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Being truly client focused is more than an aspiration. We invest both time and effort in building closer relationships with our clients. Understanding their businesses, their ambitions, their people.
Thinking in our client's shoes
The difference between an effective adviser and one that stands out from the crowd is often their ability to put themselves in their clients' shoes - and advise accordingly. This principle is central to the development of our people - from their initial induction on joining the firm, through to their training and appraisals.
But it is more than an attitude. We take practical steps to get closer to our clients - agreeing relationship and service standards, regular 'surgeries' at our clients' offices, scheduled relationship meetings, joint training initiatives, visits to our clients' operational sites, social events, and clients attending our own internal team meetings.
Client relationship partners
Central to our approach is the role of the Client Relationship Partner (CRP): one partner, selected in discussion with the client, whose role it is to ensure that we understand our clients' needs and deliver on our promises.
We commissioned independent client research to help us to define the CRP role, to understand our clients' expectations of a CRP and the personal attributes they desire in such a person.
All our CRPs are accountable to management for client satisfaction, and have the authority to marshal the firm's resources to meet clients' requirements.
Seeking client feedback
Our feedback programme is not about ad hoc surveys that go nowhere. It’s about identifying areas for improvement or change. It’s focused on meeting the individual needs of clients by identifying their particular concerns or issues and tackling them, head on. We also look for general themes to help us identify training needs and improvements in our support processes.
We ask for feedback regularly, often using an independent interviewer to talk to clients face-to-face. We find this approach helps us get an honest opinion on our performance and our overall relationship. Find out more about our findings here.
We also invite our clients to score us on our performance against five main areas:
- Our understanding of the client’s needs
- The quality of our advice
- Our ability to manage work
- Our value for money
- Our clients’ overall satisfaction
We’ve set ourselves the target of achieving an overall 4.5 out of 5 for client satisfaction by 2006. In 2005 we reached our target.
Where we do not achieve a high standard in feedback, we put in place measures to improve performance and closely monitor progress to ensure our service improves. Where we score well, we don’t just sit on our laurels but strive to do just as well – or even better – next time.
In November 2006 we published a report, entitled Why don't law firms listen? which laid out the results of our client feedback programme, and called on the legal industry to respond to the persistent shortfall between a client's expectations and the actual service level they receive from their legal advisers.
In November 2007 we published our second report in the series, entitled "How much, over priced, over paid, over budget". This report looked out how the legal industry was managing and controlling cost increases.
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