What happens after client listening?

Closing the loop for meaningful impact

Client listening has become a crucial process for law firms seeking to improve their service delivery and strengthen their relationships, reputations and revenues. However, as law firms increasingly invest in these programmes, a crucial question emerges: What happens after client listening, are we taking any action?

Traditionally client listening has been a series of research projects with a beginning, an end and a report. However, as many firms are discovering, the client listening process has not been going far enough. The real challenge—and opportunity—lies in what comes after the feedback has been received.

The client perspective: expectations vs. reality

Looking outside-in, from a client's perspective, participating in a listening exercise opens a loop of communication; and expectation. No matter how earnestly the outputs are discussed around client team and boardroom tables, clients expect firms to close the loop.

Closing the feedback loop has three components:

Going back to the specific client to share how the firm is responding to the specific conversation
Going back to all clients to share how the firm is responding to the listening exercise in general
Going back to staff to share what’s been heard and what the firm is doing about it.

Clients care about all three loops, because collectively they demonstrate how client-centric the firm really is. They also want to know that the firm is learning from other clients like them, and using it to evolve their delivery.

When clients - and staff - don’t see a process beyond the initial listening, it creates a disconnect. A disconnect that highlights a significant gap in many firms' client listening strategies.

The client listening conundrum

Recent conversations with client listening teams reveal a concerning trend: once the listening phase concludes, they quickly lose sight of the actions generated. Actions are shared with relevant teams, but tracking their progress, completion, and effectiveness becomes challenging.

This taking action blindspot makes it hard to follow through, undermining the value of the client listening process. It also risks damaging client relationships and trust.

This disconnect between gathering insights and implementing changes raises a critical question: Can law firms claim to truly value client feedback if they fail to effectively implement and track the resulting action plans? Or are they just measuring their existing assumptions?

The anatomy of effective action plans

To bridge this gap and ensure that client feedback translates into meaningful improvements, law firms need to start by reviewing the quality of their existing actions. When we review the quality of actions generated by client listening projects, we currently use six simple criteria. Neither end of these continuums is right or wrong, it’s about balance. So when too many actions tip the scales in one direction, it may reveal missed opportunities at the other end:

1. Vague vs Sharp Actions

Everyone has their own way of writing actions. Some people write very specific actions like 'Bob to arrange meeting with Nic in October to discuss apples’ while others write vague actions like ‘keep in touch with Nic’. While many will say that vague consulting speak like ‘keep in touch’ makes sense, it makes different sense to different people.

Vague actions have their place, but they’re open to interpretation of how individuals ‘keep in touch’. It also makes it hard to know whether the action is complete and what the benefit was. A few such actions are fine. But if you are seeing a high proportion of ‘fluffy’ actions, it usually indicates that your firm will struggle to take action and demonstrate resolution to the firm’s and client’s satisfaction.

The solution isn’t to boil down every action into a prescription. Rather it's to do the extra bit of thinking to help colleagues take meaningful action - say what keeping in touch looks like for this client and what the measurable outcome of it might be.

2. Narrow vs. Broad Actions

Narrow actions are ones that are specific to that individual, and the existing client lead/team. They just strengthen the existing relationship. Broad actions are those that expand the bigger picture. They reflect opportunities to introduce new team members or service lines. Or they add new value by introducing clients to each other.

Narrow actions are easy to create, and are usually the sharpest. ‘Add Bob to our mailing list’ or ‘Send Jane the interview summary’. But they also add the smallest value to the firm. In contrast when actions mention broader introductions, they open the door to an expanded relationship.

As with all of these continuums, neither end is right all the time. Not all conversations should lead to new opportunities. But it is amazing how few interviews with large and key clients generate actions that could expand the firm’s influence and share of wallet. Given organic growth and cross-selling is near the top of Managing Partner priorities, this is a huge missed opportunity.

3. Internal vs. External Actions

Who benefits most from taking each action? Some actions are designed to benefit the client directly - sharing knowledge, new introductions etc - as well as benefiting the firm. These are external actions, as the client directly sees the outcome, and hopefully benefit, of the action being completed.

At the other end we have internal actions, where the firm is the primary beneficiary. These actions include sharing positive feedback with the individuals concerned; and sharing praise and issues with the client partner and/or account team. External actions can go further to highlight areas of continuous improvement.

However these opportunities often get lost because they're only written from an external perspective. ‘Fix the billing cycle for Purple client’ rather than ‘investigate the recurring issue with the timing of bills sent to manufacturing clients’.

Many firms already create both internal and external actions, but the internal ones tend to be more about sharing feedback than process improvement. I’m sure that’s because the person creating the actions doesn’t want to jump to a solution or assume it’s not already being addressed.

They’re being kind to colleagues, which is never a bad thing. But in our experience, too often these squeaky wheels go unaddressed until the wheels fall off. See individual v aggregate below for a solution to this.

4. Reactive vs. Proactive Actions

Some actions are about fixing something that’s gone wrong, or that may go wrong in the future. These could be as simple as ‘use WhatsApp rather than email to send Bob urgent messages’. Or it could be about changing team dynamics or make up to improve client satisfaction.

Proactive actions are the ones that expand the relationship, either individually or collectively, creating new and positive value for the client - and the firm too. In the middle of this continuum is general activity, like ‘staying close’ (see vague v sharp above) or sharing feedback with the relationship partner.

This part of the framework can give experienced client listening teams a fascinating peek into the client relationships - and the strengths of different interviewers. Which clients don’t reveal any points of friction or areas for improvement? Which ones are pushing the firm to evolve? Do some interviewers only tend to generate reactive or proactive actions?

5. Visible vs. Invisible Actions

The starting point for this article was action visibility. Client listening teams are looking for better ways to create, manage and report on the actions generated by client listening. Why? Ultimately it helps them demonstrate the RoI of their programme, supports future business cases; and shows the business the ‘point’ of getting engaged.

Visible v invisible can’t be judged at the individual action level, it’s about the wider process. Visible actions are ones where the central team can quickly see what actions have been raised, where they are up to and, when complete, what difference they made.

This enables them to continuously improve their client listening process. They can develop training for interviewers and client teams. They can focus on the aggregate picture (see below) and they can spend their time helping the firm improve its client experience and brand alignment. Client listening becomes an always-on process of listening, learning and acting.

When actions are invisible, client listening remains a project. It has a beginning, an end and a report. The impact can’t be measured or evidenced and therefore it remains a nice to have.

Partners say that client listening is crucial, but don’t have the time to do it.
Firms say clients are at the heart of their strategy yet feedback remains ‘opt-in’
Clients refuse a follow-up interview because the actions from the last one remain outstanding.

6. Individual vs. Aggregate Actions

The biggest missing piece of the action management process is how the insights are used. Actions usually come from interviews, and therefore are related to an individual conversation. Meanwhile, recommendations are made following an annual survey, or following a review of complaints or review data.

But imagine if client listening teams were able to see across all these data sources, insights and actions. They can see the bigger picture and the emerging patterns. They can hear the squeaky wheels. They are in the prime position to create aggregate actions.

Aggregate actions can be internal or external. For example, they can see three client actions to add people to a mailing list, and create an aggregate action for all similar clients to be invited to subscribe. Or they can see emerging expectations around how clients are communicated with, and use that to brief client teams and the IT department.

If they’re being really crazy, they can also collect feedback from their colleagues about how they would improve the client experience. Then in one place, they would have the client problem and the internal solution.

Evidence-based continuous improvement at market-leading speeds.

From client insight to business impact

This is the game-changing benefit of having an always-on client listening platform like MyCustomerLens. The process of collecting, analysing and reporting on the feedback - and actions - happens in real-time. That enables client listening teams to spend their time on:

Creating aggregate actions that drive continuous improvement
Supporting the business to improve client experience
Supporting the talent management process
Demonstrating the impact of the insights they are generating
Improving the effectiveness of their client listening programme

To read more about how other firms are unlocking the business impact of client listening, click here to read the summary of our recent panel discussion with representatives from Shoosmiths, Osbourne Clarke and Taylor Wessing.

So what’s your answer to the question ‘what happens after client listening?’

Does momentum get lost once the feedback is in? Or is your team able to drive and evidence the impact that client listening is having on your clients’ experience?

If you feel like the actions from your client listening programme are getting lost, or only scratch the surface of CX improvement, then it could be time to make the move to always-on client listening. This enables your firm to create, manage and close more impactful actions, while automating much of the manual work that’s holding back client insight teams.