A new book by Graham Archbold, founder of Chorus Insight, offers marketers and business development professionals a practical guide to designing and running effective client feedback programmes.
The book addresses the common objections, internal politics, and operational blind spots that often derail client listening efforts. It reframes feedback not as a reporting exercise, but as a strategic tool for deepening relationships, improving value propositions, and driving growth.
From securing buy-in from leadership to designing effective surveys and conducting in-depth interviews, every chapter provides expert guidance on gathering, analysing, and leveraging client insight to shape operations, service delivery, and firm-wide strategy.
The book sets out how to:
– Choose the right research methods to maximize engagement and insight
– Establish a feedback culture that supports continuous improvement
– Analyse and report findings in a way that informs strategic decision-making
– Close the loop to solve relationship problems and identify new opportunities
– Navigate ethical and data protection challenges in client research
“Too many professional services firms collect client feedback in an ad hoc manner and fail to do anything meaningful with it,” Graham told The Professionals. “This book is for leaders who want a continuous source of client feedback to make their firm more distinctive, responsive, and commercially successful.”
While over 72 per cent of large professional services firms have some form of feedback mechanism in place – usually an online post matter feedback form or a key client interview programme – only one in 10 firms reach out to their full client base in a given a year. Furthermore, the majority of feedback programmes fizzle out within three years, meaning that claims to be client-focused are mostly unsubstantiated.
In response, the book sets out ways to link feedback with business strategy and to engage with senior stakeholders so that client insight is core to the firm’s success, not a nice-to-have peripheral exercise. Examples from leading firms highlight the many benefits of using feedback to improve services, identify opportunities and to shape new products and services in response to client needs.
At a more operational level there are introductions to key performance metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction (C-SAT), along with explanations of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies in jargon-free language.
Graham Archbold is the founder of Chorus Insight, a UK-based research consultancy that helps professional services firms understand and respond to their clients’ needs. Conducting over a thousand 1-2-1 client interviews with c-suite leaders and administering countless online surveys, Graham has advised dozens of the UK’s top professional services firms on how to improve their client experience.
The Client Feedback Playbook is available now via Amazon.