There has been a lot of discussion among bloggers lately about client satisfaction, how to measure it, when to measure it, whether it should be in person, in writing, etc. This week there were some great posts about selling while seeking client feedback, (by Tom Kane of Legal Marketing Blog) and whether visiting a client to help them is the right time to mention additional services we can provide (from Jim Hassett's Law Firm Business Development). Patrick Lamb of In Search of Perfect Client Service weighs in with a post on the right time to sell and the difference between talking to clients about how to serve them better and how you can serve them more. Hopefully this is a conversation that never ends.
But for those of you who still aren't convinced that any of this is worth so much discussion, perhaps Larry Bodine's post about bad word of mouth will change your mind. This isn't really new, and I've pointed this out before, but it bears repeating that a dissatisfied client, more than likely, isn't just a single loss to the firm. Negative experiences with a firm spread. And they probably spread more than 'positive' experiences. Think about this logically - people love to talk about what's wrong - they love to complain. It just isn't as much 'fun' to talk about what's going right as it is to talk about what's going wrong. Sad, perhaps, but true. So 'bad press' is likely to spread faster than good press - unless you really are exceptional.
Bodine's post talks about statistics gleaned from a customer dissatisfaction survey conducted by the Verde Group. Although the survey wasn't geared toward lawyers (it was about customer satisfaction with shopping), the statistics should make you sit up and take notice. Among the key findings were these:
- 31% of people that have a bad experience will tell at least one other person
- 64% of people surveyed wouldn't return to a business after hearing about a friend's negative experience
- On average people will tell at least 4 other people about their bad experience
- Negative experiences tend to be embellished in the re-telling(remember the game 'telephone' when you were a kid?) and can become up to 5 times as damaging as the original story
My thanks to Lisa Solomon of The Billable Hour and Question of Law for alerting me to Larry Bodine's post.
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