Professional services firms are increasingly focused on becoming truly client-centric, yet many still rely on traditional and sporadic approaches to gathering client feedback. A recent webinar hosted by Ben Kent, Director at Meridian West with insights from Susie Greene, Senior Client Listening Manager at Bird & Bird, and Ethan Murphy, a consultant at Meridian West explored how firms can effectively balance quantitative and qualitative research methods to create more comprehensive client listening programs. This article covers insight drawn from the session, which revealed key insights about the evolving landscape of client feedback and some of the strategic and technological developments that can facilitate this blended approach. 

The Power of Blending Approaches 

To kick-off the webinar, Ben and Ethan reiterated the benefits of both qualitative and quantitative approaches when it comes to client listening. Qualitative research, consisting of unstructured and open feedback channels, facilitates more in-depth discussion feedback, exploring clients personal feeling and thoughts. Quantitative research, conversely, collects data in a more structured and standardised way, and is useful in looking at clients’ feedback collectively, comparing across larger splits and running statistical tests on key metrics. 

The Meridian West team, calling on their experience in this area but also findings from their recent CLIMB 24 study, suggested that firms are engaging more with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Firms are not only using more mixed methods and touchpoints (Figures 1 & 2), but these channels are becoming less stringently qual or quant, with questionnaires and discussion guides increasingly varied.

The benefit to this approach is that both quantitative and qualitative methods offer unique and highly complementary strengths, meaning that firms that can successfully integrate the two within their feedback mechanisms achieve deeper insights. The integration of qualitative follow-up questions in quantitative surveys was highlighted as a growing trend that enables rich data collection and analysis, while the ability to code responses by the relevant topics or sentiment scores also allows greater management and analysis of open-text data.

The Bird & Bird experience

Susie shared her experience of transforming Bird & Bird's client listening program from a biennial survey to an "always-on" approach that combines both quantitative and qualitative methods.

"What we have is a balanced mix of interviews and surveying. Within the survey, we've got a lot more forward-looking insight with qualitative questions. We ask clients what challenges they're facing, what's on their agenda."

She emphasized how this approach has provided practical value to partners: "I find this is a great hook, it really helps partners to go back and have conversations with their clients. Before, they weren't really sure how to follow up with clients, but if they know that regulatory change or digitalization are the top issues being faced by their clients, it helps them to have that conversation about how they can support them moving forward."

Susie explained how this blended approach has yielded unexpected insights: "I really have been amazed, and the partners I work with have been amazed too, how much insight we have had into the direction of travel for the business. Even things like 'we're expanding into XY and Z territories' or 'we used to use X external legal provider, but such-and-such a partner has left and we're looking for somebody new to give the work to.'"

The Value of Multiple Feedback Channels

The webinar went on to explore how in facilitating this blended approach, there are often several often-neglected channels for gathering client feedback, including:

• Client communities and panels
• Internal feedback/secondees
• Informal feedback
• Always on channels
• Employee surveys
• Key account 360-degree reviews
• Informal feedback capture

Having worked on recent client listening projects which have embedded feedback from many of these channels , we particular noted the impact of combining insights from both employee and client feedback to help drive strategic impact. Being able to compare results between clients and employees has helped show differences in perceived and actual performance, which has reportedly been really eye-opening for some firms.

A healthy mix of qual and quant questions across these surveys can help close the loop on feedback. It helps close the loop by not just highlighting key issues from the clients, but actually uses employee feedback to work out what are the root causes of these issues, why this is happening, and gives employee the floor to suggest some practical solutions.

Technology and Analytics Integration

Despite the increasing sophistication of client listening programs, many firms are still not fully utilizing available technology and analytics tools. According to our  CLIMB study, less than half of firms use a central dashboard to track client experience KPIs, and less than 20% employ AI or text analytics to analyse qualitative insights (Figure 3).

Susie, who with the help of the Meridian West team has built a client feedback dashboard on Qualtrics for Bird & Bird’s programme, highlighted the importance of having integrated systems:

"What's been great is we've got a one-stop shop. We've got everything in one place. We've got a single reporting and analytics platform for all of the quant and the qual data, even down to things like receiving an email from a client - I can just copy and paste that. It's all getting scooped up together. It's been brilliant. It's been a real step change."

Advanced text analytics tools, including our own MeridianAI, have been “game-changing” in allowing for more efficient analysis of quantitative but particularly qualitative data. Historically, the limitation of qualitative research, especially from interviews, has been sheer processes of going through interview transcripts one-by-one, picking out key themes, picking out findings. There's a real missing opportunity here as MeridianAI and other types of tools can be really transformative in facilitating qualitative analysis.

Looking Forward

In summary, the webinar session underscored the necessity of adopting a blended approach to client feedback collection, combining the structured insights of quantitative data with the rich details of qualitative inquiry. As firms move towards a more client-centric framework, it is imperative to integrate technology effectively, establish a culture of continuous feedback, and employ diversified methods to capture a 360-degree view of client experience. This comprehensive strategy will help in crafting solutions that not only address current challenges but also anticipate future client needs, solidify long-term relationships and foster innovation in service delivery.

You can watch the complete webinar here.