Are Your Clients Happy, Or Just Polite?
Small businesses can borrow a technique corporations and law firms use to maintain customer satisfaction.
Tipton Cole is pretty confident. His specialized knowledge makes him one of a handful of software engineers who can make a living as expert witnesses in patent litigation. What he didn’t know, however, was that he was rubbing some clients the wrong way—until he hired a customer-feedback consultant.
“As a business owner, I’ve always been the boss and run things my way,” says Cole, president of Austin-based Tipton Cole + Co. “Some of the information I’ve gotten back is that I need to be sensitive to the fact that cases are controlled and managed by the attorneys, and not by me. I can’t allow myself to be overbearing.”
Cole is one of the rare small business owners who solicit client feedback through third-party interviews, a practice that is far more common in large consumer-marketing companies and law firms. Acting on information collected by an outside consultant has helped Cole to generate repeat business, which has more than offset the cost of his client feedback program.
Keep ‘em happy
Cole relied on direct customer feedback for decades to find bugs in the custom software he produced. In his new business as an expert witness, however, he turned to Doug Hall, a longtime friend who provides third-party interviews to gauge customer satisfaction. The owner of Austin-based W.D. Hall Co., Hall is a former environmental and engineering consultant who now offers management training and business development coaching.
Hall charges $1,000 to $1,600 for each client feedback interview, including several hours of planning and follow-up with the small business owner. “This is not something you want to do with every client,” he says.
Hall calls client interviews “the most powerful marketing tool I’ve ever seen.” The feedback he collects helps small business owners retain key clients by identifying and addressing any areas of dissatisfaction. And, he says, a good interviewer can help uncover untapped business opportunities.
Those opportunities can be substantial, according to Laura Meherg, principal of Meherg Consulting LLC in Birmingham, Ala. In 1997, a law firm hired Meherg to conduct a client service review with a financial-services company. Executives at the company spoke glowingly of the legal services they had received from Meherg’s client—and contrasted that with their unhappy experience with legal counsel in an adjacent state. That gave Meherg’s client a critical insight and the firm bid for the out-of-state business. Today, the firm is the corporation’s primary regional counsel, with nearly $6 million in billings last year compared with less than $1 million in 1996, before Meherg’s client-service review.
