Blinded by client satisfaction?

As a law firm your challenge is to stand out from the competition and get positive word of mouth to secure new clients. Clients aren’t able to judge your legal advice – they base their opinion on their experience with your firm.

Client satisfaction score: an unreliable indicator

Many firms rely on a client satisfaction score to gauge how satisfied their clients are with the legal services they have received. This is a flawed approach for a number of reasons. First, a single score (such as an overall customer satisfaction score or a net promoter score) does not reliably capture the different facets of a client’s experience. Secondly, overall satisfaction scores tend to be biased by extreme opinions – clients who are raving about you and those who hold very negative opinions; there is little incentive for clients with a “middle-of-the-road” view to take part in a survey. Thirdly, in almost all cases clients are asked to rate the service at the end of the client journey – at that point they may see no reason to give you feedback and may simply have decided not to use your firm again in future.

In short, client satisfaction scores don’t give you an accurate picture of the quality of your client experience. Good scores can lull you into a false sense of comfort and into complacency.

What ultimately matters for your firm to thrive is whether clients are recommending you to their family, friends and professional contacts. Recommendations from a trusted source are up to 50 times more powerful than reviews by strangers on sites such as Google reviews or Trustpilot. Since personal recommendations are a risk for your client – their reputation and relationship of trust is at stake – positive word of mouth is very impactful.

Client experiences that fall short of expectations, however, lead to negative word of mouth, and unfortunately negative word of mouth gets amplified, both in real life and through social media. Many more people will hear about a negative client experience than about a positive one.

Do you track whether new clients come to you based on personal recommendations? Do clients return to you for new or related matters? And are you yourself comfortable recommending your firm to friends and family?

The client experience: more than just interaction

The client experience is often seen as the interaction with the client. While this is an important component, the core elements of a client’s experience go much deeper:

Value for the client – not only legal advice: To create value for your client, you need to understand what is most valuable in their life. Time and convenience are more valuable commodities than ever – convenience means spending the minimum physical and mental effort. Worry is a form of mental effort especially relevant to legal services – whether a client comes to you for a court case, the purchase of property, a business matter or a power of attorney, they are seeking peace of mind.

“Real value to client” = “Value of legal value” minus “legal fee” minus “client time” minus “client mental and physical effort”

Emotions: Emotions are an integral part of the client experience. A client’s case may be fairly routine from your perspective, but for the client, especially a private client or a small business owner, it is likely to be a major or emotional moment in their life. The emotions they experience when dealing with your firm will be an important part of what they remember: memories contain emotions, and negative emotions are more intense and lingering. Client loyalty, on the other hand, is based on positive emotions.

“When we have an experience, we will later remember how we felt at the time”

The weakest link: Your client experience is the sum total of everything you do. This has two implications. First, all aspects of a client’s experience count, tangible and intangible. Secondly, every person in your firm – both client-facing staff and support staff – contributes to that experience, directly or indirectly. What goes on behind the scenes ripples through to the client experience. For an excellent client experience, your support teams need to feel valued for how they contribute to the client experience, and your back-office systems, technology and processes need to help your staff to be at their most productive.

”Your client experience is only as good as your weakest link”

Measuring and improving: a systematic approach

Client experience excellence is rooted in thinking from the client’s perspective in every action of every person in your firm. This may mean quite a change. However, you can start reaping the rewards quickly by using a simple three-step approach:

1. Knowing how you are currently performing: assessing your client experience reliably
2. Setting your goal: developing your client experience vision
3. Making the transition manageable and effective: prioritising actions using a structured approach.

1. Assessment: the wheel of client experience

The wheel of client experience (CX): a tool for a whole-firm assessment of the client experience

To assess your firm’s client experience reliably, you can do a 360° “health check” against nine factors that best practice has shown to determine the client experience.

These factors include “value to clients” and “client focus”, but also, importantly, strategic and operations factors such as “strategy and values”, “firm organisation”, “operational management”, “processes and systems”, and “your people”. The nine factors are summarised in the wheel of client experience (CX) – see image. To do this assessment, it’s important to use a variety of rich information sources such as qualitative feedback from clients gathered throughout the client journey and input from everyone in the firm. Involving staff across the firm is essential both to tap into their insights and to make them part of the change journey – change without genuine staff involvement is likely to fail (as discussed in my article “Three reasons why change fails – and antidotes”).

2. Goal setting: start with the ideal

Before you make any changes, it is worth considering what you are aiming for: what is your firm’s vision of success with regard to client experience? Thinking ambitiously, what would excellent client experiences look like from the perspective of your clients, partners and management team, legal and support staff, and yourself? Starting from an ambitious, ideal vision helps to open the mind to new possibilities. These new possibilities will spark ideas for action. At this stage it is also important that you involve your teams so that you are collectively building your destination vision – this will make sure that people are enthused and motivated to achieve the vision.

3. The transition: prioritise actions

When you assess your current client experience, you may become aware of issues that were not previously on your radar. It can be daunting to know where to start taking action. The key to keeping it manageable is to focus where you can make the most impact. Which of the nine factors that determine the client experience is your firm weakest on? For the three factors that require most improvement, identify the root causes of the issues and brainstorm actions that will resolve these issues as a collective exercise with staff from across the firm. Then prioritise the actions that will make the highest impact and require least effort. Finally, phase actions over time: which actions can you take this week, later this month, later this quarter, and further out? Using this structured approach will make the task of excellent client experiences manageable and effective.

In conclusion

Client satisfaction scores are not a reliable measure of your clients’ satisfaction. Instead, a 360° “health check” gives you a much more accurate picture of your firm’s client experience performance. This approach also recognises that client experience issues go far beyond the interaction with the client. They are rooted in your strategy, values, culture and operations and the role of every person in your firm – both client-facing staff and support staff.

To create positive word of mouth – and indeed prevent poisonous negative word of mouth – use a simple three-step process: (1) assess your client experience using a whole-firm perspective; (2) set your vision of success; and (3) prioritise the most impactful actions. Your firm will thrive like never before.

Download your journey map to client experience excellence.