Law Practice Today

In uncertain economic times, lawyers appreciate their clients (well, the paying ones, anyway) more than ever. When it is hard to find new clients, keeping satisfied your existing clients becomes your firm’s number one priority. How do you know if your clients are satisfied? Ask them.

When to Survey

The first issue is to decide when you will survey your clients. In an ideal world, you would receive a constant stream of survey information from all of your clients all day long in real time – like a stock ticker for client satisfaction. You would instantly know who was trending up and down and be able to work quickly to fix problems before they get out of hand. Surveys require your clients to spend their time and energy, though, so you must balance your need for data with their need to do other things in life besides respond to your surveys.

Begin by surveying your clients when their cases close; or, if your practice involves representing the same clients for years without opening discrete matters, start by surveying them once per year. You are better off surveying consistently but not frequently than coming out of the gate too fast and surveying your clients 4 times in the next month and then stopping abruptly. Like so many things in life, slow and steady wins the race. Once you establish a rhythm of surveying regularly you can determine if surveying more frequently would be beneficial. More frequent surveys can yield more valuable data but also run the risk of inundating your clients and causing them to ignore the surveys. You need to strike a balance of frequency that provides enough data for you to keep your clients satisfied while still keeping your clients’ response rate as high as possible.

How to Survey

There are many different ways to survey clients. Foremost among low-tech options is a simple telephone survey in which someone (not you) calls your clients and administers the survey over the phone. Phone surveys can reach less technology-savvy clients and provide the added convenience for of permitting responders to schedule a convenient time to take the survey. If your clients are comfortable accessing the internet and using computers, web-based survey tools are an efficient and inexpensive way to reach large numbers of people. Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) and Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) are two popular solutions that allow you to easily create and administer surveys on the web which your clients access through email and their internet browsers.

Whichever survey method you choose, the cardinal rule of surveys is that response rate is paramount. Choose the method that will be most comfortable and convenient for your clients – they are doing you a favor by taking time to provide valuable feedback to you, so make it easy on them. Watch out for hidden obstacles to response, as well. For example, if you conduct telephone surveys yourself, your clients may be reluctant to respond with honest, critical feedback. It’s uncomfortable for a client to confront his attorney about difficult issues, and if that discomfort leads a client to avoid your survey, everyone loses.

What to Survey

Polling and surveying (and the statistical analysis of the response data) are complicated enough topics that there are many professionals who earn their livings specializing in the field of deciding what to ask and what the answers mean. If your firm has deep enough pockets to hire a professional to design, administer and interpret a custom survey, go for it. However, for smaller firms (and in economic conditions like these, a lot of larger firms) shelling out a small fortune to survey your clients may not be practicable. In that case you will be designing and interpreting your survey yourself.

One simple approach is to survey for “net promoter score.” Net promoter score (NPS) surveys call for asking clients only one question to gauge their loyalty to your firm: “how likely is it that you would recommend our firm to a friend or colleague?” NPS is the brainchild of Frederick Reichheld who introduced the concept in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “The One Number You Need to Grow.” There is a considerable amount of content in the article (as well as numerous books published about NPS) concerning the methodology used and how to interpret the data, and it is all of a scale and scope that can be as easily implemented by a solo practitioner as an AmLaw 200 law firm.

NPS has its fair share of detractors, however, and there are reams of articles on why more detailed surveys are more beneficial to understanding client satisfaction. Whether you decide to use the NPS survey technique or devise a more detailed survey asking the customized questions you care most about, remember that the best surveys are the ones that are asked and answered. Even the most brilliantly conceived survey will be meaningless if your clients fail to respond.

Follow-up

The most important part of a client survey program is not the survey itself but what you do after you receive the responses. If you do not address the feedback you receive your clients will quickly become jaded about your surveys and stop responding. Think about it. Have you ever put a suggestion in a suggestion box only to have your input ignored? Did you ever put in a second suggestion? I didn’t think so.

You don’t need to do everything your clients mention in their client survey responses, but you do need to do something. Follow up with the critical survey responses. Fix the issues raised or explain why the issues can’t or won’t be fixed. Let your clients know that you appreciate their time and candor and that you are using their feedback to build a better law firm for them. Never, ever respond to a survey response defensively, even if you believe it’s deserved. It’s not the critical responses that are a problem – clients who take the time to criticize your firm still care enough to respond. When they think you are too far gone to fix, they will stop responding altogether.

How satisfied are your clients? Ask now.