Our 10 second survey in February 2011 focused on the issue of client feedback.  At Vue, we find this issue of soliciting or receiving feedback from clients a point of contention among training participants.  While it’s our belief that if you just listen to your clients they will tell you exactly how to build your business in a way that they will stay and pay for, it’s interesting how many training participants are almost fearful of obtaining feedback from clients.

So in our February 2011 survey, we wanted to find out just what client feedback tools were actively in use among Professional Services advisers.  The results were interesting and confirmed many of our thoughts.  We asked quite simply...

Which of the following client feedback tools do you use?

Apart from asking a client for feedback during an annual client interview or review meeting, most Professional Services firms undertake no other steps to obtain client feedback.  In fact, 17.8% of respondents take no active steps to seek out client feedback at all!

The danger of ignorance

Obtaining feedback is often a confronting experience.  No doubt there will be comments which are difficult to read or results which you are not happy with.  You may even know that certain results are likely to be bad and therefore don’t need the pain of confirming what you already know.  However, these small moments of pain for your ego are so much smaller than the pain you will feel if your business is ignorant of client satisfaction, feedback and loyalty.

Consider that...

• Up to 50% of consumer clients do not complain before switching providers
• Up to 25% of business clients do not complain before switching providers
• Over 66% of clients leave a service provider purely on the grounds of indifference in service
• Disgruntled clients are estimated to tell 7-10 other people of their unhappiness with you

Let’s go a little further into Practices which do not actively solicit feedback…

• It sends a message to clients that their views are not valued or of interest
• It gives no outlet for disgruntled clients other than to complain to other people
• You miss out on valuable ideas to refine your business (improve its value)
• You miss out on retaining unhappy clients and then waste resources finding new clients
• You have far less information when making business plan or process improvement decisions

Some options

Client focus groups and Client advisory boards require a bit of work to set-up and maintain.  At the other end of the spectrum, obtaining feedback in a client meeting is relatively straight-forward.

So let’s concentrate on two of the interesting and achievable options of periodic client surveys and regular end-of-engagement feedback, particularly as the survey reveals there is already some traction among advisers in those areas.

Our overall recommendation, however, is to have at least two, if not three, different ways for clients to provide feedback.  This is because not every client wants to do an online survey, or give face-to-face feedback or complete a feedback form...but there is a good chance one of those ideas will appeal to them.  So give them the option.

Option 1 – Client Survey

The internet means there is simply no excuse not to run regular client surveys.  There is a huge range of cost effective ways to structure a professional, re-usable and analytical client survey.  We use www.surveymonkey.com but there are also a heap of other providers.

If you want to write your own survey, there are dozens of books to help you do this.  Vue Consulting also has a boiler plate client survey which we can provide you with to get started – just send us an email.  Once your survey is ready, survey 25% of your client base on a rolling basis every 6 months to establish benchmarks and see if changes are making a difference.

We have had many clients start work on a client survey in the morning, have it distributed in the afternoon, within a week have feedback from 70 clients and within two weeks have implemented six changes to their client experience to improve client satisfaction.

Alternatively, you can engage the services of an expert, particularly to help you not only obtain the right feedback but to put that feedback into context by benchmarking your results against industry standards or competitors.  This is a very useful process as it gives meaning to your results.  Our friends at Business Health can help you out with this type of comparative benchmarking process.

Option 2 – Regular feedback

An option to a “point in time” survey like Option 1, is to run a “end of engagement “ survey.  In this process, clients are asked for feedback at the end of certain engagements.  The survey is constant and on-going – as each client finishes an engagement, they are surveyed.  This gives you rolling feedback.  In training, for example, this includes our end of Workshop feedback forms and post-training experience survey (conducted 3 months after the training).

The advantages of these rolling surveys is that you can spot problems or trends in the system immediately.  It also helps either consolidate a positive experience with you by allowing the client to comment on this, or immediately allows an unhappy to client to “vent” and give you a chance to address the issue before they become truly disgruntled.

Online surveys can fulfil this process, but equally a letter with a self-addressed stamped envelope and feedback form can do the trick.