Most professional services firms gather some form of client insight or feedback. Some operate well‑structured and well‑resourced client listening programmes, but many still lack a centralised and consistent approach.  In our experience, firms often conduct high‑quality in‑person interviews with VIPs, key accounts, and strategically important clients. These interviews are often carried out by an independent partner, or a member of the business development team, and often result in detailed meeting notes stored somewhere within the firm.

The value, and the challenge, of interview notes

These interviews, and the notes that follow, are usually rich sources of insight. They can help firms strengthen relationships, improve client experience, identify opportunities and risks, understand brand perception, and clarify how clients view the firm’s value. However, they are often lengthy documents with substantial detail. At an early stage, managing them is relatively straightforward. A small number of documents can be stored centrally and easily recalled by the individual responsible for them.

As interviews increase in volume, this becomes more difficult. Firms often turn to spreadsheets or document management systems and begin summarising feedback or categorising content. Over time, this process becomes increasingly complex, particularly once other teams begin drawing on the insight, for example bid or account managament teams.

How a market researcher would approach the problem

A market researcher would typically categorise responses to each open‑ended question into themes and summarise them through simple charts or summaries. This makes it easier to see patterns and themes across the data.  This is where AI and CustomServe can increasigly help.  

But themes and coding of verbatim comments will evolve as more feedback is received; finding specific comments or memorable quotations needs to be indexed for when they are needed, e.g. for a pitch or internal discussion.

Moving towards structured insight

To address this, many firms are now recognising the value of using insight platforms to collate and analyse client feedback across the whole firm. This approach supports ongoing analysis, consistency, and easier access to insight over time.

Using CustomServe to support action

At Acuigen, we use the interview tagging and coding functionality within the CustomServe platform to achieve this. This allows users to highlight specific parts of a client’s comment, assign tags, and retrieve those insights later using analytical tools or AI.

Clients value this approach because it helps track themes while also making it easy to find specific comments when working with partners, service teams, or bid teams. The tagging evolves with the feedback and is applied by people who understand the client context and commercial relevance.

As a result, less time is spent searching, categorising, and managing data, and more time is directed towards working with the business on what the feedback means, and how it can be used to improve client service and profitability.