Remember playing the telephone game as a child? One person would start with a sentence, and by the time it made its way around the circle to you, it was a garbled circus of word entertainment. The game illustrates how messages can get lost in translation—how communication, meaning, and intent can shift, sometimes drastically, from their original form.
This concept applies to business communication as well.
Even if your firm prioritizes Client Experience (CX) with the goal of driving growth through referrals, opportunities to create client advocates can slip through the cracks if there isn’t a structured process to measure, monitor, improve, and deliver on your CX brand promise.
Why You Need a Client Listening (VoC) Program
When you engage your clients regularly through a Client Listening or Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, patterns begin to emerge. Instead of trying to aggregate anecdotal feedback from various individuals—some of whom may have better questioning and listening skills than others—a VoC software program lets clients speak for themselves. By capturing their preferences and comments directly, you gain valuable insights into why your clients responded the way they did.
Consider the following scenario as a modern-day fable underscoring the importance of a VoC program.
A local ice cream store launches a new flavor: Banana Hand Sanitizer. The owner is thrilled and pours all his energy into promoting this unique offering. However, in the process, he neglects to stock up on more common flavors like chocolate. On a scorching July weekend, the new flavor sells out, and the owner assumes it’s a hit. But is it really?
By focusing on the sales of the new flavor alone, he overlooks the fact that he ran out of chocolate on Friday evening. Were customers choosing Banana Hand Sanitizer because they loved it or because they had no other option? If the owner had a VoC program in place, he’d know that limited choices influenced their decisions and that they might not return. Worse, he might waste time and money producing more of an unpopular flavor that had a fluke success. The mistake will catch up with him—but at what cost?
Over the past twenty years, Client Savvy has helped firms integrate VoC programs into their project delivery systems, leading to increased client loyalty and growth. Through our experience, we’ve found that two of the greatest challenges our clients face are getting team buy-in and maintaining enthusiasm for the program. We help them overcome these challenges.
Getting Buy-In for Your Voice of Customer Program
Our research, derived from over 500,000 data points, shows that the most actionable feedback your firm can receive is ‘requested by’ and ‘delivered to’ the individual working directly with the client on the project. Why? Because clients are more likely to share what’s working—or not—on a project with the person who can DO something about it, such as their project manager. This makes getting project manager buy-in the first critical step to establishing a robust voice of customer program.
A common pitfall we see is decision-makers rushing into the implementation and execution of a VoC program before laying the necessary groundwork. It’s human nature to ask, “What’s in it for me?” Therefore, before rolling out your program and expecting everyone to participate, ensure that your team understands and agrees it's needed. This might seem basic, but it’s easy to assume that what’s important to you will automatically be important to the rest of your team. If you’re like me, you’ve been on the receiving end of realizing this is false. However, most project managers already feel stretched thin when managing client demands. The phrase “I don’t have time for one more thing” is almost a cliché among them. However, once they recognize a problem and agree that a VoC program can solve it, resistance tends to disappear.
Maintaining Enthusiasm for Your Client Listening Program
You’ve gotten buy-in from your team to measure and monitor the impact of your firm’s client experience focus through your VoC program, and individuals are sending out requests for feedback, and clients are responding. Project managers are seeing and acting on the feedback they receive from their clients to increase client loyalty through intentional positive client experiences. However, it’s important to ensure that these insights don’t get siloed. Without a strategic communication plan, valuable feedback may not reach everyone who needs it.
One effective strategy is to share feedback with leadership automatically. For example, when a project manager requests feedback from a client, the response could be automatically sent to the practice area or discipline leader (business development), marketing manager, business unit leader, branch manager, and the original project manager. Additionally, you could generate reports that provide trending data and analysis of client responses, automatically delivering these insights to key stakeholders. This approach would allow business development teams to gain insights into what your existing clients see as strong differentiators, branch managers to compare client sentiment with profitability, and marketing teams to use positive client quotes in upcoming proposals.
Implementing a process to measure and monitor the success of your client experience program is just the beginning. Ensuring that all individuals responsible for project delivery and firm growth are informed of the results allows your entire firm to leverage insights from satisfied clients—and address potential challenges—to drive growth and profitability.
Are you willing to risk your clients’ experience being like a game of telephone by having incomplete, indirect, and garbled communication undermining your firm’s growth and client loyalty strategy?
Monitoring, measuring, and sharing client feedback can enhance, clarify, and strengthen your firm’s opportunities to increase loyalty and differentiate your services. Contact us to start building your voice of customer (Voc) program today.
