In all service-sector businesses, long-term success is dependent on satisfied customers making repeat purchases, as well as those same customers recommending that service to their family and friends. Collecting feedback among customers to ensure that these two things are happening or, if they are not, to understand the reasons why, is standard practice in sectors such as hotels, travel and personal banking.

The same principle applies to the professional services sector, including legal services but, until recently, firms have been slow to recognise the importance of gathering and acting on client feedback; lawyers have been among the slowest to act.

Techniques for gathering client feedback

The techniques available to law firms to elicit feedback on their performance from clients are well known, although not widely practised. Different techniques need to be used across a firm's client base, with more research investment being directed at the firm's most important clients.

At the other end of the client spectrum, economics dictate that more cost-effective techniques need to be found to obtain client feedback.

Independent client service reviews

For a firm's key clients, usually the largest by fee income or profit, the most effective method for gathering feedback is by way of an independent client service review. Every 12-18 months, someone independent of the day-to-day client relationship should conduct a formal, face-to-face review with the key decision-makers at the client organisation to assess their satisfaction with the firm's services.

Such interviews can either be conducted by individuals from within the firm, such as the senior partner or the business development director, or by an outside consultant. This ensures the review is as objective as possible, because it allows the client to talk freely and frankly about the service they receive, including their views of the lawyers providing this service.

While client partners should be encouraged to have a regular dialogue with their clients about the firm's performance, this method of gathering client feedback is not as reliable as the independent client service review.

In most firms, key clients will be few in number, typically less than 50, but will contribute significantly to the firm's overall fee income, often 50% or more.

The importance of these client relationships to the firm dictates that significant investment of resources is made to get accurate and comprehensive client feedback. This level of investment will also be expected by the client.

It is not uncommon for senior partners to invest 10 hours per review covering being briefed by their colleagues, meeting with several decision-makers at the client organisation and then reporting their findings back to their colleagues. A consultant would typically charge £1,000-£5,000 depending on the number of decision-makers being interviewed at each client. Since most key clients for law firms in the top 50 will be providing fees of more than £250,000 per annum, this is a relatively small investment which is easily justified.

Client satisfaction surveys: telephone, post or online

Once you get beyond the firm's key clients, other techniques are needed to gather client feedback. Immediately below the key clients sits the next group of clients, which could number several hundred. To conduct face-to-face independent reviews with all of these clients would be extremely time-consuming and very costly. Therefore, to obtain feedback from these clients, it is best to carry out a telephone survey through a market research consultancy. The unit cost of such research is about a fifth of the cost of commissioning independent client service reviews.

Finally, for the 'long tail' of a firm's smallest clients, postal or online surveys are best. While the unit cost is very small, the main downside of this method is that response rates can be very low – typically around 5%-10%, even among your own clients. The quality of the feedback is also significantly less than for the other two methods described, as you are reliant almost entirely on answers to multiple choice-type questions, as respondents are reluctant to spend time composing long responses to open-ended questions.

Post-transaction feedback

While the techniques for gathering client feedback described above are very valuable, because such reviews/surveys are usually only conducted every 12-18 months, there is a danger that failings in service delivery that occur between client reviews/surveys are not picked up quickly enough. The old adage that 'you are only as good as your last deal' has never been truer – if the client has become dissatisfied with a firm because of a failing on a deal or case, the longer the problem is left unresolved, the greater the chance that the client will defect and appoint another law firm.

To overcome this, some law firms now conduct post-transaction reviews after all major deals, cases or projects. These reviews are kept deliberately short so as not to inconvenience the client, and become part of the firm's approach to quality assurance and client care.

Such reviews are best outsourced to a market research consultancy, whose interviewers contact the key decisionmakers after a transaction and conduct a short telephone interview – no more than 10-15 minutes – to elicit the client's views of the firm's performance on that transaction.

The areas covered by such a review should include:

. the performance of the team against key performance indicators, such as accessibility, quality of advice and value for money;

. the performance of the individual team members;

. areas for improvement;

. overall satisfaction with the service received; and

. the likelihood of using the firm for similar transactions in the future.

Once completed, the findings from such reviews should be made available to the client service team as quickly as possible, so that they can deal promptly with any issues identified by the client. At Wheeler Associates, we use a computer-automated telephone interviewing system to populate a report template, which allows us to email the review report to the appropriate people as soon as an interview has been completed. Aggregating post-transaction feedback data allows the firm's management to analyse the performance of individual lawyers, departments and offices. 'Early warning systems' can be set up to alert management to transactions where the firm has underperformed, so that they can step in and ensure that remedial action is being taken.

So, if your firm wants to ensure that it has all its bases covered in terms of gathering client feedback, make sure that you put in place mechanisms for collecting post-transaction feedback because, remember, you are only as good as your last deal.

Kevin Wheeler is principal at legal marketing and business development consultancy Wheeler Associates.