Enhancing professional service quality: feedback is the way to go

Professional service organizations continue to face increasingly competitive markets. In this situation the key to profitability growth is client loyalty which depends on client satisfaction. Demonstrates how to go about assessing client satisfaction – short of face‐to‐face confrontation. To this end recommends a policy of individualized feedback and illustrates this with an example from a professional service firm. Described as the 450° feedback process, it provides partners with internal (in‐house) and external (clients) perceptions of service relationships, leading to improvement in client satisfaction and loyalty.