When you receive feedback from your clients – be honest – what do you do with it? Even firms with the best intentions struggle to turn insights into action. Many make grand plans for change, struggle to gain traction, file those plans away and eventually move on.
However, the most successful companies do something different: they integrate feedback into every corner of their strategy, from marketing to service development, pricing to performance management.
A well-structured feedback strategy doesn’t just collect opinions – it fuels smarter decision-making and directly influences the business action plan. Feedback is a clear guide to improving client experience (CX) and making your business more efficient and productive; while ensuring you are capitalising on the investment that collecting feedback requires. Your firm will be set up for long-term success when you genuinely understand and prioritise what clients value most.
In this article, we’ll explore how to put feedback integration at the heart of your business. Understand how to put effective feedback strategies into action and discover practical ways to use feedback to grow your business, improve performance, and keep clients coming back.
Client feedback enhances our decision making, shapes our culture, and drives client satisfaction and success.”
Why feedback matters for your business strategy
Gathering client feedback tends to be one of the first things that falls below other priorities when professional services firms get busy. But a solid feedback strategy should be fundamental to how your business operates. Think of feedback like a GPS for your decisions: without it, you’re guessing. With it, you know exactly where to go and how to get there.
We’ve discussed previously how client feedback benchmarking can help guide business growth. In short, feedback fuels growth by helping you define and build a competitive advantage that sets your firm apart from others. In the contemporary, highly crowded, market of professional services it is useful – if not, imperative – to establish a point of difference from the rest.
Why gathering strategic and targeted feedback matters
Gathering strategic and targeted feedback:
- Informs business decisions with real-world insights.
- Highlights gaps in your services or practices before they impact your bottom line.
- Improves performance through corrective feedback strategies and targeted performance improvement plans.
- Strengthens client relationships because people notice when their feedback actually makes a difference.
As Luke Cudmore, Legal Practice Direct at Cudmore Legal explains:
“Responding to client feedback impacts decision‑making by informing strategic choices and operational improvements. It fosters a client‑centric culture that values continuous learning, adaptation, and the pursuit of excellence in client service.”
Luke Cudmore of Cudmore Legal, winner of Best Family & Relationships Firm(<$30m revenue) in the 2023 Client Choice Awards.
Integrating feedback into your overall business strategy
Putting feedback at the core of your business strategy requires intentionality. Many businesses already collect feedback – but to truly leverage that feedback requires going beyond reading the feedback and turning those client insights into action. Here are the key steps you need to take for effective integration.
1. Build a feedback framework that aligns with your goals
Start by connecting your feedback strategy to your broader business objectives. Ask: what decisions will this feedback inform? Perhaps you will use the feedback to refine service delivery, shape your marketing plans, or improve client relationships. Whatever your goals, a clearly defined strategic outcome will inform the very basics of your feedback collection. That includes the type of questions you need to ask of clients, and the type of feedback that will be most useful for your goals.
Determine how you will benefit from quantitative and/or qualitative data. It can be valuable to utilise both to answer different types of questions.
- Quantitative feedback: number-based metrics from satisfaction scores, NPS, or online customer reviews.
- Qualitative feedback: open-ended or verbatim client comments, interviews, or focus groups that reveal why people feel a certain way, and why you may receive the scores you did in quantitative feedback.
You should consider whether you’d like to gather relationship or transactional data (or both). The differences and benefits are explained in this article. Combining a mix of data types can provide richer insights that can drive confident decision-making.
Before setting up your own feedback surveys, we encourage you to read Beaton’s best-practice tips for conducting client feedback surveys in this free downloadable guide.
1. Build a feedback framework that aligns with your goals
Start by connecting your feedback strategy to your broader business objectives. Ask: what decisions will this feedback inform? Perhaps you will use the feedback to refine service delivery, shape your marketing plans, or improve client relationships. Whatever your goals, a clearly defined strategic outcome will inform the very basics of your feedback collection. That includes the type of questions you need to ask of clients, and the type of feedback that will be most useful for your goals.
Determine how you will benefit from quantitative and/or qualitative data. It can be valuable to utilise both to answer different types of questions.
- Quantitative feedback: number-based metrics from satisfaction scores, NPS, or online customer reviews.
- Qualitative feedback: open-ended or verbatim client comments, interviews, or focus groups that reveal why people feel a certain way, and why you may receive the scores you did in quantitative feedback.
You should consider whether you’d like to gather relationship or transactional data (or both). The differences and benefits are explained in this article. Combining a mix of data types can provide richer insights that can drive confident decision-making.
Before setting up your own feedback surveys, we encourage you to read Beaton’s best-practice tips for conducting client feedback surveys in this free downloadable guide.
2. Involve leadership from the start
Every change initiative needs leadership support – and becoming more intentional with how you integrate feedback into business strategy often requires change. Without visible leadership support, even the best feedback strategies can lose momentum. Leadership sets the tone for how seriously feedback is taken across the business and how well the insights will be integrated into concrete change.
To get leaders on board:
- Engage early. Involve senior leaders when designing the feedback strategy so they can shape priorities and champion its purpose.
- Link feedback to KPIs. Tie performance review KPIs and leadership objectives to feedback outcomes – for example, client satisfaction or responsiveness scores.
- Lead by example. Encourage leaders to share how they’ve acted on feedback from clients or teams. When leaders model this behaviour, others follow.
Strong leadership commitment signals that feedback isn’t just a side project – it’s part of the organisation’s DNA.
Without leadership support, it is hard for any feedback program to take off.
3. Integrate feedback into regular planning cycles
Once your leadership team is on board, integrating feedback into regular planning should be easier.
Regular is the operative word here. Don’t let feedback live in a spreadsheet that’s only opened once a year. The best-performing firms integrate feedback into their quarterly or annual business planning cycles.
- Have regular meetings to review trends in client satisfaction and feedback data alongside financial results and growth goals.
- Use these insights to inform priorities, budgets, and action plans with your leadership team, involving all areas of the business.
- Identify which parts of your strategy should change based on what your clients or teams are telling you.
This creates a live feedback integration loop and builds learning and improvement into your regular rhythm of decision-making.
4. Prioritise themes, not one-off comments
It’s tempting to react to every individual piece of feedback, but strategy requires pattern recognition. Group similar insights together to identify recurring themes. Are clients asking for faster communication? More transparency on pricing? Simpler reporting? This is where methods involving quantitative feedback, such as NPS tracking tools, can be valuable. They will deliver a broader picture of client sentiment and how this may have changed over time.
Translate these themes into strategic priorities with measurable outcomes – such as updating service delivery models, improving onboarding processes, or enhancing communication protocols.
5. Turn insights into a clear action plan
Once you’ve identified the key themes, the real work begins: converting those insights into meaningful action. This is where many organisations stall – not because they don’t care, but because they don’t translate feedback into a structured improvement plan.
A business action plan or SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) action plan gives feedback integration a repeatable, accountable framework. Each action should have:
- A specific objective – what exactly will be improved, fixed, or enhanced.
- An owner – who is responsible for delivering the improvement.
- A timeframe – when this action will be completed.
- A success measure – how you’ll know the change worked.
For firms with major or strategic clients, these plans should be part of your key account management strategy. Clear action plans turn feedback from “good to know” into “here’s what we’re doing next.” The goal is to remove ambiguity, create urgency, and ensure no insight is wasted.
6. Close the loop and communicate back
Clients want to know their feedback matters. Always close the loop by communicating what you’ve changed or plan to change. Not only does this build trust, but it also encourages more honest feedback in the future – a hallmark of effective feedback strategies.
By integrating these steps into your business rhythm, feedback becomes more than a report. It becomes the engine behind every smart decision you make.
Turning feedback into action – examples by department
Actioning feedback in marketing and BD
As this Chief Client Officer told us recently, marketing in professional services firms can sometimes feel like a “dark art”. Teams often struggle with making evidence-based decisions and proving the return on the investment of those decisions. It’s why feedback is so valuable for marketing teams – it provides guidance from your clients to make better decisions and, later on, proof that those decisions are having a positive impact.
You might choose to start by informing yourself with client feedback research that already exists. Our Marketing, BD and CRM Effectiveness report offers insights from 2025 research into what works best (and what doesn’t) in marketing to professional services firms, capturing first-hand feedback from clients of firms across Australia and New Zealand.
One straightforward example of actioning feedback in marketing would be rewriting your website copy using the exact terms clients use to describe their challenges in feedback. Use the same language clients use, highlight the pain points they mention that using your firm has resolved, and carry those themes through your content for improved search performance.
Don’t overlook the value of public feedback through customer reviews. They help your search engine optimisation (SEO), build trust, and reinforce your credibility. Even negative reviews are a chance to demonstrate corrective feedback strategies by responding constructively and making visible improvements. It’s important to respond quickly and publicly. This article offers good guidance and examples of responses to Google reviews.
Look for opportunities to use great open-ended verbatims in your materials. Consider using them as testimonials on your website, tenders or proposals. Make sure you always seek permission from the respondent before you use them!
Using feedback in service line development
Using feedback to inform your service line development can be one of the most effective ways to evolve your firm’s offering in line with real client needs. Start by analysing the feedback to identify gaps in the market or gaps within your current service lines. Use the data to spot opportunities instead of relying on internal assumptions.
Identify comments that talk about how their expectations were not met, not necessarily from a quality perspective, but from elements of work that were missing from what they expected. For instance, a client may have asked for a compliance review, but were surprised you didn’t proactively raise emerging market and or legislative risks that may need future-proofing against.
Once you make changes, communicate them. Clients want to know you listened. Sharing improvements or additional services – whether through newsletters, client briefings, or marketing – helps clients feel heard and valued. It also reinforces your commitment to using assessment and feedback strategies to guide service evolution.
As Matthew Garling, Founder and CEO of Garling and Co Lawyers explains:
“Where feedback provides opportunities for improvement, we will address them and implement any additional services required to ensure our clients are always fully supported.”
The final step is monitoring whether the changes work. Use follow-up surveys or customer reviews to measure satisfaction over time. This closes the loop and helps you refine your approach further.
Where feedback provides opportunities for improvement, we will address them and implement any additional services required to ensure our clients are always fully supported.
Using feedback to inform your pricing strategy
Pricing is an area where clients are often vocal – making it the perfect place to integrate feedback. Client feedback benchmarking can help you identify where clients feel pricing is too high or too low when compared to similar firms in the market.
At Beaton we conduct a client feedback benchmarking study every year, known as Beaton Benchmarks, which asks thousands of clients to give views on the pricing value of hundreds of professional services firms. The results are available to firms who participate – and they may surprise you.
Feedback can also reveal how clients perceive the complexity or value of your services. If clients consistently say a particular service feels “simple,” they may be unwilling to pay much for it. This is a signal that your firm needs to better communicate cost consciousness, as well as the complexity of your work. We often find lawyers, accountants, engineers and other professional services people are too humble, to their own detriment – and thus poor at communicating the full extent of work they are doing for clients.
Most of the time, negative feedback about price can be corrected through better communication and by improving the perceived value clients receive – as discussed in this article. We strongly advise this approach over and ahead of lowering prices.
Using feedback in key account management planning
Key account management (KAM) is the structured process of nurturing and growing your most valuable client relationships through strategic planning, insight, and tailored service. Feedback is the lifeblood of effective KAM, because it tells you – directly from clients – what’s working, what needs improvement, and where you can strengthen the relationship.
Use feedback to help your client-facing teams set clear objectives for improving account relationships. These objectives can be built into a business action plan or employee action plan that outlines the steps needed to deliver a better experience. You can also tie account team KPIs to feedback metrics. For example, “improve responsiveness ratings from company ABC” could be a KPI.
Leverage feedback to personalise your business development conversations and any insights you send to key clients. Ask what topics they find most valuable, then personalise tailored recommendations to them, to illustrate you’re listening and providing meaningful value.
Finally, share “you said, we did” updates after you have actioned feedback. This reinforces the feedback loop and demonstrates your responsiveness.
We conduct quarterly catch ups with key accounts where processes and legal issues can be identified and strategically addressed.”
Firms turning feedback into action – example case studies
Harrison Grierson – feedback loop technology
Harrison Grierson is a New Zealand-based engineering and consulting firm providing civil, structural, and infrastructure services. In 2019, the firm adopted Beaton Debrief as the core of its client feedback programme – moving from a manual, inconsistent feedback system to a standardised, firm-wide process.
This firm actioned feedback collected through Debrief’s online dashboard, segmenting by service line and location. This helped to isolate pain points specific to certain service lines rather than treating feedback as generic. Once those pain points were identified, project teams became accountable for addressing them.
Responsiveness scores improved by 24 per cent, and as pain points were addressed, client satisfaction increased.
The firm’s reported positive results show the feedback-driven changes were effective. The overall culture shifted: consultants and project managers became more aware and proactive about client experience, reframing feedback as a driver of ongoing improvement rather than occasional check-ins.
McCullough Robertson – using feedback to drive business development
McCullough Robertson is a commercial law firm based in Australia, serving businesses, government, and not-for-profit clients. Using Beaton Debrief, the firm established a regular feedback cadence to touch base with clients. In essence, it transformed feedback from a sporadic admin burden into a core driver of innovation and business development.
The firm now actions feedback data proactively – not just using it to fix problems, but also to drive service innovation and inform future client pitches. Feedback has become a source of client intelligence that shapes the firm’s business development.
Results have been tangible: McCullough Robertson’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) improved by 14 points, “excellent client care” scores rose by about 30 per cent, and client ratings for perceived value increased by about 25 per cent.
Conclusion: Putting feedback at the centre of a smarter, stronger business
Ultimately, client feedback only becomes valuable when you turn it into action – otherwise it’s just time-consuming noise. When firms use feedback to prioritise work, evolve their services, and deliver more value, they become more efficient and more profitable.
Commit to embedding feedback into the way your firm operates and you can build a culture where improvement is inevitable. It should be the compass for every business action plan and SMART goal you set, and the momentum behind every improvement your teams make. That’s how top professional services firms thrive – not by assuming what clients want, but by listening, acting, and continually adapting.
Our biggest observation from more than 30 years studying top professional services is this: the firms that grow year after year aren’t the ones collecting the most data. They’re the ones using it best.
Download our free guide to client feedback surveys
Learn how leading firms turn client feedback into measurable growth. Download our guide to client feedback surveys with 12 best-practice recommendations for professional services firms.
