI-powered automation is what helps align the parts of the firm responsible for brand, service delivery and relationship management. When they all have access to a single source of truth that is updating in real-time, they can make faster and more informed decisions.

Decisions that turn organic growth from a strategic priority into a reality.

AI and automation – how firms are expanding the impact of their client listening programmes