You probably talk to your clients and prospects, to find out what they like about your services (and customer service) and what they think needs to be improved.

If you don’t, you should.

But you might not get helpful or honest answers, either because the client is uncomfortable talking to you about the subject or they don’t know how to articulate it.

You can encourage your clients to post a review, or, as I suggest, wait for a client to say something positive or thank you or provide a referral and ask those clients to leave a review (and let you quote them in a testimonial), because you know they’re happy and their review is more likely to be positive.

But you also want to know when clients are unhappy so you can do something about it before things get worse.

You can keep your eyes and ears open for clues and then talk to them, but by the time you notice there’s a problem, it might be too late.

That’s why you should regularly send clients a survey, and allow them to describe their experience with your office. But if you want them to respond more often, and respond candidly, you should give them the option to do it anonymously.

Yes, you would like to know who is or isn’t happy, and the issue, but isn’t it better to know what clients like or don’t like even if you don’t know who they are?

One more thing.

Clients are funny, and by funny, I don’t mean amusing. I mean strange. Weird, unpredictable, with seemingly random likes and dislikes and preferences. You certainly can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t try.

But you should look for patterns.

If a significant percentage of clients (and prospects) don’t like something, such as being kept waiting for their appointment for more than 10 minutes, or being kept on hold for more than 30 seconds when they call, you need to know that.

You might not know there is an issue or realize that you’re doing it.

Unfortunately, you may not get enough survey responses to show you a pattern.

What you can you do?

You can go online and look at reviews of other lawyers, to see what their clients complain about, and also what they like, because the odds are your clients do (or would) feel the same way about you.

Study the competition. Learn their “best practices”. Avoid their mistakes.