Hear the voice of clients
In professional and personal life, feedback is like oxygen. Without enough oxygen, our bodies can’t function effectively. So too with feedback. Without feedback, the value we deliver to clients is sub-optimal. Like oxygen and our bodies, feedback is the essence of professional life. Feedback provides professional satisfaction and the means to improve and grow.
In this video, Dr. George Beaton delivers the 2017 keynote address at the Client Choice Awards ceremony in Sydney on 7 March 2017.
Hear the voice of clients
As human beings, our tendency is to fear feedback. We resist hearing it. We avoid receiving it. We explain it away. We reject the parts we don’t like. And even if the feedback is heard, the likelihood of acting on it is distressingly low. Who’s losing?
For these reasons, firms and practitioners don’t make it easy and welcoming for clients to give feedback. It’s not logical, but true.
We have to unlearn to learn to make it easy for clients to give us feedback (1). Shift thinking will help us view feedback as oxygen. Shift thinking will change how we view and interpret feedback. Shift thinking will challenge our belief systems and change how we feel and think about feedback. To get enough oxygen to serve clients and compete. And change how we think and feel about and interpret feedback.
Make it easy for clients and the marketplace to give you feedback using measurement frameworks like these:
NPS – Net Promoter Score
CES – Client Effort Score
NMP – Non-monetary Price
Csat – Client Satisfaction.
And do this at three levels:
Marketplace i.e. your brand,
Relationship with your firm, and
Transactional i.e. projects, jobs.
Make it easy for clients to give you feedback, like breathing in oxygen. Use multi-modalities that are cost-effective delivering feedback in forms you can act on and track how your response is being received by the marketplace and your clients.
Beaton’s mission
Beaton’s mission is to make it easy for professional services clients to give you feedback by making it:
Welcoming, simple and safe for clients
Specific and actionable for firms and practitioners.
Our mission is to be the voice of clients in professional services.
(1) Read about shift thinking on Mark Bonchek's site.