Benchmarking - what’s the best way to compare client experiences?

How do we compare? It’s a natural question. Since we were little kids, we’ve been comparing ourselves to others. 

We want to know where we stand - sometimes so that we can blend in, sometimes so we can stand out. These comparisons are not always healthy, especially when they become more about judging others than learning about ourselves. 

That said, clients are judging your firm all the time. Their needs, expectations and comparison set varies, which means they are using different scorecards. Different from other clients, and different from the ones your lawyers would use.

This drives firms to seek out client experience (CX) benchmarks. External confirmation that they are heading in the right direction.

Benchmarking means NPS, right?

When people hear CX benchmarking they usually think of NPS. The Net Promoter System, developed by Fred Reichheld and colleagues at Bain & Co in their search for the ultimate question.

Firms wear their Net Promoter Score as a badge of honour, quoting it as proof that client experience is good, and better than a sector average. Sometimes it’s even “better than apple”. 

But most of the NPS conversations stop there. The primary driver was confirmation rather than insight. Few are the firms that can tell you why their NPS is going up and down, and what impact their subsequent actions are having. 

Tracking your drivers of value

While I believe NPS can add a lot of value, when measured correctly, it only provides one lens on your client experience. It’s also a selfish question - it asks about whether the client would provide value to the firm (recommend you), rather than looking at how the firm is providing value to the client.

This led MyCustomerLens to develop the Value Drivers framework as a way to consistently measure and compare the range of experiences that clients value. Value Drivers provide a common language that bridges the gap between how clients and firms speak about value. 

Bridging the gap between promises and reality

Firms have a value proposition and brand values that make promises to the market. These promises are often made with words chosen to stand out from competitors, rather than to reflect how clients talk about their experiences.

Meanwhile clients describe the same experiences in different ways. It depends on their expectations and the bundle of brands and services they are personally comparing you against.

This inconsistency has made it hard for firms to compare their brand promises to their clients’ reality. It has also made NPS look like a simple one-size-fits-all solution.

A better solution is to combine NPS with other measures that look at what makes your firm different. Not every firm promises to be more responsive, innovative or impactful than the competition. Some prefer to focus on their communication, expertise, value for money etc.

Defining and then consistently measuring your value drivers shows you’re genuinely client-centric. It shows clients you care about whether you are continuing to deliver on the promises you made in your pitch deck or bid response. It demonstrates you’re looking to learn not confirm, grow not stagnate. 

The other advantage of having a robust and consistent value drivers framework, is that it can be used to analyse the text comments that follow your ratings questions. You get to see which aspects of your client experience get highlighted most often.

You also start discovering what clients are not saying or experiencing. Being able to see the sound of silence, gives you a much richer picture of client experience than NPS alone.

External benchmarking - is it worth it?

So should you bother with benchmarking, and if so, how? Benchmarking doesn’t have to be done externally, though that’s the default route most firms take.

Here’s the thing about external benchmarking that researchers won’t tell you.

Firstly it requires you to ask the same question of a large proportion of your client base. I'm not just talking about demographic diversity. It needs to include high and low revenue clients, growing and shrinking clients, happy and not so happy clients, new and established clients.

If you have an ‘opt-in’ approach to client listening, then your data is neither random nor representative. Regardless of how you try to avoid demographic biases, the data is still biased towards happier clients. Comparing it externally becomes meaningless.

Are you doing NPS right?

According to Fred Reichheld, the creator of the NPS System, most companies don’t have a meaningful NPS. He believes that you should be asking up to 90% of your clients to ensure that you are picking up all the relevant signals. This is a very high bar that most firms doing an NPS benchmarking exercise don’t even attempt.

Secondly, you need to be sure that the firms in the comparison data set have also been through the same rigorous approach to client listening. If they have cherry-picked the clients to include, or they did the exercise several years ago, then the comparison is meaningless.

Finally, an NPS benchmarking dataset is often made up of other firms who think their client experience is good and want to validate that assumption with market data. Therefore the comparison data is skewed - unless it comes from a reputable research study that looked at a large cross-section of the market at a given point in time.

The alternative - internal benchmarking

The less exciting, but far more insightful approach is to run internal benchmarking. For starters, you control the process and dataset. This should make it easier to ensure that a wide variety of clients are included from across the firm.

But more importantly, internal benchmarking gives you a great opportunity to learn. You choose the questions to ask. You see all the responses to the open questions that follow the ratings questions. 

The benefits of internal benchmaring

The benefits of internal benchmarking include:

• Measuring and comparing your firm’s value drivers, not just NPS or CSAT.

• Real-time analysis to reveal why clients are giving high and low scores. 

• Comparing client experiences across revenue bands, practice areas, locations and industry sectors. 

• Gathering year-round insights, and involving clients when they’re most likely to respond, because you can run the process in-house.

• Repeating the exercise regularly to see trends over time.

• Owning all the data, so you can go back over previous years and look for the root causes of emerging themes.

Consistency is the secret to great client experiences

The reality is that most client experiences are driven by levels of consistency. Rarely is a firm bad at responding, communicating or delivering impactful results for their clients. The brand promises that most firms make are usually sound.

Variations in client experience come from inconsistent delivery. From certain teams deciding that they will do things differently, or certain partners believing their clients only buy them and not the firm. 

Brand promises and client expectations then become disconnected from the reality of client experience. Usually it’s when things are busy, or people are human. But sometimes it reflects a process, system, behaviour or mindset that is no longer fit for purpose.

You don’t need external benchmarking to see any of these inconsistencies. You just need a commitment to keep learning about and improving the experiences that create value for your clients.

#NPS #ListenDifferently #ClientExperience #BusinessIntelligence

Paul Roberts is co-founder of MyCustomerLens | always-on listening, the innovative always-on client listening platform designed to give law firms a competitive edge.

Designed from the beginning to harness the power of advanced AI, MyCustomerLens transforms formal and informal feedback signals into real-time, actionable insights.

This pioneering approach helps firms drive organic growth by unlocking deeper client relationships.