Evaluating your Clients’ Experience
Want to level up your firm, but not sure where to start or exactly what shifts you need to make? Our Gap-to-Goal worksheet is a great tool to help you figure it out.
This tool helps you look at your firm through different lenses – that of your client, your team, the financials, and the firm owner. From each of these perspectives, you’ll take note of the current state, what you would love it to look like (the goal), why the goal is important, and how you’ll reach the goal.
Following up from our last post, today we’re walking through the first “lane” in the Gap-to-Goal worksheet – the client experience.
First, think about your client’s experience from start to finish, as it stands today. Be brutally honest, and capture the good, the bad, and the ugly. Use actual client feedback if you have it – that might be from client satisfaction or NPS surveys, internet reviews, comments from current and past clients, or you might even interview a few current and former clients. Also consider the aspects of your interactions with clients that have felt friction-filled, even if the client didn’t provide explicit feedback about it.
Remember that the client experience begins with the first time they become aware of your firm, and flows through becoming a prospective client, the proposal and engagement, onboarding, and the delivery of the work.
Consider the following questions to determine your strengths and weaknesses around the client’s current experience with your firm.
- Is your communication with them clear so they know what to expect next and when at each stage in the process?
- Does your client understand how much they are paying and what they are getting in exchange for that fee?
- What is the engagement process like for your client? How much effort does it require, and how easy is it for the client to understand? How does the client sign documents and send them back to you?
- How does the client interact with the firm at each stage? What communication does the client receive, and what is the “feel” of that communication?
- Most importantly, what are your clients saying about their experience with your firm (through email responses, surveys, reviews, in the market, through their actions, etc.)?
Capture the key strengths and weaknesses of the current client experience in the first block of the Client Experience lane on the worksheet.
Next, take a moment to outline the client experience you’d love to provide, and list the hallmarks of your ideal client experience in the “Goal State” block of the Client Experience lane on the worksheet.
Before you begin to identify your action steps for getting from the current state to the goal state, it’s important to be clear about why the shift to the Goal State matters to you. What is your motivation? Why do you care deeply about this shift? Upgrading any aspect of your firm takes work, and clarity about the “why” will help you prioritize this work, and have the persistence to make it happen when other demands threaten your progress. Capture the “why” in the third block of the Client Experience lane on the worksheet.
Finally, review the current state, goal state, and why – and in light of those, decide what you’ll do to make the shift you want to see in your client experience. You may identify several steps to take, but the most important is the first step; be sure to write down the very first thing you need to do, no matter how small, to advance toward your Goal State client experience.
That’s great progress for now. In the next post, we’ll be back to tackle the Team Experience. For now, congratulate yourself for a job well done evaluating and preparing to level up your Client Experience!