How to Run Effective Client Surveys as a Law Firm
As a law firm, you must understand your client's needs and expectations to provide the best client service possible. Legal department client satisfaction surveys can help you gain valuable insight to improve your legal services and boost client satisfaction and loyalty, increasing your revenue as a result.
Running an effective client satisfaction survey isn't always easy. Getting valuable feedback requires careful planning, thoughtful questions, and a commitment to address and implement the feedback you receive.
Fortunately, you can use survey software to run client surveys effectively. One such solution is Checkbox, our customer satisfaction and feedback survey software that allows you to create customized, mobile-friendly forms your clients will be happy to fill out.
With Checkbox, you don't need coding skills to create and edit your surveys – you can start as soon as you create an account. You can distribute surveys using various digital channels such as SMS, email, and website or leverage our REST API.
What's best, you'll get access to advanced analytics to learn, analyze and implement critical points from your clients' feedback.
Want to see Checkbox in action? Request a demo now!
In today's article, we will share all the essential information on how to run a legal department client satisfaction survey, share the best practices, and provide you with sample questions you can start using today.
Let's start with some basic information.
Why Should Law Firms Run Client Surveys?
Processing and analyzing customer feedback is crucial for identifying weaknesses and growth opportunities in any business. With client surveys, you can identify areas where you excel and highlight those strengths to potential clients.
Conducting effective surveys is especially important for uncovering insights about your team and processes, improving your services and procedures, and tracking progress over time, increasing the number of positive reviews.
Your clients also love feeling their opinions matter. The online survey helps you identify trends and patterns in dissatisfied client feedback and understand common issues and concerns.
By asking your clients for feedback, then acting on the responses, you can demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction.
It helps you build trust and loyalty with your clients, leading to increased revenue and a more positive reputation for your law firm.
Best Practices for Running a Legal Department Client Satisfaction Survey
Here are some things your law firm can do to run client surveys well and collect great-quality feedback.
Determine your goals
First off, you should never run client surveys just for the sake of quizzing your customers. Each survey should have a clear purpose.
You can use customer feedback to achieve many different goals. For example, you can identify how clients see your company and why they choose your services, evaluate the experiences clients have with your employees, or optimize various internal and external processes in your company.
Decide when to send surveys
When it comes to gathering feedback from clients, timing is everything.
Surveying customers shortly after their experience with your law firm will ensure their recollection of the engagement remains fresh. It will give you the most accurate feedback possible.
You should tailor the timing of your surveys to the specific goal you are trying to achieve. If you want to understand why clients chose your firm, send out the survey after they have signed up for your services.
On the other hand, if you want to understand the details of your client's experience during a specific engagement, sending out the survey after the engagement is complete will give them time to reflect on their experience and provide more in-depth feedback.
Take action after you receive a response
It's essential to take action on client feedback as soon as possible to show you value their input. Ignoring feedback can make your clients feel like their opinions don't matter.
If you receive negative feedback, reach out to the client and address the issue. Apologize for any inconvenience and provide a clear plan to prevent similar problems in the future.
It shows your dedication to improving your service and ensuring client satisfaction.
Watch for trends
When analyzing client feedback, keeping an eye out for trends is essential. While you can expect occasional complaints or negative feedback, it's important to pay attention to patterns that emerge across multiple surveys.
If you consistently receive feedback that clients have a poor experience working with a specific team member, it's crucial to take action and address the issue. It could involve meeting with the team member to discuss the feedback and work on improving their performance.
On the other hand, if you see a trend of positive feedback about a particular aspect of your law firm, it's worth investing additional resources to capitalize on that success.
For example, if many of your clients discover your firm through LinkedIn, it's worth investing more time and effort into building your presence on the platform.
Keeping an eye out for trends in client feedback helps you identify areas where you need to take action and where you're doing well and should continue focusing on.
Share the results with the rest of your firm as appropriate
When it comes to client feedback, it's not enough to gather and keep it to yourself. Sharing the results of your surveys with the appropriate members of your law firm can lead to a more productive and effective team.
When you identify trends and patterns in the feedback you receive, it's important to communicate this information to the rest of your organization. It allows your team members to connect the dots between their own experiences and the insights provided by your clients.
With this information, you can make more informed decisions and take steps to improve your processes. It leads to better service for your clients and a more positive reputation for your law firm.
Leverage a survey platform
Creating and delivering client surveys without survey software can be challenging.
Luckily, you can start using Checkbox as a white-label survey platform to ensure the right clients receive the proper survey at the right time. You can use it as SaaS or on-prem survey tool.
Our no-code survey editor lets you set up your client surveys in minutes. You can align each survey with your branding, create dynamic client profiles, design your campaigns quickly, and efficiently collect and analyze client feedback.
Now is the perfect moment to start your free trial and evaluate all features.
Since we covered the best practices, let's discuss common mistakes while running your customer satisfaction surveys.
Mistakes to Avoid When Conducting Client Surveys
You need to be aware of common pitfalls when conducting client satisfaction surveys to ensure they are effective. Let's share some tips to avoid these challenges and improve the accuracy and usefulness of your survey results.
Don’t use too long surveys
To make the survey experience efficient for your clients, keep the survey short and focused. Limit survey questions and adjust them to your goal so the clients can complete them within 10 minutes. It will prevent overwhelming or discouraging your clients from participating.
Don’t ask about multiple concepts in one question
Keep your questions straightforward. Asking about too many things in one survey might confuse your respondents and make them reply inaccurately, lowering the feedback quality.
Don’t include too many open-ended questions
Focus on multiple-choice questions instead of open-ended ones. It will allow your respondents to complete the survey quickly and easily. Remember that most clients don't have time or inclination to provide lengthy responses, so it's best to limit the number of short response questions to two or three.
Don’t over-survey your clients
It can be tempting to survey your law firm’s clients at multiple stages in the customer journey, but try to resist that temptation because survey fatigue is real. Keep your client experience in mind, don’t send them surveys too often, and pick the right time when you do.
Sample Questions to Ask
When creating your legal department client satisfaction survey, it's important to include questions that serve a specific purpose and align with the overall goal of the survey. However, specific questions may bring value despite not directly contributing to the particular goal.
Here are some examples:
- How did you find our law firm?
- Why did you decide to employ our law firm?
- How would you rate your experience with our law firm?
- Did we respond to your phone calls promptly?
- Where do you feel like we could have provided you with additional support?
- Would you recommend our law firm to friends or colleagues?
Run Effective Client Surveys as a Law Firm
Law firms must conduct client surveys to gather valuable feedback on their services and customer experience. This information can help identify areas for improvement, track progress over time, and make informed decisions about the firm's direction.
Additionally, client surveys can help build trust and strengthen relationships with clients by demonstrating a commitment to their satisfaction and addressing any concerns they may have.
Overall, customer satisfaction survey helps law firms to continuously improve and ensure they are meeting the needs of their clients.
To further optimize your law firm surveys, you can implement Checkbox into your workflow and get the best insights into your clients' sentiments.
Interested? Request a demo to see Checkbox in action!
