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Wow Your Clients!
The old-school term is Client Satisfaction. It's been replaced with Client Delight, which is defined as beyond satisfaction. But, just how good do you have to be, anyway? If you're a law firm Relationship Partner, do you need to earn an “A” from your clients? Or, what about a rating of 9.0 out of 10? Is that good enough to delight? Instead, I'd like to introduce the metric, “Wow!”
New Fields of Competition
Client expectations regarding what constitutes effective and pleasing service have risen. Clients now want not only good, but also really great client service ' and are feeling entitled and empowered enough to demand it.
Once, where law firms competed by which ones had the best lawyers, now almost all significant firms have equally great lawyers and can a provide an equally high-quality legal product, at least to the degree that most clients can discern. So, it is now becoming obvious that law firms must compete with each other in some new way ' by their levels of service quality. What's a law firm to do?
What Needs Fixing
Unless you formally ask for feedback, you may never know what's on your clients' minds. It's human nature to be reluctant to give negative feedback when sitting face-to-face with the service provider (or, worse, his/her boss), and this seems especially true when clients consider the professionals who serve them. After all, that professional might have worked many nights and weekends on the client's matters, so why hurt his/her feelings? It's easier just to quietly move the work elsewhere.
Russian (Client) Roulette
Where does all this lead? Answer: in order to enhance the relationship that a firm has with any one of its most important clients, the firm has to approach the client and formally ask ' I repeat ' formally ask for feedback. This is the only way that the firm can find out, apart from guesses made by the firm's lawyers, about how the client rates the service it is receiving, what the client expects in the future, and an indication of how loyal the client will remain.
Bruce D. Heintz heads Heintz Consulting LLC. Reach him at [email protected].
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