Feedback Flywheel
Create a Feedback Flywheel to future-proof your client listening
The Challenge
Are you curious about what else your feedback data could be telling you? Or frustrated that your client listening isn’t revealing enough actionable insights? Are you missing the chance to drive organic growth?
You're not alone. Many professional services firms gather valuable feedback from surveys, interviews and reviews, but find it difficult to connect the dots and extract meaningful insights from their quantitative and qualitative data.
- Siloed data makes it impossible to see the big picture. Hidden trends and crucial client experience gaps go unnoticed.
- Manual analysis is time-consuming and inefficient. Teams waste valuable hours compiling and analysing data, leaving little time for strategic action.
- Decisions are based on existing assumptions, not new evidence. This can lead to client experiences becoming outdated.
The result - missed opportunities to strengthen client relationships, enhance service delivery and win work from new and existing clients.
The business benefits of always-on client listening
While these barriers are commonplace, they can all be overcome. The solution requires a change in culture and process. But the shift doesn’t need to happen overnight. Feedback intelligence creates a flywheel, that over time builds momentum across the business.
- It starts with improving the efficiency of the insight creation process.
- Creating richer and fresher insights makes reports more compelling.
- With a stronger evidence base, insight starts to replace assumption.
- As teams get on the same page, it becomes easier to align experiences across offices and business lines.
- Clients notice the change, and the volume of positive feedback goes up.
- This in turn adds momentum to the flywheel.
But what about the bottom-line impact?
In short, moving to always-on client listening helps firms protect and grow revenues. Having access to continuous feedback intelligence creates a competitive advantage by enabling faster and more informed decisions. These decisions lead to:
- stronger client relationships
- more sales and referrals
- a greater share of discretionary spend; and
- reduced complaints, and the protection of recurring revenue
Benefit 1
Stronger client relationships
Always-on client listening gives you the opportunity to pick up and respond to issues faster. The same goes for discovering delightful experiences you can replicate. Furthermore, it provides the opportunity to learn across clients. For example, two or three clients in the same industry or business line mention the same thing. Now the other clients teams can hear about it straight away. All teams get an early heads-up, and the opportunity to proactively ask their clients about it.
Benefit 2
More sales and referrals
People only refer services that have delighted them in some way. This delight comes from brands that consistently meet or exceed their expectations. This consistency is key. Before people refer a firm, they have to believe that it will deliver on their recommendation. To boost your word-of-mouth marketing, you need to see how often your firm delivers experiences worth talking about.
Benefit 3
Increase share of discretionary spend
Whether a firm is part of a formal or informal panel, the goal is to be the first choice for discretionary work. By combining feedback from across the client journey, you can see a bigger picture. Continuous feedback surfaces new needs faster. Not just the needs of that specific client. Trends can be spotted across business lines and client sectors.
Benefit 4
Reduced complaints, and the protection of existing revenues
In their future of CX report, PwC found that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. While it’s easy to dismiss this because “B2B is different”, that’s not entirely true. Every B2B client is also a consumer of B2C experiences. Post-pandemic, where B2C brands lead B2B buyers expect their service providers to follow.
How it Works:
- Unify: We bring your existing feedback data – surveys, interviews, reviews, emails, and more – into a single client view.
- Analyse: Our proprietary FeedbackAI automatically analyses unstructured text, identifying key themes, trends, and sentiment.
- Visualise: Interactive dashboards provide clear, concise visualisations of your data, enabling you to answer future questions about client perceptions.
- Act: Data-driven insights inform your strategy, enabling you to enhance client experience, strengthen relationships, and drive organic growth.
Having implemented the tool, we feel like we are really listening now and the feedback is enabling us to make the right decisions across different areas of the business
Why Choose MyCustomerLens?
- Industry Expertise: We specialise in the professional services sector so we understand your unique challenges and needs.
- Collaborative Partnership: We work closely with you throughout the process, providing expert guidance and support.
- Custom AI: Our FeedbackAI is tailored to the nuances of professional services feedback, delivering more relevant and actionable insights.
- Proven Results: Feedback Intelligence has helped firms like Grant Thornton, Johnston Carmichael, and Wilkin Chapman achieve significant improvements in client experience and business performance.
Benefits to you
- Work with a partner that understands voice of client (VoC) data, AI analysis and how they can be combined to help you to achieve your personal goals and KPIs.
- Make your existing data work harder. Generate insights and actions that boost internal engagement with your listening programme.
- Demonstrate the impact of dedicated AI analysis. Build the case for investing in an AI-powered listing platform.
- Become more client-centric. Use the voice of your clients to inform client service decisions, business development and marketing.
2. Centralise the data
Clients are willing to share more feedback in more places than ever before. As well as surveys and interviews, they’re sharing online reviews, verbal comments and complaints. This isn’t just personal clients. Corporate clients are also getting used to rating services and writing reviews. Most likely your feedback data is ending up in different places, which makes it hard to analyse.
Our recent survey across professional services revealed that feedback is most likely to be stored in:
- individual documents
- peoples heads and notebooks
- email inboxes.
To be able to spot emerging themes, root causes and new testimonials, you need all your feedback in one place. To start with this could be a shared folder, shared spreadsheet or Slack channel. Somewhere that everyone can save relevant documents, research and anecdotal feedback. From here, the progression is to a shared database that makes text analysis easy and scalable.
Future-proof client listening means having a single source of truth. One central place where everyone goes to find client-related insights.
3. Automate the analysis
Unstructured verbatim comments provide the richest insights. You discover what’s happening on the ground, in the client’s own words. But traditionally firms have had to trade insight against speed. Manually analysing text feedback takes time. It also becomes subjective and inconsistent as more people get involved. The choice became “a quick survey” or in-depth research. But not any more.
Automating text analysis enables firms to use the most appropriate feedback channel each time. Industry-specific algorithms can analyse large volumes of text instantly. Using AI significantly accelerates feedback intelligence. It also increases consistency and ensures new themes get spotted sooner.
Once firms are benefiting from automated AI analysis, they can scale up their client listening. They’re no longer limited by the people available to review or tag feedback. Removing the resource constraints means feedback can be collected from more clients more often. This frees up the client listening teams to focus on the high-value work. They spend their time defining ‘so what’ and orchestrating firm-wide responses.
4. Give results context
How do you know what insights are significant? By putting them in a wider context. Insights become actionable when they can be benchmarked over time and across sectors, offices and business lines.
This comparison is not just about satisfaction ratings. Benchmarking text analysis helps decision-makers to see the full picture by highlighting:
- Inconsistent experiences
- Emerging themes
- Emerging client needs and expectations
- Whether past decisions are improving current performance
- Whether client experiences align with the firm’s brand promises
Feedback intelligence accelerates when firms have the ability to compare insights in real-time. As new feedback comes in, the big picture evolves. Firms no longer have to rely on guesswork and assumptions. Continuous feedback and automated analysis enables faster and more informed decisions.
5. Close the loop
Having collected, analysed and summarised your client-related feedback, it’s time to close the loop. Report back to clients and employees about what you’ve heard and what you’re doing in response. For your clients, this could be creating a regular section in your client newsletter that has a ‘you said’, ‘we did’ table. This consistent transparency has two important benefits. It shows the clients who are sharing feedback, that you are genuinely listening. It also shows the other clients that their peers are sharing feedback and getting a response. Both benefits build trust and improve future response rates.
Secondly, you must close the loop with employees. Share what you’ve heard from them and your clients, what you’re planning to do about it and how it may impact them. Also take the opportunity to celebrate success. Make sharing and collecting feedback a positive experience, by highlighting examples of great client experiences. Some of our more client-centric firms even have quarterly awards for staff who get the best customer or peer feedback.
Future-proof client listening means closing the loop with both clients and employees. This builds trust, drives up future response rates and creates a platform for celebrating success.
Summary
From disconnected data to shared feedback intelligence
Forward-looking firms are developing feedback intelligence by adopting an ‘always-on’ client listening process. This enables them to reduce decision-making blind spots by hearing from more clients, more often. They’re also able to do more with the data they collect.
To start realising these benefits, your firm can adopt 5 principles today:
- Always be listening
- Centralise the data
- Automate the text analysis
- Give results context
- Close the loop
Time for a chat, or prefer to keep informed?
Is your firm ready to implement always-on client listening?
With a quick video call, we can help you decide.
Alternatively, keep up to date with Outside-in, the newsletter for client-centred professional services firms.
With a quick video call, we can help you decide.
Alternatively, keep up to date with Outside-in, the newsletter for client-centred professional services firms.