If you only listen to clients, you’re only hearing part of the story

Welcome to The Happy Client!

Written by our Director, Anna Lake, this monthly newsletter shares insights, ideas and inspiration to help you build stronger client relationships and create move value for your business. If you're not already subscribed, click here to never miss an issue! When we talk about client experience, the instinctive response is often to ask only clients for their view.

Of course that matters, client insight tells us how things feel at the receiving end. It highlights what’s working, what’s frustrating, and where expectations aren’t being met. But if that’s where listening stops, you’re not hearing the full picture.

In professional services, the client experience is created across a whole ecosystem. It’s not only shaped by client-facing teams and relationship partners but also client support teams, internal colleagues sitting in IT and finance, and by your internal systems, processes and behaviours. 

The value of widening the lens

When you start listening beyond clients, the picture becomes clearer. And I don’t just mean listening to others outside the firm, listening internally reveals a wealth of data that can show what might be really going on.

When clients say, “responsiveness could be better” (a common gripe!) what they’re often describing is a symptom, not the root cause.

Support teams can explain where processes break down – do your reception team notice clients left waiting longer than they should be? Are your switchboard team faced with voicemails or phones ringing for a length of time?

Fee earners can describe the pressures they’re managing – your teams’ capacity is not your clients’ problem but you do need to listen to teams and give them additional support during peak times for the sake of their wellbeing and the health of the client relationship.

Outside of the firm, referrers can tell you what clients expect before they even instruct you – and you should be checking in with them to make sure you’re delivering on their expectations. Referrers have no shortage of choice and firms place a huge amount of value on these relationships. Including referrers in a listening exercise is a great way of demonstrating that you value the relationship too. 

When different perspectives sit alongside client feedback, patterns emerge and it becomes easier to see where the points of friction lie in your client journey and why some issues keep resurfacing. It will also become apparent which problems are behavioural and which are structural; and what needs to change system-wide, not just at individual level.

A simple way to start: map one moment

You don’t need a big programme or a complex framework to do this, you can start small. Pick one moment in the client journey – onboarding, matter updates, billing, or the end of a piece of work – and look at it from a few angles:

• What does the client experience at this point?

• What do fee earners think is happening?

• What do support teams find difficult here?

• What do referrers or introducers hear?

The gaps between those perspectives are often where the most useful insight sits.

Turning insight into action

One of the biggest benefits of joining up perspectives is that action becomes easier. Not because the issues are smaller, but because they’re clearer.

When firms can see how different parts of the system contribute to the experience, actions are more practical, shared, and realistic. Improvement stops being about fixing individuals and starts being about fixing how the system works together and that’s when clients really notice change.

A final thought

Clients are the ultimate judges of your experience and their voice matters enormously. But, if you want to improve that experience in a meaningful, lasting way, you need to listen to the people who help create it too.

Sometimes the most valuable insight comes from the voices we don’t usually ask.