Turning client feedback into a competitive advantage: Osprey Approach podcast
In episode 34 of Osprey Approach’s Empowering Law Firm Leaders podcast, Graham Archbold spoke with Amy Bruce about turning client feedback into a commercial advantage. The conversation ranged from the questions to ask clients to the leadership and follow-through needed to make the answers useful.
Three things tend to cause a feedback programme to stall. Firms struggle to show its commercial relevance, senior leaders are not sufficiently engaged, or the operational effort of conducting interviews and acting on findings is underestimated. The answer is to treat listening as an ongoing programme with clear purpose, rather than a one-off survey.
Personal interviews are worth the investment when the relationship or decision matters. They allow a client to explain the reason behind a rating, raise an issue the firm had not anticipated, or describe a new business need. Surveys have a useful role too: they can provide reach and a consistent measure over time. The two methods answer different questions and can work together.
Feedback becomes valuable when it informs decisions about relationships and performance. A score on its own rarely tells a management team what to do. Pairing patterns in the data with the client stories behind them helps leaders see where service needs attention, where trust is growing and where future opportunities may lie.
That requires accountability. Decide who owns each action, when they will follow up, how progress will be measured and what the client will hear back. Leadership sponsorship matters most when leaders use the evidence in real decisions and make the response visible.
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