Five trends shaping client insights in 2025 according to MyCustomerLens

Our latest ‘Future of Client Insights’ research has uncovered five key trends that law firms cannot afford to ignore. Regardless of your firm’s size or focus, these trends will be shaping your competitors plans this year.

To keep up, your firm will need to consider how it shifts from:

• Research to Signals
• Manual to Automation
• Static reports to On-demand access
• Open loops to Closed loops
• Single lens to Multiple lenses

The driver behind this shift? As firms strive to achieve their organic growth targets, they’re realising that they need more insights and evidence to inform their decision-making.

As a result, the client listening process is evolving. It’s shifting from siloed and selective projects to an always-on process of gathering and sharing insights.

After all, financial decisions are not based on assumptions or out-dated numbers. Partners don’t opt-in clients to receive invoices. New work isn’t won by waiting around because “clients will say if they have a problem”.

Likewise, the days of client listening being dominated by assumptions, opt-ins and the fear of finding out are also numbered.

The shift from research to signals

Traditionally client listening has been driven by a research mindset. Interviews and surveys were conducted as discrete projects, with selected clients, at a moment in time that suited the firm.

In most cases, this led to retrospective listening. Research projects looked back over work already completed. Only the firm benefited, because it was too late to change that client’s experiences.

In contrast, future-proof client listening will focus on feedback signals. The voice of the client is available to your firm 365 days a year, through a wide range of sources that supplement surveys and interviews. Emails, complaints, reviews, feedback forms, meeting notes and operational data all provide additional signals about your client’s needs, expectations and experiences.

Tuning into these signals requires a shift in mindset as well as processes. The feedback that a lawyer receives in a client email obviously isn’t as robust and unbiased as formal research data; but it is far more likely to influence the lawyer’s subsequent behaviours than an annual PowerPoint presentation.

Something to consider: where is the voice of your client already being heard by the business? Those are great places to listen for signals as the data is already available.

The shift from manual to automation

The typical client listening programme is full of manual processes. They consume time and limit the scale and impact of the programme.

For example, there’s:

• Getting individual partners’ permission to send feedback requests
• Creating client lists
• Setting up survey emails
• Finding and combining different data sets
• Analysing the data
• Producing reports

All these steps, and many more can be automated. Our research revealed that implementing/upgrading CRM systems and experimenting with AI sentiment analysis are the two most common automation strategies.

But the effectiveness of either will be limited unless the permission to ask for feedback is also automated – by shifting to an ‘opt-out’ rather than ‘opt-in’ culture. Unless you break the manual step of having to ask partners for permission to collect client feedback, every downstream automation has limited benefit.

Something to consider: map out your full client listening process and identify all the steps that could be automated.

The shift from static reports to on-demand access

The pattern of quarterly or annual reports, produced in word or PowerPoint, is still the foundation of many firms’ communications. But times are changing.

Implementation of business intelligence dashboards in general, as well as the growing usage of LLM tools like ChatGPT, is shifting the information culture from ‘push’ to self-service.

Client listening teams are looking to move up the value chain, and to be seen as a strategic adviser to decision-makers. To do this they need to have enough data to tell a compelling ‘real-time’ story (see research to signals), and they need more efficient ways of analysing the data (see manual to automation).

The third leg of the table is enabling the business to access simple and regular reporting on-demand. Questions like ‘can I see all the feedback a client shared recently’, or ‘what’s the overall rating of my practice area this quarter’ should be available on demand.

This frees up the client insights teams to focus on the higher value-add work, such as:

• Discovering trends and opportunities across feedback sources
• Managing the actions taken across the firm
• Helping teams to discover the ‘so what’ behind recent data
• Acting as the voice of the client in strategic planning sessions

Something to consider: what reports and analysis do you produce regularly? These are all potential candidates for moving to on-demand access.

The shift from open loops to closed loops

Few firms have a central process for creating and managing the actions produced by client listening. Actions only tend to be created from interviews and focus on that specific client.

Once the transcripts and actions have been shared with the relationship partner, the insights team loses sight of them. As a result, there is no easy way to know what actions have been taken and what the benefit was of doing them. These open loops make it very hard to demonstrate the impact and ROI of client insights.

The future is about creating a feedback flywheel, a closed loop where signals feed reporting, reporting feeds action and actions inform future signal gathering.

Closing the loop means:

• Taking action based on what the client said, and measuring the result of that action
• Investigating how similar actions could benefit other clients
• Going back to clients to share what happened because of their feedback
• Sharing the process and impact with your people, to demonstrate the benefits of listening for client signals
• Feeding the insights and lessons learned into BD, Marketing, Operational and Account planning sessions.

Something to consider: can you combine feedback and action reporting, to make the benefits of closing the loop more visible?

The shift from single lens to multiple lenses

Further down the road firms will be expanding this process beyond the signals gathered from existing clients. ‘Client listening’ will move beyond existing clients to incorporate signals gathered from both external and internal sources.

External market sources such as prospects, lapsed clients, referrers, and other stakeholders.

They have an untapped perspective on how the market sees your positioning and value proposition, how people speak about your firm to each other, and where your competitive opportunities lie.

External listening keeps your finger on the pulse of the market, at a scale beyond what individual partners can gather and communicate efficiently.

Internal ideas and perspectives from your people.

People and talent teams ask your people about their relationship with the firm. But who’s asking your people about how they would improve the client experience, or to what extent they feel able to deliver on the brand and desired client experience?

The solution to client-related issues and missed opportunities is often hiding in plain sight. Your people often have the context and solution for any issues faced by your clients.

Future-proof listening will bring these data sources together, to enable faster and more informed decision-making. By shifting perspective from client to multiple lenses, firms will find ways to bring together all the intel they need to inform their organic growth decisions.

Something to consider: can you start small by gathering process improvement ideas from each team within your firm?

Making the move to always-on listening

As culture, process and mindsets shift, client signals will be continuously gathered, analysed, shared and actioned across the firm – an approach we call always-on listening. The client’s voice is heard when and where they have something to say, and even when they say it through actions rather than words.

Likewise, the resulting insights are available to all decision-makers when and where they need them. Not a firehose of data they need to sort through, but curated insights based on what they are most likely to need to know now.

This approach will not only help firms make decisions that strengthen relationships, reputations and revenues. It will also enable them to show – rather than tell – clients that they are really listening.

MyCustomerLens is the innovative, always-on client listening platform designed to give law firms a competitive edge. By harnessing the power of advanced AI, we transform formal and informal feedback signals into real-time, actionable insights. Our pioneering approach helps firms drive organic growth by unlocking deeper client. Ready to learn more? Click here to arrange a time to chat.