The high cost of overlooking client feedback

Most partners would say they know their clients well. Far fewer can tell you when anyone last asked. The cost of that gap rarely shows up on the management accounts, but it shows up in lost revenue all the same.

Ask most partners how well they know their clients and the answer is usually a confident 'very well'. Scratch the surface and structured client feedback is often loose, informal, or parked for another day.

That gap is where revenue quietly slips. Clients who would have told you they were unhappy if anyone had asked. Work that should have come to your firm but went to a competitor because no one spotted the trigger. Partners who assume long-tenured clients are loyal, when in reality they are simply not yet inconvenienced enough to leave.

In a recent piece for Accountancy Ireland, I argued that client feedback is one of the most reliable commercial tools available to a professional services firm, and one of the most underused. The argument matters because the firms that get this right are not necessarily the ones with the biggest BD budgets. They are the ones with the most disciplined listening habits.

Three patterns I see most often in firms that do this well:

1.     They treat feedback as a commercial discipline, not a relationship nicety

2.     They ask consistently, not only when something has gone wrong

3.     They act on what they hear quickly enough that clients notice

Read the full piece in Accountancy Ireland.

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