In January, one of my posts dealt with setting yearly goals for the legal department (click here to read). One of the goals was sending out a client satisfaction survey, i.e., asking those in the business to weigh in on questions related to their satisfaction with the services provided by Legal. There are a number of reasons why you would want to send out such a survey, primarily to gather helpful data and comments about how the legal department is performing and how it is perceived throughout the organization; the second being to use the survey as a tool to market and promote Legal by reminding people that the department is there, that it provides valuable services to the company, and that you are directly seeking their input into improving the quality and value of the services the legal department provides.
This edition of “Ten Things” will walk you through the process of creating, distributing, and analyzing the results of a client satisfaction survey. Though the discussion deals with in-house counsel sending a survey to their internal business clients, the “why” and “how” apply equally to the relationship between outside/in-house counsel and outside attorneys can easily use this post to create a satisfaction survey to distribute to their in-house counsel clients. If you intend to put out a survey this calendar year, now is the time to get started creating it for distribution after the summer holidays.