What’s the future of client listening?

With remote working impacting both clients and firms, Marketing & Client Care teams looked for more agile and scalable ways to understand clients and anticipate changing needs. While our future of client listening research was still running, we used our real-time analytics to get a preview of the emerging themes.

The future of client listening is exciting. This cornerstone of revenue growth saw some dramatic changes during 2020. With remote working impacting both clients and firms, Marketing & Client Care teams looked for more agile and scalable ways to understand clients and anticipate changing needs.

This pattern looks set to continue in 2021 but the details will vary across firms. To understand how firms are responding, we’ve partnered with Client Talk and Anna Lake Consulting to aggregate the view across the sector. The research has now been completed. This post shares the early emerging themes. For the full story, download the report here.

While the future of client listening survey was still open, we were able to use our real-time analytics to see the emerging themes. Here’s what we were seeing…

2020 saw BD teams regularly calling clients. Decision-makers couldn’t wait for periodic client reviews or surveys to get the lie of the land.

2021 looks like the year that client listening will become a more continuous process.

“Knowing my clients” can be a double-edged sword. While strong relationships are vital for growing revenues, they can also make it harder to get clear feedback on where services can improve.

Firms are already moving towards a balance of internal and 3rd party listening so that changing client expectations can be discovered sooner.

It’s not possible to have partner review meetings, or even conduct phone interviews, with every client. The more data you collect, the longer it takes to manually review and summarise it. Traditional manual processes are no longer scalable.

So firms are looking at how recent digital transformations can enable them to scale up client listening while reducing the cost of manually handling all the data.

Listening to clients was a multi-channel programme, even before the digital transformations sparked by remote working. Partner review meetings, client interviews, online surveys, market research all needed to fit together to provide a consistent and accessible picture. Add in ad hoc feedback from clients and the process improvement ideas from your team, and you get a single view of the client experience.

So how will this look in 2021? Is it more of the same, quiet evolution or radical redesign?

We’d love to hear your perspective and to be able to share the view from across the Legal Support Network. To share your views on the future of client listening, click here to complete the 5-minute survey and request a copy of the insights report.