The Shoosmiths case study – How MyCustomerLens has helped cultivating a culture of client excellence
Feedback is crucial to a thriving business culture but, as Shoosmiths’ Aileen Leahy, cautions (and has learnt from experience), getting too comfortable with the status quo must be avoided.
Client listening has been an influential presence at Shoosmiths for some years now and has played a significant role in ensuring we are getting it right for clients, as well as providing food for thought around areas for improvement and innovation.
We recently asked ourselves though if we can confidently say feedback is a normalised area of our culture and features regularly in most things we do across the business. The answer? Mmm, not quite yet!
Within our team, feedback is one area where we identified the need not to get too comfortable with the status quo.
As a firm that offers independent non-lawyer relationship managers as the conductors of client listening, we could perhaps be forgiven for leaning on this facet of listening as our main source of feedback and leave it at that. We’re getting client intelligence via this method, why do we need to expand it?
We felt we were at a point where we needed to move the feedback agenda along and re-invigorate our strategies around it. As a team dedicated to client excellence, we are driven by the client voice. We work to ensure that voice is broadcast at an audible volume internally to be able to ensure we are advocating client truth.
Feedback serves so many purposes within an organisation. It can tell us what we’re getting right; where we need to improve; highlight areas we need to focus on or expand opportunities.
But it’s more than that. Feedback provides us with reassurance on a personal level that we’re getting it right – perhaps inspiring us to think of other ways to work with clients. It’s also a great reason to celebrate our fantastic people. One of the parts of my role I love is being able to tell people that a client has said something lovely about them – the ‘feedback effect’ is a visible boost.
Clients provide feedback in lots of different ways – through listening; surveys; a chat on the phone; emails; testimonials to name a few. Whilst we had exposure to all these types of feedback, the collective assessment of them was proving challenging.
Manual analysis can be skewed by a few things: bias, omission, misinterpretation can all potentially derail the best intentions to provide an accurate analysis.
Additionally, the shelf life of feedback via these methods is limited. A positive email from a client singing our praises is great and will get circulated and acknowledged – but what then? What potency does that feedback retain as it travels to sit benignly in an inbox happily ever after?
Our partnership with MyCustomerLens sees Shoosmiths entering a new phase of development in the way we generate and use feedback. This online platform provides a designated repository for all types of feedback, whilst also allowing us to proactively seek feedback from a greater number of clients via its functionality.
We will now, thanks to the platform, be able to engage a wider range of clients to compliment the richer, thick data our current client listening currently generates. Clients want to feed back to us in different ways. Sometimes, it’s a meeting, sometimes it can be a quick email to tell us what they think, or they simply want to give us a rating. MyCustomerLens provides us with the tools to be able to accommodate these client preferences across a spectrum of methods without compromising the quality of the feedback.
Similarly, I’m able to retire my highlighter pens as it will no longer be necessary for a manual ‘comb’ of our feedback, as the reporting available to us ensures we are able to place feedback at the centre of leadership conversations and provide a regular feed of information to be able to inform those discussions. Our recent inclusion of client satisfaction as a reward metric linked to our bonus scheme will also ensure that feedback remains a core topic at leadership level.
Establishing MyCustomerLens will also help us to ensure feedback is a truly inclusive endeavour. All feedback whether it be about partners, PAs, or our business support services has a home within the platform. We fully intend to use this to promote our ‘common purpose’ across all roles and demonstrate the pursuit of excellence has a place in everyone’s working day.
Ultimately, we hope the platform’s presence at Shoosmiths is a clear sign to our people and clients alike of the importance we are placing on feedback. People have different relationships with feedback which, from the discussions we had within our really engaging focus group at the PSMG Summit, feels like a common issue within our respective businesses.
We strongly believe by making feedback present in as many places as possible and regularly sharing our insights and analysis across the business we are working hard to show that at Shoosmiths, feedback is part of our business-as-usual infrastructure – and is an active tool to be used daily to help keep you on track.
By creating some healthy habits, and through our partnership with MyCustomerLens, feedback is on course to take its rightful place at Shoosmiths – where everyone has their part to play in achieving excellence.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2023 edition of Centrum, the magazine of the PSMG.
https://dh-design.foleon.com/psmg/centrum-summer-2023/people-shoosmiths-llp
