Launching a feedback program sounds simple enough: ask clients what they think, learn from the results, make improvements.
However, anyone who’s struggled with implementing feedback from inside a professional services firm knows it’s rarely that straightforward. Resistance to change pops up. Silos between partners, groups and departments slow things down. And without a clear picture of what “good” looks like, it’s easy for a new program to stall before it even starts.
This article breaks down the most common barriers firms face when rolling out a feedback program – and pairs each one with a practical way to overcome it.
Problem 1: Territorial partner culture
In many firms, partners and senior practitioners still guard their client relationships closely and prefer to be the only touchpoint in a firm. They often refuse to provide the BD or marketing team access to clients for feedback purposes. Their reasoning is usually something like: “I know my clients better than anyone and I’d know if they were unhappy”.
“In some firms, partners keep their clients close to their chests,” agrees Marc Ewen, Senior Associate and Debrief product manager at Beaton.
“Those traditional partner behaviours are pretty frustrating for firms – particularly the marketing and BD team who are keen to collect client feedback and just can’t because they can’t talk to the clients.”
This protective ownership model often comes from good intentions – wanting to safeguard relationships, manage risk, or maintain service consistency. However, it creates a structural barrier to any feedback program. If access to clients depends on individual partner permission, a firm can’t build a consistent, scalable, or reliable view of client experience. It also reinforces a single-partner dependency model that leaves the firm exposed when a partner is unavailable, moves on, or misjudges a client relationship.
Solution: Reset expectations and normalise shared client ownership
To change the mindset of partners trying to “protect their patch”, you can show them research that provides hard data on the positive impact of feedback programs. Research into client feedback that Beaton conducted in 2018 found clients received, on average, one request for online feedback each year – yet they’d be happy to receive 2-4 times as many requests. Additionally, Beaton Benchmarks research across the past decade shows firms who regularly survey their clients for feedback show 14 times greater improvement in client satisfaction than those who don’t.
“If you can demonstrate to partners they may be leaving money on the table, you might have better luck convincing them of the benefits of feedback,” says Ewen.
Processes around contacting clients also need to change, requiring clear standards and visible leadership backing. To shift the culture:
- Make shared client access the default, not the exception
Introduce a firm-wide principle that clients belong to the firm, not an individual. This expectation should be stated explicitly in firm values, partner forums, governance documents, and performance frameworks. - Position feedback as risk management
Partners may be more receptive when they understand that structured feedback protects their relationships and income rather than threatens them. Emphasise that independent feedback reduces blind spots, prevents unpleasant surprises, and strengthens loyalty. - Define when and how BD/marketing can access clients
Create a simple, transparent process for inviting clients to participate in feedback. For example: quarterly pulse checks, annual relationship reviews, or post-matter surveys. - Recognise and reward partners who model the behaviour
Create KPIs linked to internal collaboration and cross-selling via different teams. Publicly highlight partners who participate fully, share client access, and act on feedback. When leaders consistently reinforce that client experience is a firm responsibility, territorial barriers start to dissolve.
If you can demonstrate to partners they may be leaving money on the table, you might have better luck convincing them of the benefits of feedback.
Problem 2: Organisational silos that block information flow
Expanding on the problem above, some firms struggle to establish effective feedback programs due to the silos creating barriers between departments. This causes teams or individuals to operate in isolation, limiting the flow of information. Silos in business limit a firm’s ability to collect feedback consistently, compare results across teams, or act on issues quickly. They also make it harder to build a unified view of the client experience.
Business silos show up in two ways:
- Horizontal silos, where departments such as BD, Marketing, and service lines don’t coordinate.
- Vertical silos, where insight gets stuck between senior leaders and delivery teams.
Organisational silos not only limit collaboration between teams. But they also have direct impact on your profitability – limiting your ability to cross-sell and improve the best client experience through collaboratively sharing and acting on feedback.
Solution: Break silos through cross-functional collaboration
Silos don’t dissolve on their own. Firms must intentionally build structures, habits, and systems that force collaboration around client insight. Here are practical ways to break down organisational silos:
- Establish shared ownership of client feedback: Provide all client-facing teams access to the same platform or reporting dashboard, include feedback results in regular cross-functional meetings. Align KPIs to the shared goal of improving the client experience.
- Use a survey platform that does everything: Choose survey software that not only sends your surveys and reminders, but also collects the data in an accessible, visual dashboard, and alerts and reminds you to action feedback with close-the-loop functionality.
“Having a survey platform that does everything is going to make that a lot easier. If you’ve just got a different technical silo for each part of the chain, then that’s when things are going to break down,” says Ewen. “Automating it means things flow to the next stage automatically and you’re more likely to follow feedback through and action it.”
- Conduct regular, centralised feedback review meetings: Run regular “client insights forums” involving BD, marketing, practice leaders and delivery teams. Review red flags and opportunities together, then agree on owners for follow-up actions.
- Educate teams on the commercial cost of silos: Use feedback data to demonstrate opportunities missed by failing to collaborate. For example: lost cross-selling opportunities because teams weren’t aligned, inconsistent client service due to fragmented communication, slower response to emerging client needs.
Cross-functional collaboration breaks down business silos and helps firms with implementing feedback.
Problem 3: Messy CRM systems and inaccurate client data
Many firms that want to run a feedback program often hit a frustrating operational barrier: their client data isn’t reliable. Contacts are duplicated, outdated, incomplete, or spread across multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. Partners may keep their own spreadsheets, BD teams maintain separate lists, and the central CRM is rarely trusted as a single source of truth.
This creates several challenges:
- You can’t send surveys confidently if you don’t know which contacts are current.
- Response rates drop when surveys go to the wrong person or to multiple people accidentally.
- Reporting becomes unreliable when clients are categorised inconsistently across teams.
- Staff lose confidence in the feedback program because the admin burden becomes too heavy.
As Ewen puts it: “Most firms want insight, but they don’t have the foundational data hygiene to deliver it.”
Solution: Clean, centralise and automate client data before launching feedback
Before launching a program, it’s essential to clean and consolidate your core client list. You’ll need to standardise names, merge duplicates, and remove outdated contacts, while also migrating all that data into a single source of truth for all contact information. Private partner lists or siloed spreadsheets create risk, not control, so establishing one authoritative database is a critical first step.
From there, firms need systems that keep data clean over time. Automated workflows should update contact details when new matters open, new stakeholders join, meetings occur, or clients change roles. Technology helps enormously: a platform like Beaton Debrief integrates structured client lists and automates survey delivery, reducing manual effort and eliminating errors. Clear ownership – typically within BD or marketing – ensures data hygiene becomes part of business-as-usual rather than an annual clean-up.
Most firms want insight, but they don’t have the foundational data hygiene to deliver it.
Problem 4: Poor survey response rates
Surveys across all industries are experiencing a downturn in response rates, for a variety of reasons. Professional services firms launching their first feedback program may discover their first response rate is lower than they would have liked.
Bear in mind the average response rate in any B2B industry can be modest, and achieving a statistically valid survey response requires thoughtful survey design and outreach. If your questions are unclear, surveys are too long, or email requests don’t get to the point and explain why the feedback matters, clients are less likely to complete them. This results in limited, inconsistent insights.
Solution: Improve survey design and communication
Good survey design and communication is critical to increasing client participation and achieving a statistically valid survey response. The Beaton guide to client feedback surveys shares expertise from Beaton’s research team and offers best-practice recommendations to maximise your response rates to feedback surveys. It is free to download here. These are recommendations we incorporate into Beaton’s own survey processes and can really help lift your response rates while ensuring the insights you draw are reliable.
Our guide to client feedback surveys teaches firms how to increase response rates by:
- Asking the right questions
- Keeping surveys concise and relevant
- Framing email requests clearly, with personalisation
- Choosing the right survey frequency (not too often, not too rare)
Download Beaton’s guide to client feedback surveys for tips to increase client participation and achieving a statistically valid survey response.
Problem 5: Prior failed attempts implementing feedback
Many firms have tried feedback programs before. Maybe they conducted ad-hoc surveys, once-a-year client listening, or tools that were never fully adopted. As Kim Trajer, Chief Operating Officer at McCullough Robertson told us, before implementing their client feedback survey system:
“We were receiving feedback from a range of different sources, including through formal and informal client listening discussions, ad hoc emails, and client issues raised with our credit team, but that information was not collated, or centralised and so not actioned consistently and not able to be measured for improvement.”
When previous attempts didn’t deliver clear value or action, people understandably became sceptical. Re-building confidence requires showing the firm how the new program differs, why it will work, and how it solves previous pain points in feedback implementation.
Solution: Show how the new program is different
You need to demonstrate how your new approach addresses past issues. Explain:
- What will be done differently
- How the new system supports action, not just measurement
- How feedback loops will be closed
- How teams will be supported
Rebuilding confidence is essential before asking people to engage again.
Problem 6: Resource constraints
Implementing and managing a feedback solution can feel resource-heavy. Firms often underestimate the workload of setting one up themselves. They may spend hours chasing surveys, calculating response rates, wrangling spreadsheets, and building reports from the responses you receive. This is especially challenging if your firm has limited expertise in survey design, data analysis, or interpreting feedback at scale. And let’s be honest – very few firms have teams of researchers available to conduct their feedback programs in-house.
Resource pressure often leads firms to delay or under-invest in feedback programs altogether. And the workload placed on partners can become a deterrent – especially when there is limited internal capacity.
Solution: Outsource the heavy lifting, and use technology to assist
The most practical way to overcome resource constraints is to outsource the survey design, distribution and interpretation to an external provider that specialises in feedback research. For example, Beaton’s specialist team can manage the entire cycle: designing effective surveys, increasing survey participation rates through best-practice techniques, interpreting results, and providing clear, actionable reports that the firm can use immediately. This approach not only improves the quality and consistency of the feedback collected but also frees internal teams to focus on acting on the insights rather than getting bogged down in operational tasks.
“The sheer time that’s involved in setting up a survey is enormous,” says Ewen.
“If you decide to outsource that, you’d have a workshop with our experts at the start to design the system according to your feedback requirements, and then the next step is sending out your first set of surveys because everything else has been built and tested for you.”
Beaton Debrief combines outsourced expertise with the hands-on accessibility of technology. Debrief automates survey distribution, consolidates the data, and provides real-time results on easy-to-read dashboards. Beaton’s team of research experts will help set up and design the surveys for you with your goals in mind – then hand over the reins for you to access the reporting dashboard to drive action and outcomes. This enables teams to focus on action rather than administration and improves long-term adoption.
Problem 7: Limited understanding of what ‘good’ looks like
Many leaders simply haven’t been part of a well-run feedback program operating at scale. Without a clear example to follow, it’s impossible to know where to start. Most professional services firms are not equipped with research teams to design effective surveys, who know what response rates to expect, how to interpret the data, or how to link feedback to commercial outcomes. As a result, programs stall. Not because people aren’t willing, but because they simply don’t have a reference point.
Solution: Educate your people and provide examples
The fastest way to lift confidence and adoption is to show your people what successful firms are already doing. The good news is there are plenty of examples of other firms already implementing feedback programs with great success – some of whom you may compete with for clients. Educating your team and providing examples to demonstrate the benefits is important when setting up yours.
A practical approach includes utilising:
- Stories that link feedback to commercial outcomes: People buy into what they can see. Share examples of firms using client feedback programs to identify problematic issues, drive cross-selling, or improve retention. We have published several case studies of different client feedback programs in different industries – feel free to peruse them. Understanding the potential of feedback and sharing these success stories will help your teams see how feedback translates into measurable revenue impact (rather than a “soft” measure of client sentiment).
- Industry benchmarks: Independent benchmarking can help by showing your team what other firms are achieving, and what to aim for. Beaton Benchmarks gathers client feedback on hundreds of firms to help shine light on how clients perceive your services – and participating enables you to view your client feedback scores in comparison to others. If the feedback scores show your firm is lagging in areas, this can provide necessary inspiration to your people to start getting serious about feedback implementation.
- Training and support: Examples provide the inspiration but not the tools to change behaviour. External experts can help educate partners and teams on survey design, interpreting insights, closing the loop with clients, and embedding feedback into decision-making.
Making your feedback program stick
Implementing a thriving feedback program in a professional services firm requires input from people beyond your BD or marketing team. Success often requires a firmwide cultural shift. Firms that succeed are the ones that treat client feedback as part of their regular operating rhythm, rather than just an ad-hoc activity or a once-a-year survey.
Breaking down organisational silos, improving survey response rates, educating teams, and using the right feedback solution all contribute to a program that drives better client experience and commercial outcomes. Being prepared for difficulties and having solutions at hand when they crop up can help ensure your feedback program’s success.
It is not about working hard or spending more – but investing strategically in the right structure, design, and support to respond to challenges from the outset.
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.
