A transformational tool

Large consumer-facing law firms and ABSs, especially those who invest heavily in TV and online advertising, have successfully embraced the customer experience strategies of the best operators in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors.

One thing these organisations all have in common is a relentless, top-down commitment to transforming their clients' service experience across the business.

There is a sound business case for transforming client service experience. KPMG Nunwood report that the top 100 B2C brands for customer experience have achieved double the annual rate of revenue growth of the FTSE 100 - an average of 11 per cent versus 5.5 per cent.1 Jesko Perrey, Director, Global Brand and Marketing Spend Effectiveness Group at McKinsey, comments: 'We know that brands that improve the customer journey experience see revenues increase as much as 10-15 per cent while also lowering the cost to serve 15-20 per cent.'

The commercial drivers for this level of focus and commitment to improving the quality of client interactions (namely to build loyalty and maximise revenues from new and existing clients) apply equally to B2B law firms. Why wouldn't they? Yet, in our recent poll of senior management in the top 50 B2B law firms, only one firm said they were confident that clients would have a consistently positive experience when interacting with fee earners and support teams across their firm. The majority of the firms polled admitted to not knowing or measuring what it feels like for a client to engage with their firm. In a way this isn't surprising, as it supports conventional wisdom that the biggest influence on B2B client loyalty and buying behaviour is a combination of the firm's reputation, their quality of advice and the strength of their personal relationships with fee-earners.

The new reality, however, is that the rules of B2B client engagement have changed. Clients have learned to expect more for less. They are more discerning and less tolerant of a mediocre or poor service experience than they ever have been. Clients increasingly project their personal consumer experiences and expectations onto buying legal services. They want their experience right across the firm to be as easy as Amazon and as pleasant as John Lewis.

The challenge for B2B leadership teams is to make the changes needed to adapt to this new reality, given the plethora of initiatives competing for their sponsorship and attention. There is a big prize for the B2B firms who get client experience consistently right, but this is not for the faint-hearted. Improving client experience in a sustainable way involves systemic change, which perhaps helps to explain why relatively few firms have yet to grasp the nettle.

Transformation begins with acceptance

The leaders in firms who are committed to transforming client service experience have accepted that in order to drive change, they need to do more than sharing anecdotes of poor service.

These firms also recognise that client satisfaction surveys are useful but have their limitations: surveys are generally backward looking and although they can generate vast amounts of quantitative data, it is not always clear from the data what actions to take to improve the service experience for the client. Tick box and numerical scores might show that you received a low score out of 10, but they don't always pinpoint exactly where things went wrong, and clients rarely have the time or the inclination to explain in detail what you need to do to improve the score.

There is also a growing recognition that clients, fee earners and support teams alike are all suffering from 'survey fatigue'. Consequently, the qualitative insights into improving service levels that have historically accompanied client satisfaction scores are steadily diminishing, as is their impact over time.

Successful transformation is underpinned by irrefutable evidence and emotional engagement

Client-focused leadership teams are increasingly realising that transforming ingrained patterns of mediocre or poor client service delivery needs hard evidence. Systemic change requires evidence that addresses the emotional as well as the logical barriers to change, in a form that is as irrefutable as evidence presented in court. Without this, leaders struggle to generate the pre-requisite emotional commitment to change, and they struggle to sustain the desire to improve client service experience. Easy to say, but challenging to deliver.

Teams in B2B law firms need constant and relevant reminders. They are still largely managed in silos, so the way clients are treated by one department won't necessarily resonate with other departments.

Achieving transformation requires leadership commitment to rigorously measuring service attitudes and capabilities throughout the client journey, and across all business functions that touch a client. It includes sharing the evidence openly with teams, and benchmarking customer experience against the competition to help build the 'burning platform' for change, and to get people engaged and out of their comfort zones.

Firms shouldn't waste time and resources if they see the gathering and dissemination of this evidence as a one-off exercise.

Regular diagnostic work that pinpoints strengths and weaknesses in service experience across the whole organisation, not just the fee earners, is critical to successful transformation - using quantitative and qualitative data with sufficient granularity to engage people and motivate them to change their behaviours.

So, how do you measure the points in the client relationship journey which are increasing or decreasing their propensity to engage and buy services?

How do you measure what it feels like for a potential or existing customer when they use your website and switchboard, or what impression your partners or support teams create during an initial telephone consultation with a prospective client?

And how do you pinpoint which areas across the firm are failing to inspire trust, causing clients and prospects to hesitate, or go to a competitor?

Mystery shopping as a transformation tool

A growing number of firms are using independent mystery shopping techniques to measure and improve the service experience for prospects and clients when they make a new enquiry. Large consumer law firms and retailers have been doing this for years - the estimated annual global spend on independent mystery shopping is $3 billion.

These firms forensically analyse what it feels like to be a client, independently measuring satisfaction levels and gathering insights at each stage in the customer journey - from searching the website, to ringing a fee earner for some initial advice, through to on-boarding, loyalty building and complaint handling.

The evidence generated - recordings of conversations with switchboard operatives, support teams, and fee earners - is irrefutable and emotive. It leads to partners and staff either swelling with pride or cringing with dismay when evidence is shared. These reactions serve as powerful catalysts for culture change.

Mystery shopping trends in legal services

There are the usual horror stories that you would expect to find in many organisations - brusque telephone manners, phones ringing out for unacceptably long time periods, being passed from pillar to post, 'computer says no' mentality, and internal procedures that might help the firm but make no sense to the client.

However, these horror stories tend to be isolated incidents. Although it is important that they are addressed by the firm, it is the recurring trends that we believe firms should focus on, because they will have a much bigger impact on improving client service experience across the firm.

Figure 1 summarises the recurring trends in our findings. It illustrates the points in a typical new enquiry journey - from visiting the website through to initial consultation with a fee earner - that either inspire trust or cause people to hesitate, lose confidence or go elsewhere to a competitor.

Using business owners and client service professionals to undertake the mystery shopping, our research identified three common sources of profit leakage during the client enquiry journey, as shown in Figure 2:

1. Websites that lack intuitive navigation and with search functions that either don't work or generate irrelevant results.

2. 'Over-efficient' switchboard operatives and/or message takers who lacked warmth and empathy, and a frequent requirement for callers to have to re-state the nature of their enquiry to fee earners.

3. Reluctance from fee earners to show belief and enthusiasm for working with the client and to agree a next step when closing the conversation.

In our experience, the client experience bar is currently set low across professional services - there is a big opportunity for leaders who are committed to getting this right to make their brand stand out against the competition.

Tim Dixon-Phillip is a co-founder and director of Service Reality (www.servicereality.co.uk)

References

1. 'A New Era of Experience Branding' KPMG Nunwood (https://www.nunwood.com/uk-businesses-are-making-limited-progress-in-improving-customers-experiences)