Listening to clients is absolutely essential to delivering remarkable service. One way to get feedback from clients is conducting a client feedback survey. Here are a few ideas for implementing a client feedback survey at your firm.
For the less-than-tech-savvy folks, you can always conduct surveys with good old-fashioned paper and pen. Have a stack of surveys readily available for anyone at the office to hand to a client at the right time. While paper surveys tend to be the easiest to implement, they also require clients’ physical presence at your firm. Depending on your practice, this may prove inconvenient for clients. Of course, you could always send the survey as a .PDF attached to an email. Still, the client will have to complete the survey and return it to you, whether by scanning or mailing. Not ideal.
With a small step toward the future, you can implement some form of online client feedback survey. One of the easiest and most affordable options is Google Forms. If you’re looking for something a little more robust, check out the following:
Next, you have to consider what you want to ask clients. While you might be inclined to add several questions to a client feedback form, less tends to be more here. After all, you don’t want to annoy your clients. In fact, you may even consider limiting your feedback to a single question. Something like a Net Promoter Score (NPS). While not perfect, an NPS score survey is short and can provide some great insight about how clients perceive your service. An NPS question might be as simple as something like this:
On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our practice to a family member or friend?
You might also add an optional paragraph text field prompting clients to leave more open-ended feedback, should they want. With a short survey like this, you’re likely to get more responses than from a longer questionnaire. Further, you can always follow-up based on client feedback to ask more questions later.
Okay, now for the advanced part. For the more savvy types, you can implement a client feedback system that incorporates online review platforms. Put simply, the system should identify a client’s satisfaction level and then prompt happy clients to post a testimonial and notify you about unhappy clients to decide how to respond to them.
While you can roll your own system, here are a few software options that can handle the heavy-lifting for you:
No matter how you implement a client satisfaction process, keep in mind that none of this works without providing excellent client service. Design a service-first practice. Use client feedback to learn how to improve. Implement a client satisfaction process to motivate more happy clients to sing your praises online.
In our experience, this has been one of the most effective ways to both improve our service to clients, as well as, get the word out.
If you’ve had experience implementing client feedback systems that you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to add to the comments below.
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