Client Surveys

Game Changers Leading to New Directions

One of my favorite ways to take advantage of a client survey is to use the information gleaned from them to help further team member development.  For the right person these can be a life changer.
I remember working with a Project Manager – for the sake our discussion let’s call him John – who was very dedicated to his clients, his career and the firm.  We surveyed a number of his clients, people whose names he had provided.  He couldn’t wait to get the results.

The results were not what he expected.  He wondered how he could be working for clients as hard as he was, and yet only achieving “average” scores.  We poured through the data together.  There was nothing alarming, but on the other hand, there was also nothing that said: “this is the guy I turn to and can’t live without” either.  The commitment towards Jerry seemed neutral – which seemed a shame, considering how hard he was working. Indeed, the data would say that he was doing many things right.

We noticed that numerous clients remarked about his availability, noting, “I cannot always reach him as quickly as I would like” or “he seems a little overworked”.  These were not adamant complaints, but rather came across as offhand asides in more in-depth comments; that theme did, however, surface consistently in most of the surveys.

John and I went to work and together we developed a plan to assign a “job captain” for each of his projects and to communicate to clients that in his absence the job captain could be contacted to get answers quickly to their questions.  Though this required John to adapt the way he operated to a certain extent, the changes were not overwhelmingly difficult. One year later, the surveys were repeated, and this time they revealed that implementing the job captains as a part of his project management system had garnered him “outstanding” ratings, across the board.

He was delighted: he felt appreciated, he had developed positive relationships with his clients and he experienced a great deal more job satisfaction.  Those results were a win-win for everybody! The experience was a life-changer for John; it solidified his relationships with clients and made him their go-to guy.  This is a great example of a situation where there was no big problem or event that might have precipitated a client “defection”, but in this era of intense competition, it was a way we could ensure that our clients would come back again and again – which, in fact, they did. The lessons that we learned from this experience, and similar ones in subsequent surveys paid several times over for the time and effort invested in conducting them.  At the same time, it serves as a vivid demonstration internally and externally of the culture of service we had nurtured among our team members.

Tips for how to successfully conduct Client Satisfaction Surveys:

• Never use them as a “stick” against your people – the more the team sees that you use these as learning tools, the more open they will be to direct you to the right clients to survey.
• Never use them as a sales tool – you have asked a client to help you in some way by using their time to make you better.
• Don’t try selling a new product or service on those calls, that would lead the clients to feel duped and they will not want to participate.
• Use complete transparency: let the client know that the people with whom they work are aware of the surveys and even submitted their name as a person who could really help.
• Do not contact anyone’s client to participate in a survey without letting him or her know in advance. Most clients are protective of the relationship they have with their providers
• Use the data to change your culture: Be swift at sharing the results – don’t make the results a mystery.
• Go over the results, specifically, with those about whom you have specific information and share the general findings with the larger team.
• Work with your teams to develop clear, achievable plans for dealing with what has been learned and follow up to make sure the changes are being made.
• Client Satisfaction Surveys can be tailored and adjusted to meet many needs: growing a team to be the best possible service providers, during a major office transition to get a snapshot on how the firm/office is perceived in the marketplace, and ensuring that quality of service is maintained for your clients.