Future of Client Listening

To keep up with how your competitors are listening to their clients, your firm will need to consider how it shifts from:

The driver behind this market shift? As firms strive to achieve their organic growth targets, they are realising that they need more insights and evidence to inform their decision-making.

Forward-looking firms no longer want to risk their insight process being dominated by assumptions, opt-in culture and a fear of finding.

As a result, their client listening processes are evolving. They are shifting from siloed and selective projects to an always-on process of gathering and sharing insights.

Traditionally client listening has been driven by a research mindset. Interviews and surveys were conducted as discrete projects, with selected clients, at a moment in time that suited the firm.

In most cases, this led to retrospective listening. Project-based feedback looked back over work already completed. Only the firm benefited from this, because it was too late to change that client's experiences.

In contrast, future-proof client listening will focus on feedback signals. The voice of the client is available to your firm 365 days a year, through a wide range of sources that supplement surveys and interviews. Emails, complaints, reviews, feedback forms, meeting notes and operational data all provide additional signals about your client's needs, expectations and experiences.

Tuning into these signals requires a shift in mindset as well as processes. The feedback that a lawyer receives in a client email obviously isn't as robust and unbiased as formal research data; but it is far more likely to influence the lawyer's subsequent behaviours than an annual PowerPoint presentation.

The typical client listening programme is full of manual processes. They consume time and limit the scale and impact of the programme.

Common manual processes include:

All these processes, and many more can be automated. Respondents told us that implementing/upgrading CRM systems and experimenting with AI automation of sentiment analysis are the two most common strategies.

But the effectiveness of either will be limited unless the permission to ask for feedback is also automated - by shifting to an 'opt-out' culture. Our research revealed that unless you break the manual step of having to ask partners for permission to collect client feedback, every downstream automation has limited benefit.

The pattern of quarterly or annual reports, produced in word or PowerPoint, is still the foundation of many firms’ communications. But times are changing.

Implementation of business intelligence dashboards in general, as well as the growing usage of LLM tools like ChatGPT, is shifting the information culture from ‘push’ to self-service.

Client listening teams are looking to move up the value chain, and to be seen as a strategic adviser to decision-makers. To do this they need to have enough data to tell a compelling real-time story (see research to signals), and they need more efficient ways of analysing the data (see manual to automation).

The third leg of the table is enabling the business to access simple and regular reporting on-demand. Questions like ‘can I see all the feedback a client shared recently’, or 'what's the overall rating of my practice area this quarter’ should be available on demand.

When firms make real-time insights available to the business, the client insights teams are freed up to focus on the higher value-add work, such as:

Few firms have a central process for creating and managing the actions produced by client listening. Actions were only being created from and related to individual client interviews.

Once the transcripts and actions have been shared with the relationship partner, the insights team loses sight of them. What’s more, the insights team didn’t have the time or technology to look across feedback sources to see the bigger picture and where additional actions needed to be taken.

As a result, there was no easy way to know what actions had been taken and what the benefit was of doing them. These open loops made it very hard to demonstrate the impact and ROI of client insights.

The future is about creating a feedback flywheel, a closed loop where signals feed reporting, reporting feeds action and actions inform future signal gathering.

Closing the loop means:

Firms looking further down the road are expanding their view beyond the signals gathered from existing clients. ‘Client listening’ will move beyond existing clients to incorporate signals gathered from both external and internal sources.

External market sources such as prospects, lapsed clients, referrers, and other stakeholders will be incorporated. Each of these audiences has an untapped perspective on how the market sees your positioning and value proposition, how people speak about your firm to each other, and where your competitive opportunities lie.

External listening keeps your finger on the pulse of the market, at a scale beyond what individual partners can gather and communicate efficiently.

Meanwhile the solution to client-related issues and missed opportunities is often hiding in plain sight within your firm. Your people have the context and potential solutions for any issues faced by your clients.

Future-proof listening is bringing these data sources together, to enable faster and more informed decision-making. By shifting perspective from client to multiple lenses, firms will find ways to bring together all the intel they need to inform their organic growth decisions.

As culture, process and mindsets shift, client signals will be continuously gathered, analysed, shared and actioned across the firm - an approach we call always-on listening. The client's voice is heard when and where they have something to say, and even when they say it through actions rather than words.

Likewise, the resulting insights are available to all decision-makers when and where they need them. Not a firehose of data they need to sort through, but curated insights based on what they are most likely to need to know now.

This approach will not only help firms make decisions that strengthen relationships, reputations and revenues. It will also enable them to show - rather than tell - clients that they are really listening.

MyCustomerLens is the innovative, always-on client listening platform designed to give professional services firms a competitive edge. By harnessing the power of advanced AI, we transform formal and informal feedback signals into real-time, actionable insights. 

Our pioneering approach helps firms drive organic growth by unlocking deeper client insights. Ready to learn more?