Your clients think you are too cheap

because my pleasure, very good to see you.

The beginning of my feedback journey was probably about 18 years ago. So have you come across Stephen Covey and his seven habits of highly effective people?

Okay, so one of those habits and it's a that book is a bit of a kind of cliched self-help book now, but I think it's got value still. So one of the habits is seek first to understand and then to be understood. And I think that's, that's quite a powerful message when you think about it and you delve into it. So you have to make an effort to really understand somebody and that's understanding. in a human capacity so that you can connect with them, build a relationship. And it's something that the foundation of trust, but I think just in practical terms, if you've got a commercial relationship, there's no way as a provider customer, can you offer anybody anything unless you actually understand them and what their needs are. So I think that's kind of the foundation of my sort of understanding appreciation of the importance of feet. That's where it started. I think the stage two was Toastmasters. Now don't know if you've come across that as an organization. So I joined a local Toastmasters club. So I knew that feedback was important, but it wasn't until I started doing that, trying to improve my public speaking that I realized, actually there are methods to improving at a skill and it involves people telling you what you're doing wrong, unsurprisingly. And I think it's difficult to get, it's difficult to get people to tell you how to improve. What, firstly, what you're doing wrong and how to improve. But Toastmasters clubs are one of those environments where they've actually structured it and they know how to deliver that. So I went for several years and week in, week out, get someone, whether you give a long speech or whether you give like a one minute talk, you will get a formal evaluation where somebody will look you in the eye in front of the audience and tell you, okay, this is what you did. how it made me feel this was the reaction of the audience. This is what you might want to think about. So feedback in terms of, you know, not just criticizing you saying you did this right or wrong, but saying, well, this is the result. This was the outcome in the room. This is what people, how people reacted. And so I found that really useful in sort of building confidence and as a speaker, but it also made me think about, you know, how do we get better professionally, but personally. And that's all about being able to sort of course correct. So people giving you that input in a direct way that you can apply and make changes. So I suppose that was like my stage two in, I know that feedback's important. I'm learning how to do it. And then I think the third element was I was in a consultancy working for professional services firms. And a lot of what we were doing was helping improve client relationships. through better understanding. So helping our clients better understand their clients, acting as that sort of intermediary. And over that time, sort of developed and honed techniques to improve those commercial relationships. But my frustration was often we were getting that sort of nice to have feedback. you know, the sort of polite praise and, you know, nice to hear things. But then the client might say these fantastic things and then, and then they would leave. They wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't stay loyal. And so I knew that we weren't quite doing the full job. We weren't quite getting, a sort of closed loop where the feedback was leading to improvements. And I felt that we could do a better job. So I sort of made it my mission to say, how can we get really good commercial feedback that, that keeps clients loyal? And so that that's kind of the. The reason for Chorus, the reason that I'm in this business is because I sort of think we can do better, but we have to work really hard to get the insights from feedback. So that's kind of the background to it all.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's, that's a challenge, isn't it? Because you, you sort of, you've got to say, okay, I know you want to be gentle with my ego, but, but I'm okay. I really genuinely want to know, what, know, what the feedback is. think, I think the most important thing from my perspective is, making it a formal exercise. So it's not just a casual, how are we doing? It's, we're going to put some time aside. and we're going to have an interaction that is specifically about this. And these are sort of the guardrails and this is why we're doing it. So explaining to people what's going to happen and giving them the reassurance that you want to know. So, you know, the interviews that we do, we do interviews and surveys. They're the primary ways of collecting feedback. There are other means, but this is the majority of the time. We're creating a space and an opportunity and making it clear to the individual that this is going to be used not just to put everybody on the back, but to genuinely make changes within the business. it's all about, you've got an incentive because we're going to deliver a better service. If only you'll tell me what the pain points are and what needs to be changed and what needs to be improved. We're going to act on it. And I think that takes time. So, you know, you've got to convince somebody that you are genuine, that you're not just trying to work out what the opportunity is to sell you more things. So the first time round, you shouldn't ask for too much, but then act on it and show people that you really are making changes and you're developing. And then you win the trust and you go, I see, this isn't just somebody who is... saying they want feedback and not acting on it. They go, okay, I told them this and they did this, right. So the next time you come around, you know, maybe it's 12 months later for another relationship review, you ask for a bit more of their time and a bit more of their input. And they're more likely to give you that because you've sort of developed the trust.

Yeah, there's lots of examples like that. I think the most positive one, because there's lots of negatives, suppose, the most positive one is often where you're working with these people who are charging quite a lot of money for their time, but they're a bit worried about whether or not they are really delivering enough value and whether they're really worth what they're charging. And there's quite a lot of instances. And there's a firm we worked with recently. sort of surprised them because the feedback was that they were relatively cheap. They're charging hundreds of dollars an hour and they think, that's quite a lot, it? Is the client getting enough? And the client loves them. And actually the client's saying, when you compare the prices against others, these guys are a good value for money. And that sort of preconception that, but we can't, the price sensitivity. you know, we can't possibly charge more. And we were able to go back to the firm and say, actually, you know, you're about 20 % below current expectations all the time. And it's not that you now want to need to go out and, you know, bump the prices up immediately, because that's, that's going to undermine the trust that you've, you've developed. But it gave people the reassurance that that what they were doing, you know, was valued. And yeah, in some instances, there was opportunity to put the fees up. I suppose, often, yeah, often the belief inside the firm doesn't reflect the client experience. And so that's kind of a good news story. You can go back to the firm and say, actually, you've got scope to increase the fees. Happy days. They're going to be pleased with that. But quite often it's misdiagnosis of what the client sort of expectations are. I think maybe like around responsiveness for instance. So, you know, we're working with lots of professionals that put themselves under a lot of stress and strain who, you know, are burning out, often thinking that the client expects a response, you know, within an hour, that they need to, you know, work through the night, through the weekends, and often they've not, took the time to understand what the expectations are of them in the first place. So they don't have a sort of service level agreement that says, well, these kind of problems, we expect them to be resolved this quickly, or we expect a response in this amount of time. And people have made assumptions about what good services, and that can be like all different dimensions of the service experience. But they've not spent the time to understand the client expectation in the first place. So either they're kind of massively over delivering in the wrong area. know, technology comes up quite often. You know, I've seen firms make huge investments in technology platforms because they think it's gonna help the client. And actually they've just completely misunderstood what the client wanted. You know, they thought the client wanted some flash innovation in terms of technology, but what they wanted was a service innovation, which might've been something. you know, the firm already had resource and ability to do. So yeah, there's that kind of mismatch. think, you know, they expect, it's all about expectations. You've got to understand what people's expectations are and then hopefully, you know, at least deliver and hopefully, you know, over-deliver a little bit to give that sense of added value.

well, you referred to my book. That's, that's a nice way to mention it. Yeah. So that my book is the client feedback playbook, which is, all about the main principles in collecting feedback from clients and how you use it, within the business to make, first of all, to improve individual client relationships, to, to, you know, better deliver, but then sort of bigger pitch to look across the piece and understand.

the patterns and the trends that run across all clients or perhaps are in certain segments so that you can make improvements within the business. And often it's about a strategy change. mean, other books, yeah, I'm hiding them, but there's a good selection of them. I suppose at the moment I'm reading lots about brands as well as client experience we look at. brand perception and that kind of fascinates me around the fact that you your service experience. to, you whether you're a satisfied customer, that kind of thing is fairly straightforward because you know what's being delivered and you can give it a rating. What interests me about brand is it's all perception. It's not, you you didn't actually have the interaction. It's just what you've heard from other people or you've seen advertised and things like that. So you'll see there's lots of brand books up there. That's my current area of interest in learning how do we measure. things like awareness in the market, but also sentiment and association. Yeah, so that's not a specific other book, there's plenty of good ones out there.

And in terms of getting, what's the biggest sort of benefit from the least amount of effort?

Yeah, okay, that's a good question. I'm gonna think for a second about that. What's the biggest, I mean...

Okay, so it depends if you're in a small business or if you're the founder of the business, you pick up the phone and start having conversations with clients because we tend to think that client research needs to perhaps be this sort of very formal methodical exercise. Whereas if we're doing commercial research, The feedback that we want for a business can be, it's quick and dirty is the best means. either talking directly to your clients, having conversations saying, want to get feedback on how we're doing. I'm trying to make improvements within the business. Can you help with that? Just very informal conversations are the best way to just start. Or if you haven't got clients, it's about talking to your prospects, people who would be ideal, rather than sort of overworking it. Because you can save yourself so much time and effort and money by not developing products and services that people don't want. You can work that out in advance and save yourself all that effort. So that's, suppose, if you're in a small business, if you're in a big business, it's harder to make changes. I suppose that the biggest obstacle that people run into in the types of firms that I work with are internal objections around contacting clients. it's often people are looking after very valuable relationships. and they are protective of them. And so the most useful thing is having prepared for those objections. So people will say, clients are too busy. So no, know, don't go and talk to my clients. They're too busy. We already know what they think. And even if you find out the things that are wrong with the service, we don't have the time or resource to fix them. So, you know, don't go and ask in the first place. So prepare yourself for those kind of objections. Again, if you're in a professional services firm, you need to be able to demonstrate that actually people do give feedback and if they don't want to, they'll tell you, so they'll push back. Like they're adults, give them the choice. Because we get surveys about so many things, don't we? Like it doesn't matter what you buy, you get a survey afterwards, even if it was... something for £2.50 on eBay. And you know, we're pretty good. We can just ignore those things. But it's, you know, if someone's spending lots of money with you, you should at least give them the opportunity to give you feedback. So preparing for that kind of objection. And yeah, everyone's busy, but you know, the larger the amount they're spending with you, the more that you should be giving them an opportunity to sort of course correct if you're getting things wrong.

Yeah, so AI is incredibly... impactful within all kinds of consultancy at the moment, particularly for us. You yeah, you can get AI to do almost every aspect of soliciting feedback. But... Do you? Sorry, my throat's going a bit dry.

Let me just talk. So AI is having a big impact on how we solicit feedback and what we get from people. I think the biggest, most useful area is with the analysis side. So we collect huge amounts of data. So we've conducted interviews, thousands of words of feedback. And being able to sift through that used to be an incredibly time consuming process. So it would literally be me or a data analyst or another researcher reading every line of what had been said and coding that up to put it in a category to say, well, this was about document quality or this was about responsiveness. So this was about any one of a hundred different things. And now, AI is brilliant. Large language model can dissect an interview transcript. in less than a second, pull out all the main themes, identify the things that need to be addressed. So yeah, that's hugely useful. People are trying to say, well, can we use it for the actual data collection? So instead of a human being interviewing you, you can be interviewed by an AI instead. I think that's very plausible. So you could, but I the issue there is what message does it send out to the client? So what does it say that you're not important enough to be interviewed one to one? That's yeah, so that's that's the issue there. Sorry Nicholas my throat is dry

Just contact me. You can go via the website, chorusinsight.com or via LinkedIn, look me up there, Graham Archbold. And yeah, more than happy to always to talk feedback and how we can improve the business using it.

No, pleasure. Thank you, Miklas.