Law Practice Management Asked and Answered Blog

Category: Law Firm Client Satisfaction

Jan 26, 2011

Law Firm Client Surveys

Question:

I am a legal administrator in a 20 attorney firm in southwest Texas. My partners have been expressing concern about loss of several key clients and wants to know what we can do determine why this happened and what we can do to improve client service? I have been thinking about doing a client survey? What are your thoughts?

Response:

Much can be learned by talking to your clients. Structured telephone interviews and other forms of surveys conducted by a neutral third party can provide many surprises as well as answers. Client satisfaction surveys can be the best marketing investment that you can make. Our law firm clients have found their clients to be impressed that the firm cares about their opinions. It is good business to listen to your clients. Understanding what bugs people about your services and those of your competition can be the most valuable input to strategy development you can get your hands on. Find out what bugs your clients and you will learn to out-think and out-service your competitors.

Before you invest any time, money, or effort in developing an overall strategy for service improvement, you must survey your clients to understand what your clients want and expect from your firm. An initial survey helps you identify the starting point for your service improvement journey.

Planning The Survey

The type of survey that your firm chooses depends on your purpose for doing the survey. Are you looking for some insight into why you’ve lost clients? Are you interested in getting a general idea of how your clients feel about your firm? Following are some of the basic types of surveys that you may want to consider:

Random Client Survey or Census

These surveys are used to measure overall client satisfaction and highlight any widespread service problems and identify new business opportunities. A random survey involves selecting a percentage of your clients (sample), contacting them by phone, mail or in person (or a combination of all three), and asking them to evaluate the services they receive from your firm. A census involves surveying all clients rather than taking a sample.

Lost Client Survey

This type of survey is used if your firm wants to know why you have lost a particular client or group of clients. With this survey interviews are conducted (usually by telephone or in person) with clients that no longer do business with your firm. Let the client know that you are sorry that he or she is no longer doing business with your firm and that you are interested in learning from your mistakes. Understanding your client’s reason for leaving will help you make improvements for future clients. One of the greatest benefits for this type of survey is that you are often able to discover the specific reason a client left.

Key Client Survey

Rather than doing a random survey of your client base, you may want a more targeted and focused survey of a particular client group. For example, if 80 to 90 percent of your business comes from ten clients, you may want to create a survey that is specifically targeted to them. The advantage of a targeted key client survey is that it is limited in scope and precisely focused. Before you commit time and resources to a client survey identify your purpose and establish specific goals and objectives.

Develop a survey plan. Insure that a follow-up strategy is incorporated into the plan.

Click here for our blog on client service

Click here for our article on the topic

John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC

Nov 24, 2006

Marketing Idea For 2007

Our firm recently completed client satisfaction interviews for several of our insurance defense law firm clients. Here are a few quotes and a summary of what these insurance company law firm clients told us:

We want to work with proactive attorneys that aren’t afraid to try cases.
Limit the number of people working on a file. I like consistent assignments.
I expect attorneys to get back to me by the next business day.
I like one partner and one associate per file.
Most of our billing issues with law firms is due to excessive use of associates time.
I get upset with attorneys that want to settle right before trial.
The primary reason that we terminate our relationship with our outside attorneys is not reporting to us in a timely fashion and poor communications.
I find that many lawyers are poor at managing their files and have poor basic communication skills. I work with lawyers that can do both of these things well.
I think that it is important that law firms provide value added services such as newsletters, legislative updates, e-alerts, seminars, etc on a “no charge” basis. These services are provided by most law firms these days. Such services help us do our jobs better, improves communications and the overall relationship between our organization and the law firm, keeps us up to date on changes in the law, and helps the law firm stay abreast of emerging needs in our business.
I will pay higher fees to lawyers that aren’t afraid to try cases.

Much can be learned by talking to your clients. Structured telephone interviews conducted by a neutral third party can provide many surprises as well as answers. Client satisfaction interviews can be the best marketing investment that you can make.