Whether your firm is ready to embark on its first or tenth formal client survey, your goal in conducting the survey is to gather feedback from clients that are important to and knowledgeable about the firm—in short, those who are qualified to voice a credible opinion that can make a difference in how you service your clients.  Asking the right people the right questions is essential to provide meaningful, actionable results for the firm.  So one of the most critical elements of conducting a client survey for a law firm is assembling the mailing list, list of email addresses or call list. 

Typically, we ask firms to build their client list by:

• Reviewing the firm’s list of clients over the past three years.
• Selecting those clients who generated the top 80% of the firm’s revenue over those three years (not 80% of the clients—this is typically a much smaller number).  You may also decide to include opportunity clients, including smaller clients that you expect to grow in size and/or large clients with whom you would like to increase your share of business.
• Identifying individuals within those client organizations with whom the firm has had contact and, again, would be in a position to provide valid feedback about the firm.
• Breaking the list down by billing attorney.
• Distributing these smaller lists to each billing attorney for their review, covered by an explanatory memorandum.

Using this process, firms typically generate a minimum of 300 names for the final survey.  If you attain a 40% response rate on the survey, you will have 120 surveys to tabulate.  Clients will also update their email and website addresses, if they have changed recently, which also can help keep your client mailing and contact information current.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Client Surveys, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.