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Client Feedback, Service & Teams
2 minute read | 4 years ago

What Clients Are Telling Us About Their Priorities

Photo of Laura Meherg By: Laura Meherg

Tara recently shared some great questions to uncover client priorities. By understanding your clients’ businesses and what has their attention, you are in a much better position to offer helpful solutions to their most pressing problems, make their lives easier, add value and position them for success inside their organizations.

In the past two weeks, we’ve interviewed a number of clients in a wide variety of industries and markets. The priorities below, quoted from clients directly, run the gamut from department housekeeping chores, skill development/training, conducting risk assessments, evaluating creative financing options, developing back-to-work plans and much more. But while they touch on a wide variety of areas, they all present opportunities for their outside counsel to offer assistance, resources, introductions or best practices from experiences with other clients.

  • Updating the employee handbook. I’d like to scrap the old one and start from scratch.
  • Getting employees back to the office by June 1st.
  • I am responsible for reviewing internal audits that come back with deficiencies with legal regulatory issues. I need to get better at that.
  • My top priority is getting staffed up and getting the processes idealized for a very aggressive round of acquisitions. I need to add two lawyers in the next six months and take six years of lessons learned and make an execution plan.
  • Aside from the grind and agreements that need to get done I need to “clean the clutter” of multiple document versions and get trainings done for the purchasing department to take on more work on their own. That would improve efficiency for my team.
  • We are figuring out what things we learned during the pandemic that we want to keep and what we want to ratchet back to what we did before. We are looking at where we can relax some of our safeguarding without giving up the kinds of integrity we want in our programs and organization.
  • We are focused on fixing the financial performance problems caused by COVID which may involve some creative solutions with our lenders.
  • We are looking at some acquisitions and divestitures and getting our HR department in much better shape.

Use this list as a starting point for exploring new areas where you can help your clients with their priorities. As Tara said, knowing and acting on the priorities of your clients is key to moving from a transactional relationship to that of a trusted advisor.