Brand alignment – does your promise match reality?

Your brand is the sum total of your clients’ experiences. It’s not something your firm does. It’s something your client feels. So how do your clients feel right now? How well does your brand promise (the ‘inside-out’ view) match the client’s reality (the ‘outside-in’ view)? Is your brand aligned?

Achieving brand alignment is the secret to sustainable growth.

When firms consistently get client experience right, they’re rewarded with new engagements and unprompted referrals and testimonials. They create ‘super clients’ – clients that want to bring them new work.

So how do you measure this engine room of profitability?

This is where AI is helping forward-looking firms to create rich new client insights.

Traditionally, client experience has been measured periodically. The most valuable clients would be interviewed, others would be sent a survey and some would be left alone because “it’s not the right time to ask for feedback”. The questions themselves would vary, and were often based on internal measures of success. Meanwhile, day-to-day feedback would be responded to by individual client teams but rarely captured or shared across the firm.

This led to a situation where individual partners/client teams knew their clients well, but the firm lacked a collective or up-to-date view of client experiences. This made it hard to compare the brand promises made in bid documents, directories and websites, with the actual client experiences.

So what’s changed?

The last 2 years have seen a surge in digital transformation, within firms and their clients. Needs and expectations have shifted, as have the way firms deliver their services. At the same time, a new breed of startups have been adapting big data and cloud computing techniques for the professional services industry.

Now it’s possible to consistently measure client experience in real-time. You can collect both formal and unsolicited feedback in one place, and use AI to analyse text as well as closed questions. AI gives firms the ability to effortlessly handle large quantities of client feedback, by removing the need for manual analysis. This automation also makes the analysis consistent and objective, as well as fast.

So if your firm is striving to stand out for its strategic thinking, responsiveness or expertise you can now instantly see if clients feel the same way.

By listening at scale to the voice of your client, you can discover where you have alignment, where you have inconsistencies and where you have an ominous silence.

To learn more about how MyCustomerLens applies AI to measuring client experience and brand alignment, click here.