TEN THINGS: CREATING A CLIENT SATISFACTION SURVEY

This edition of “Ten Things” will walk you through the process of creating, distributing, and analyzing the results of a client satisfaction survey.  Though the discussion deals with in-house counsel sending a survey to their internal business clients, the “why” and “how” apply equally to the relationship between outside/in-house counsel and outside attorneys can easily use this post to create a satisfaction survey to distribute to their in-house counsel clients.  If you intend to put out a survey this calendar year, now is the time to get start creating it for distribution after the summer holidays.

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   • Weighting the responses.  Not all responses are created equal.  In my experience the opinions and thoughts of the frequent users of the department and those of the senior management tend to carry more weight.  The former because their frequent use means the feedback is generally more specific and useful.  The latter because they control the purse strings and their perceptions of the legal department as an important and valuable part of the company (vs. a black hole cost center) are critical as to whether the legal department thrives and has a seat at the table or is constantly fighting for funding and a voice.  One way to account for this is to weight the responses from those who are frequent users or who are part of senior management a bit higher than other responses.  For example, give a 1.25 weight to the former vs. a 1.00 weight to the latter.  To do this, you will need to ensure that you have the users identify themselves (generically) as “frequent” users of Legal — however you want to define that — and/or as senior management (e.g., VP and above, or SVP and above).  You will see an example of this at the first page or two of my sample survey.
   • Create a “word cloud.” You’ve probably seen a number of word clouds on a day-to-day basis.  These are charts that show different words at different sizes, shapes and colors.  Using the available data set, the words that appear most frequently are “larger” and “brighter” than the words used infrequently.  In my sample survey you will see a question that asks the user to list three words that they think best describe the legal department.  I used this same question in my actual surveys, created a data base of the words provided by the users, and then used a word cloud generator to create a word cloud.  I included the word cloud chart in the survey results I shared with my team and with my CEO.  It is a great way to visually capture a snapshot in time as to what your clients think of the department.  You can see a list of word cloud generators by clicking here.   I used Wordleto generate my word cloud.  Here is the word cloud generated by my last survey:

• Analyzing the results.  Once your survey closes, it’s time to analyze the results.  A few things to understand about surveys.  First, don’t be disappointed if you do not get a “90%” response rate.  That would be amazing.  You should more realistically expect anywhere from 5%-10% of the people to respond (more if the survey pool is small).  Second, you will tend to get more responses from people who are “unhappy” with legal.  This is just human nature.  Don’t be put off by this.  Accept the criticism as just something you and the team need to work on to fix.  The fact that you asked for feedback has probably made some positive in-roads with these unhappy clients.  There will always be some people that no matter what you do, or how unreasonable their complaints, you will never satisfy — just a cold hard fact of in-house life.  Hopefully, none of those people are part of senior management.  If they are, that is a topic for another column down the road!  Depending on the capabilities of your survey tool, you should be able to slice and dice the data in a number of different ways, e.g., by region, by line of business, by type of legal matter, etc.  This will give you a lot of insight into where things are going smoothly or where you need to put in some work.  If you included the ability for people to write open-ended comments there is a lot of great information you can extract.   Look for patterns involving certain types of matters or certain groups or members of your team (good or bad).  All of these are areas for improvement or enhancement.  Prepare yourself for the odd curve ball, e.g., someone complaining on the survey about things that are not part of Legal’s purview, such as procurement or system security.  The simple fact is not everyone has a true understanding of what fits under Legal and what falls outside of Legal.   Your word cloud will give you additional insights as well.  Here is an example from one of my actual surveys showing the results regarding overall satisfaction with Legal year-over-year.  Given (like many in-house departments) we had budget and staff cuts leading into 2014, we were very pleased that 97% of our clients had the same or higher level of satisfaction with Legal vs. prior years:

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   Sterling Miller

   July 28, 2015