Participants:

Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild

Steve Wershing: 
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we talk about adopting a voice of the client strategy in your business. Now we tend to design our businesses based on what we believe our clients want and need, and most advisors understand that getting feedback from clients can be integral to understanding what they value most and how to customize your practice to better conform to what those clients want to make you better differentiated and more desirable by your target clients.

But we tend to think about tactics. We tend to think about taking a survey, putting together an advisory board, doing that kind of research as opposed to thinking about it strategically. Voice of the client is a strategic approach to incorporating the desires and preferences of the clients into the design of your business. So in this episode, we talk about what is a voice of the client strategy. We talk about some of the different methods that can be utilized when putting together and implementing the voice of the client strategy.

We talk about things like how to understand the difference between what clients say during these feedback exercises and what they actually do, which is actually a better way of understanding what their preferences are. And listen through to the end where you’ll hear about some new offers to give you tools to incorporate a voice of the client strategy in your own business.

I thought it was a nice conversation backing away from some of the tactics that Julia and I often talk about in regard to client feedback and to talk about it in a more strategic way that I think will be valuable to you and that I think you’ll enjoy. So, without any further delay, let’s get to my conversation with Julie about voice of the client. Well, Julie, it’s just us today and I always love just having conversations with just the two of us so we get to explore some of the stuff that we’re each working on.

Julie Littlechild: 
I know, I look forward to these conversations actually so this is great.

Steve Wershing: 
Now one of the things that … You’re working on a paper and it’s about a topic that I thought it would be really interesting to sort of dig into. You’re doing some research about voice of the client. So you know, we each do some structured client feedback types of activities, but tell me a little bit about what you mean by doing voice of the client research.

Julie Littlechild:   
Yeah, and I think, you know, because we do often talk about the tactics of gathering feedback, but there is a much bigger strategy, which is broadly referred to as voice of the client research. It really is a, it’s a formalized process to gather input from clients so that you can design the client experience around their needs and their wants and their challenges. But our minds often go to the methods that we know best.

But if we use like the broadest possible definition, the process of voice of the client really captures everything that customers or clients, in our case, are saying about a business or a service. It packages all of that feedback. However, it comes in into a perspective on the brand. So the voice of the client is really a single strategy that a business can have, but the methods that we use to execute on that strategy would change from one firm to the next, the way we get that input.

Steve Wershing: 
Okay. Can we explore that a little bit? So tell me a little bit more about what you mean by what different kinds of methods and how we would go about gathering that. So I’m fascinated by that idea.

Julie Littlechild:  
Yeah. Because I think that, you know, again, normally what we do is we go to the tactics that seem most obvious to us. Like we do surveys so people think about surveys, but if we truly look at voice of the client as a strategy, the most common methods of gathering feedback would certainly be things like qualitative interviews, focus groups, advisory boards, quantitative surveys. The things that you and I are both very familiar with. Having said that, with larger firms, with some of the most progressive client experience firms that are out there, voice of the client also includes things like website usage patterns, comments that are made on social media, recorded call data, online reviews. So it’s gathering all of those sources of input, marrying it ideally with operational data to understand what clients truly think.

Steve Wershing:   
Interesting. So in some ways we’re trying to dig up things that people are expressing that we may not even know to ask about.

Julie Littlechild:
Well, that’s it because you know, one of the limitations of traditional feedback methods, and they’re good methods, is that it doesn’t necessarily give us input on behavior, right. And we can learn as much about how people are thinking by watching their behaviors. Now, look, in our industry we’re small to midsize businesses, we’re not Apple. So the chances are we’re not using it in perhaps as sophisticated a way, but I’m really interested in this concept of voice of the client because it forces us to think about getting input from our clients, not just measuring how we’re doing, but actually using their input to inform the overall experience. And that’s where I think the magic really happens.

Steve Wershing:  
Well, and I totally agree and I know that we’re on the same page about this because your firm is absolute engagement, which is not just absolute feedback. It’s deeper than that. Then mine is the client driven practice, which is let’s take this and let the client, give the client the keys and let them drive for a while. I think that’s a message that we could do better at, at getting out there because it’s on one level you can say, “How are we doing?” And you can look at statistics to try to figure out do they like me better today than they did last week? But I think customizing what you do to cater more directly to the preferences of your clients will have a transformative effect on the business. It sounds like that’s kind of what you’re getting at, is that right?

Julie Littlechild:  
That’s it. And that’s, that’s what I think this, this whole strategy assume. So you think about it as a title voice of the client. What it’s saying is you’re inviting your clients into the business, not only to tell you how you’re doing, but to inform where you’re going. That latter piece does get lost. I talked to a lot of advisors, I know you do, too, where we will talk about client input and the immediate response is, “Yeah. You know, maybe I gather feedback or I don’t really need to gather feedback because I know my clients are satisfied.” But Steve jobs had a great quote and he said, “You’ve got to get closer than ever to your customers. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” You know, I think that is what effective input does. You don’t go to clients and say, “What else do you want me to do for you?” Because you won’t get a good answer.

Steve Wershing: 
You’re right, and I can tell you that from firsthand experience. You don’t get good answers to that.

Julie Littlechild:  
You don’t get good … And so this is about truly understanding what their needs are, what their challenges are, what they’re thinking, feeling, doing, and then really having a process in place to bring all of that together and say, okay, what do we need to deliver?

Steve Wershing:   
I think this is worth drilling down into because I think there’s a line that advisors have to walk. When Steve jobs said that quote that you just gave where it’s really up to us to get to know them so well that we know what they want before they want it. I’m not saying it as eloquently as Jobs did but one of the challenges that you and I face is that there’s a difference between just deciding that this is where you want to go and deciding it’s what’s best for the client and then trying to go out there and market it, which is, you know, I don’t know about you, that’s what I more commonly see is that an advisor gets really invested in the experience that they’ve created and they really …

When we talk about modifying it based on client feedback, they actually get really resistant to it because they really believe that this is what’s best for the client as opposed to developing that idea and bringing it to them because you know the client so well and because, in some ways, watched that behavior and come to understand that better than the client realizes what they’re doing. Can you talk a little bit about sort of that aspect of it?

Julie Littlechild:
Well, yeah, and I think I would even push it a little further and say that the fundamental way in which value is delivered has changed. So what you’ve referred to at the beginning there, I think of that as sort of firm-centric value, right? We decide what’s good and best and we make it available. Then we moved a little more toward kind of a client centric, which in our industry, in fairness, look, everything’s about the client at some level. I think we do a lot of that very well, but we’re really trying to understand the client. But going forward and I know you and I have talked a little bit about this, but I’m a massive believer that co-creation of value is where it’s at in the future, which is, is not a not so subtle difference.

What it’s telling us is that, and we see examples of this one outside the four walls of our industry, which is where I think we should probably be looking, and really what this concept, which is there’s a lot of academic research on it says the future is that we are actually creating the value with the clients. You almost can’t separate those two things. All of a sudden, that’s a very different sometimes provocative for a lot of people way to think about it. And yet that’s what we see happening. So we cannot be immune to this trend.

Steve Wershing:     
Right, right. I totally agree. You know, even if it were not necessary, and you could make a pretty good argument that it’s not necessary, because you and I have both seen firms that not only do they not get client input, but they don’t really even do marketing. Then they’ve built it entirely on selling and they’ve done very well because they’re really good at it. But the idea of bringing the client into the process, and I love how you put it as co-create the experience, that can be so profound and it can have such huge effects on the trajectory of the business and where you can go with it. Can you think of a few examples or an example or two of a co-created experience and what that’s done with a business?

Julie Littlechild: 
Yeah. I mean, there’s certainly ample examples outside the industry. I mean, the one I remember writing about this awhile ago, it’s a bit of a silly example, but it’s real. Its importance so that’s like an institution for us. But you know, there was a sign as I was driving through the drive-through one day that said, it invited customers to help vote on what the next donut was going to be. I thought, well, you know, first of all, really? Like, does anyone, does anybody care this much? I’d like my coffee, please. But what they were doing is pretty clear. They were telling their customers, “You’re on the product development team,” and people could submit different ideas and then there was the winner and all of that. So in effect, that’s a version of co-creation of value, right? You’re inviting clients into that discussion.

We see examples, you know, Starbucks is another good example of a firm outside that does this very well and they invite a lot of client input. You can go to mystarbucksidea.com and you can share all of the thoughts that you have about espresso, if you have any. But the thing that I think is really interesting is they invite input on how they show up in the world and social responsibility and what organizations they should support right down to the local level, which is why a Starbucks in one city or even one neighborhood might support a different charity than somewhere else.

So what they’ve said is that as a firm, we need to be a reflection in all parts of our business, not just the coffee that we serve, but how we show up in the world has to be a reflection of what our clients want to see. The other example, and I want to bring it back to the industry because I think, and this is going to be a technology driven point, but I do think that FinTech is going to have an extreme impact on this because part of co-creation of value is also literally putting more tools in the hands of clients in a meaningful way so that they’re part of the planning process. That’s, again, that’s another example of co-creation of value.

Steve Wershing:
You know, it’s interesting, and you took that further or in a different direction than I was anticipating because you were talking a little bit about inventing your own donut.

Julie Littlechild: 
And you thought, “Well, this is very high brow.”

Steve Wershing:   
Right, exactly. Exactly, what do they have for me? I’m gluten-free. I can’t co-create that experience. But I was thinking of Amazon and Google and Facebook and they’re always watching what you’re doing. They’re not even asking. They’re just watching what you’re doing and they’re not inviting people into the process, but they are incorporating the clients into the process. They’re kind of like the robo advisors of the retailing world, right? The stuff that you see, obviously, the stuff you get recommended on Amazon is based on the things that you’ve bought before, and the number of stars you’ve given other products before, and that kind of stuff. But even down to Google and Facebook and the stuff that shows up in your feed and the stuff that shows up in your search is a reflection of all the searches and things you’ve clicked on before.

Julie Littlechild:  
Well, that’s right, and so when we look at these big companies and it gets a bit scary at some point, but this is voice of the client writ large, right? This is massive technology dollars going into this. And what really interests me is about, okay, how do we then examine the ways that advisors can invite more and better input in more and better ways so that they can effectively implement a similar strategy on the understanding they don’t have Amazon’s budget. I think there are a lot of ways it can be done.

Steve Wershing:   
Yeah, and I think that there’s value in being more transparent about it, then we’re not just … And obviously, there’s no advisor that has as many clients as any of these big tech platforms does. That’s probably, we don’t have to worry about that, but I think there’s also a value of consciously bringing people into that process and being open about it so that you’re inviting them into the process and inviting them to co-create it along with you in making it more compelling.

Julie Littlechild:   
It is, and then trying to think about layering in different ways because input, if we think of it not just as feedback, which is a measurement tool, but input, which is more of a driver of the experience, there are different ways that we can integrate that into the business. It’s not all about, you know, just going out and getting a net promoter score. That’s where a lot of people are at.

Steve Wershing:   
So let’s talk a little bit about some of those methods of getting that guidance. You know, when I talk with people about advisory boards, I’m always saying feedback and guidance, feedback and guidance. Because it’s not all just about feedback. It’s about telling me where you want us to go. But so, what are some of the methods that work for the people who would listen to this podcast that they can solicit that kind of guidance and then incorporate it into their strategy?

Julie Littlechild:
So there’s a few things that come to mind, and ultimately how you use some of this would change depending … I mean, if you are an individual adviser with one assistant or two versus a large RIA and you’re on the leadership team, I mean it’s going to change a little. But there’s a few things that I think are pretty simple. One is just something like client interviews, right? So we can get great information, we’ll talk about advisory boards and whatnot, but the one-on-one interview, where I like interviews or things like just teasing out better information on the greatest client experience is that people have had, for example. So it’s really more of an interactive and the ability to probe and to peel back the onion, but do that one-on-one.

So a client interview is one way to get feedback that is much more qualitative. There’s focus groups and advisory boards. I mean, I don’t know about you, I have a clear definition in my mind about the difference between the two. I’m sure you’ll tell me if you disagree, but in my mind, I use focus groups when I have something that’s issue specific. So you know, we’re making a change to the website. It has an end. There’s a clear focus, you bring people together at disbands.

Again, it’s great when you’re making a shift in the business or there’s something visual, and something that you need some discussion on. Advisory boards where you can talk about this a lot better than I can, but again, that’s more ongoing. You’re getting that kind of guidance and support from clients on key issues. There’s surveys, of course. I mean that’s where we live and breathe every day. And surveys are good both to measure how you’re doing and to gather deeper insights on what’s important to clients, what they’re interested in learning more about, what topics are on their mind. There’s just a richness of information that you can gather from there.

The two areas, though, that I think we sometimes forget about are a little more issue specific. So for example, a lot of our clients do ongoing client feedback. So maybe every 18 months they’ll do a full survey, but many of our clients are single. Like we want to improve a certain area of our business. So it might be the quality of the review meeting, or it might be the impact of the plan presentation meeting or something. So we’ve worked with a few people to design a process where it triggers a set of questions that are specific to that activity. So, you know, they go through onboarding and it triggers a, call it a new client survey, that just asks a certain set of questions about onboarding.

Or we’ve got one client who is really focused on making the quality of their reviews better. So after a review it triggers a very brief survey that asks some quick qualitative but important questions about that review. These are more issue-specific, designed to help. You don’t get that in broad-based feedback. Then polls, I guess, I would put as maybe a final area. By polls, what I mean is maybe one or two questions that go out and gather opinion. Maybe it’s something in the news. Maybe it’s how are they feeling about something in the news or the markets or about their future. But it’s more of that quick and dirty. Let’s get our finger on the pulse of how our clients are feeling at a moment in time. So all of those things fall under the umbrella of voice of the client, but which you choose depends very much on what your objectives are.

Steve Wershing:   
Yeah, yeah. We employ a very similar system to how you’re describing it. I agree totally with your distinction between a focus group and an advisory board. When we start an advisory board, we have a standard progression of topics that we go through from the first meeting, second meeting, third meeting. It’s systematically deconstructing that client experience. So we start with what do you find most valuable? We ask questions about the overall value that they get from the relationship. Then we go on to let’s deconstruct the review meeting because that’s the most consistent thing in the relationship. Each of their services we pull it apart. After we’ve done a few of those, we can start asking questions about things that are really not going to benefit the people sitting in that room, like the onboarding process and that kind of thing.

But one of the things I’d like to dig into is getting a little deeper understanding and I wanted to ask you this because one of the things that we do in advisory boards is trying to figure out is how to implement the feedback that we get. One of the fears that a lot of advisors have, if they haven’t done an advisory board as well, what if the client, what if the whole board asks us to do something that we can’t or don’t want to or can’t afford to do? It’s related to …

There’s another related topic to that, which goes back to that Steve Jobs quote. And it’s if you just asked your client advisory board or your in-personal interviews, and I love that the whole idea of doing one-on-one interviews with clients about this stuff, you’re not going to get a really good answer to a question, what should we do next or what new services should we roll out or those kinds of things. Because, you know, people are constrained. People don’t, as Steve jobs is fond of pointing out, people don’t know the next thing they need, or they can’t come up with it.

But one of the ways that we can look behind that is in what you were suggesting, which is tell me about the best client service experiences you’ve ever had. Or you know, we ask client advisory boards things like, “What’s a technology you can’t live without, and what do you like about it? And how did you start using it?” But the idea of taking some of the feedback from those kinds of questions and then building a couple of ideas from that and then bringing it back to those people and say, “Well, when we were talking about this, this is what we heard from you. And from that we thought, ‘Well, you know, you might find something like this interesting or useful. And so tell us a little bit about, if we were to roll something like this out, what would you think of it?'” Have you had experiences like that?

Julie Littlechild:     
Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s not your client’s job to tell you what you should be doing. That’s the hard part of running a business, right? We’ve got to figure that out. So I love the process whether whatever method you’re using of using it to inform change and then validating that. So part of validation might be if you have an advisory board to go back to them, part of validation might also be to then integrate it into something more quantitative because ultimately if we’re going to make a significant change in our business, we want to be very sure that it reflects, not necessarily that the needs of the majority of clients, just the needs of those clients we’re targeting with that change. So that could be a particular segment of clients. I do think we also need to be careful with some of the input and add a bit of rigor to the way that we analyze the results and think that through before we just jump off and say, “Yeah, we’ll do that,” because you know, a lot of stuff sounds good.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s it. I think it’s really important. You know, the big companies we talked about big companies and their capabilities and budgets, the big consumer products companies, they test things all along the way. So it’s not like, “Oh, we got this great idea, and people responded to the idea, so let’s spend $20,000 developing it.” You want to check in with people each step of the way because it’s really easy to come off track between what they might be interested in or had envisioned and what you end up building.

Julie Littlechild:    
Yeah. A volume of data gives you obviously a lot more opportunity to dig in. So if you’re an individual advisor and you got a hundred clients, you can get great input and guidance from an advisory board and you can get great input and guidance from a survey or both of those things. But at the end of the day, you’ve probably got 40 data points or 40 data sets from each client to work with. One of the things that we’re really encouraging for larger firms, so if it’s a large RIA for example, or a large advisory team at a broker dealer where there’s multiple advisors, now, we’re dealing in several thousand clients perhaps, is really asking smarter questions about the data because it’s not just about the averages. It’s too easy. People love a good metric.

Here’s where our net promoter score is. Actually I should tell you a story about that, but it’s easy to just do that, tick the box, and then move on. We’re really encouraging firms to do so. Okay, look, let’s dig a little deeper. You may have clients at risk and that we need to know that, but let’s understand why they’re at risk. Let’s match that back to data on tenure or the products they’re using or who they’re working with. Let’s try to tie it to some operational data. Let’s dig into differences across segments, whether that’s wealth or gender or age or what-have-you.

Let’s really get smarter about the questions that we’re asking and the way that we’re analyzing the data. But just as I was saying, it reminded me, I’ve always claimed that I’m somewhat agnostic about the metrics that we use to measure the overall quality of the relationship. I’m not sure that’s entirely true because I do kind of have a bias, but the reality is some people like satisfaction. Some people like retention, some people like net promoter score. And I never think it’s my job to argue the point. But I can tell you that people misinterpret that stuff all the time.

Steve Wershing:   
Okay. So tell us more about that.

Julie Littlechild:   
Well, this happened a couple of times recently with firms that are using net promoter score. Now, I would tell you that I think net promoter score is a better measure of the overall quality of the relationship than satisfaction, for example. So I believe that to be true based on the data that we’ve gathered. However, it is a measure that needs to be tracked and assessed over time. So the first time you ask your net promoter question, it doesn’t actually give you that much information. It’s only if it changes up or down because of the way that people answer it. So we had two clients, big clients, recently, net promoter shops, and we asked that question and both felt that they had a higher percentage of detractors, which is sort of a zero to six rating on a net promoter question, and there was some concern about it.

So we dug into the verbatims in a much deeper way than we might normally do. And what we found in both cases is that about 40% of the people who were detractors weren’t detractors because they thought the service was bad. It was either because just … I mean, if people aren’t familiar, the question is how likely are you to refer your advisor in the next 12 months or recommend your advisor in the next 12 months? The assumption is if you say you’re not, there’s a problem.

Well, about 40% of them answered that poorly because they either said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to ask me for a referral,” which is the best answer, by the way. Or, “I’m just private and I don’t talk about these things.” Or, you know, “The location just doesn’t work because I don’t live near my advisor,” but none of it had to do with the quality of the relationship. So we got to be really careful with these metrics and what we read into them.

Steve Wershing:  
Yeah. I totally agree. We see a lot of that kind of thing, too. I think there’s a really important distinction that you brought up earlier in the conversation about being about being careful about not relying on these feedback statistics too much because there is … I’ve gotten from your studies and I’ve gotten from direct experience with the advisory boards that there can be a big difference between what people say on some of these feedback instruments and what they do.

Julie Littlechild:  
Yeah. Well, and that’s right. So, you know, the basic difference between things like stated importance, right, “Here’s what I’m going to tell you on a scale of one to five is important to me,” and derived importance, which is what’s actually influencing the results can be vastly different. You ask me, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you, kind of came out at a presentation recently, but my point was if you asked me what’s important in our relationship with my husband, I would talk about caring and honesty and loyalty and all of those things, that’s stated importance. But when he loads the dishwasher the right way, I actually just love him slightly more. So that’s actually influencing me and I’m only sort of being facetious but the point is we need to understand what’s influencing, not just what people say is important.

Steve Wershing:   
Right, right. I’ve had experiences with we might bring to an advisory board a question about client events. We had a great event recently, but we would love for people like you to bring guests to introduce to us. And so what can we do that might encourage you to do that, that might stimulate some of that. They gave us a list of stuff and the advisor went off to their credit and they diligently did all that stuff and they got exactly the same results later. So afterwards, we sat down and we said, “So this is what you suggested, this is what we did, and this is what happened. Can you help us understand that outcome?”

Then, you know, they said, “Oh, yeah, well, yeah.” So what they said in the clinical situation of a board was obviously, was not actually what they did. I think another great example of that is in your studies, when you ask, “How likely are you to refer your client?” You get 90% plus that said, “I’m willing to,” and you can tell me what the actual-

Julie Littlechild:
comfortable, yeah.

Steve Wershing:   
Yeah, comfortable and how many actually do, and if you ask the advisor, they say, “Well, 4% actually did,” but if you ask the clients, they said, you know, “30% actually did.” And so you’ve got two really interesting gaps there. One is I’m comfortable doing it and I actually did it. That’s one gap. And then I did it and the advisor got it. That’s a whole big different gap. So how, if we want to … I’m sorry, go make that point …

Julie Littlechild:  
No, yeah, I wanted to pick up on that because I think what you’re highlighting is something that we miss on feedback, which is the need to dig deeper. Right? So too often it’s just we leave it at that. Well, on that question, for example, with a lot of surveys recently, we’ve not just been leaving it at did you refer, but we’re trying to drive down to if they said no, why? Not in a threatening sort of way, but just why. And now you start to get better and better. That’s the thing with feedback, whether it’s in an advisory board that is … I imagine the longer they’re together, the quality improve. Same with surveys. The more you ask, the more you dig into the right things, the better the quality.

Steve Wershing:     
Yeah. So I think you’re exactly right on, on digging deeper. One of the things that I love to do in individual … Well, one of the things that I think helps drive referrals is that when you get a referral, when you response to getting a referral, I think it’s really useful, too, if you talk to that person who made the referral and thank them for it, to follow that up with a question to say, “How did it come up in conversation?” Because getting some insights in that is stuff that you cannot get just by asking them without prompting because they won’t remember, they won’t have any idea. What other kinds of ways can you … What other kinds of things can we do in there to help drive more referrals?

Julie Littlechild:   
Yeah, I’d love to hear from you how you do this with advisory boards as well. For me, if it’s surveys where I’ll take it to where we know about this the best is just having a deeper conversation. So asking if somebody has referred, understanding why they haven’t, if they didn’t, and then being able to drive that data to the client level and an understanding then how to have a conversation about that. Not, “Hey, you said you had a referral. Can you give me their phone number?” You know, we don’t do that, but we can start to tap into what we know the motivation to be. So whether that’s, you know, “I saw you provide a referral. Thank you so much. Can you just tell me a little bit more about the circumstances and why you thought we could help?”

Now, I mean those words are very intentional because we’ve done all the research on why people refer, and so we can tap into that. But you know, here’s another really simple idea. We should and do thank people when they give referrals, right? So it seems pretty obvious. And you pointed out earlier that this gap that we see. So we have about a third of clients who feel they’ve referred. We never thank those people because we don’t know they’ve been referred. So one of the things I’ve been encouraging our clients to do is when they gather feedback, they get their list of clients who said they referred is to simply send them a thank you note.

Steve Wershing:   
Oh, that’s brilliant. That’s great.

Julie Littlechild:     
You know what I mean? It’s not going anywhere further than just this is what they would have done if they’d known, and it just reinforces the kind of behavior. What do you do you do with advisory boards to try to transition that then into referrals? Or is it something that just naturally happens?

Steve Wershing: 
Well, so it’s something that naturally happens and I think it’s because you are paying more attention to those folks and you’re engaging them more in the relationship. When you give them a little peak behind the curtain, when you give them access to stuff that you wouldn’t normally tell all clients, they feel closer to you, they feel a closer bond. So that’s, I think, one of the big contributors to the fact that the people sitting on an advisory board tend to become much more stronger refers than the average clients.

We see that as a pattern pretty consistently. One of the things that we do to sort of enhance that is that when we screen, when we develop the evaluation criteria for who you should invite to your board, which is maybe the second most important thing that you do when you put your board together behind the quality of the questions, is you want only target clients and you want … There are a couple of other criteria, but one of the big things is give preference to the people who give you referrals. Reward, spoil your … You and I found this in our research a couple years ago, spoil your referral sources.

If you say, you know, “You’ve been a tremendous supporter of our business and partly because of that we’d like to involve you in helping us do it better.” That’s a very powerful statement. But we also ask a lot of questions about referrals in those meetings, about if you’ve referred, how did it come up in conversation? What did you say to those folks? If you were to mention us to somebody that you know, what kinds of things do you think you’d be inclined to say? Those are all really … They give you some really good information about how to do it more, but also to remind them that they could do it more.

Julie Littlechild: 
Right, right. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, that’s the interesting part to me about where we started, which is voice of the client, which is, in essence, it’s a bigger strategy. It’s almost a philosophy, if you will, about the fact that we bring the client into the business. From there, it becomes, well, what are the ways that make sense based on our objectives. But what you and I have seen, and what I love about this whole process, is then it tends to drive and can drive if you do this intentionally more referrals. So it’s one of those few strategies that give in so many different ways, right? It engagement and referrals at the same time.

Steve Wershing: 
So, we’re a bit over time, why don’t we wrap this up? I know that you are back in the survey business. So how can people find out about how to access those kinds of services from you?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll put a link to the report in the show notes as well. But just, you know, visit us at absoluteengagement.com. There’s certainly information there on the client feedback work that we’re doing. Excited to be doing that work in a number of different ways, and that’s, yeah, that’s the best way. Or the blog is always good as well.

Steve Wershing:    
Cool.

Julie Littlechild:   
How about you?

Steve Wershing:  
Well, I don’t know if we’ve mentioned it on here before, but we actually … We do the advisory boards for four firms. We help them design them and then we facilitate and we give reports and we also, for those firms that just want more information about it or want to do it themselves, we actually now sell a kit that includes a 40-page manual and some of the standard forms that you can print right out and you can print the name tents, you can print the invitations. But you also get access to a website where you can download all the worksheets, templates, and forms that you need to be able to do that. You can find out more about that by … Ready? This is a great URL, by going to get.advisoryboard.solutions.

Julie Littlechild: 
I love it. I love it. So that’s perfect. So I love that idea, by the way, because there’s a lot of people who want that facilitation, but if you just want to be able to do it yourself, you need those resources. So you’re the guy to do it.

Steve Wershing:  
Right, exactly.

Julie Littlechild:   
Well, it was a good talking. It’s nice to talk