Julie Littlechild & Steve Wershing on a Voice of the Client Strategy

Show Timeline:

2:25 Julie explains the concept of voice of the client research
4:10 The different ways you can gather feedback and understand client behavior
8:55 The shift in how we deliver value and the concept of co-creation of value
12:26 Examples of a co-created client experience
18:05 Using client feedback to support your strategic objectives
25:45 The need to go deeper on client data and to take action on the results
31:58 Understanding the differences between what clients ‘say’ and what they actually ‘mean’
36:38 Strategies to drive referrals

Links:

Client Insights Program Overview
New Client Advisory board kit information: get.advisoryboard.solutions
Client survey information:  https://www.absoluteengagement.com/client-insights

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

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.

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