Write the business case for customer experience with MyCustomerLens
“If experience isn’t your strategy, you’re doing it wrong.” – PwC Future of Customer Experience Report
According to PwC “Good customer experience leaves people feeling heard and appreciated. It minimises friction, maximizes efficiency and maintains a human element.”
Does that sound like the experience that all your clients are getting?
What is customer experience?
The terms customer experience and customer service often get used interchangeably. But they’re not the same thing. My simple definitions are:
- Customer service is what you do
- Customer experience is how they feel
Customer service is often seen as a process. Or it’s the expertise and outputs delivered by professional services firms. Sometimes it’s a department that responds to poor customer experiences. Service is an ‘inside-out’ concept, it’s about what your firm gives.
Customer experience (CX for short) is the ‘outside-in’ view. It’s how your clients and prospects receive your products, services, communications etc. Customer experiences don’t just happen when working with fee-earners. On-boarding processes, communications (or the lack of them), apps and bills all contribute.
CX is emotional, not rationale. It’s driven by expectations. So, two clients can have different experiences with the same person or product.
Customer experience is a moving target
This distinction, especially the role of emotions and expectations, is important. The benchmark for good service hasn’t changed much, it’s still broadly about being friendly and responsive. But the benchmark for good customer experiences is keeps evolving. Every time a supplier upgrades their customer experience, your client’s expectations evolve. Over time, first-rate experiences become run of the mill and even embarrassing.
For example, what is a good banking experience? Once upon a time it was about short queues and a warm friendly smile. But you had to visit at a time and place that suited the bank. That was normal. Now a good experience involves an easy-to-use app, instant money transfers and being able to bank ‘on-the-go’.
Customers used to be restricted to the products they could buy (e.g. CDs). Now they can subscribe to vast libraries of knowledge and content (such as Spotify). Similarly, electric vehicles used to be embarrassing (milk floats) now they’re exciting (Tesla).
Every industry has seen new brands and new experiences rise up at the expense of incumbents. Would you rather be designing experiences based on future expectations or past assumptions?
The customer experience business case
“Customer experience leaders outperform peers on revenue growth”- McKinsey
This market disruption has been neatly summarised by McKinsey’s recent research. They identified a direct link between customer experience and revenue growth.
At this point, your business leaders may think all is fine because your firm already is a customer experience leader. But is it?
Bain & Co’s famous research from 2005 would beg to differ. They found that 80% of company executives believed they delivered “superior experience” but only 8% of their customers agreed.
Of course, this research is now 18 years old, and the numbers have undoubtedly changed. But recent research suggests the gap remains.
“45% of corporates have changed their roster of law firms in the last year.” – Thomson Reuters 2023 ‘UK State of the Legal Market Report
Thomson Reuters recently released the 2023 ‘UK State of the Legal Market Report’. One headline finding was that 45% of corporates have changed their roster of law firms in the last year. That suggests to me that the experience of working with some firms could be better.
It sounds like firms are realising this too. LexisNexis’ 2023 Bellwether Report has highlighted that 79% of firms are worried about retention.
Interestingly, the same research revealed 88% of law firms felt the firm enabled them to deliver good service to clients. So good service is not enough to create compelling reasons for clients to stay.
Our own research at MyCustomerLens reveals why the gap might still be there. Law Firm leaders are not upgrading their definition of good customer experience as quickly as their clients.
For example, we asked law firms to choose the 3 value drivers where their firm strove to deliver above average experiences. 90% said they were above average for being friendly and approachable. But only 22% said the same about keeping clients informed.
Then we asked clients what aspects of their experience was most important. Communication and feeling informed came out much higher than approachability.
Closing customer experience blind spots
With all the survey tools and review sites out there, why do firm’s still have a big gap between brand promises and client reality?
It could be because they still have a passive client listening programme. Annual research, manual report and an ‘opt-in’ approach focused on key clients all create insight gaps. This process risks firms hearing what they already know, or worse, what they want to hear.
Culture can also be a contributor to customer experience blind spots. When interviewing is only done by fee-earners, they are less likely to ask open questions they don’t know the answer to. The view that “I know my clients” can stifle the ability to collect and share insights about emerging client expectations.
The alternative is to create an active client listening programme. Active client listening (we call it ‘always-on’) is a mindset underpinned by technology. Feedback is constantly gathered from a wide range of clients and sources. The resulting data is then instantly analysed by AI and delivered to real-time dashboards.
So, the business case for customer experience is about driving differentiation and revenue growth. Achieving this requires shifting your culture and processes from “I know my clients” to “we know our clients”.
To learn more about how MyCustomerLens is helping law firms implement always-on client listening, contact Paul or visit MyCustomerLens
