Building relationships

Robert D. Hays
chairman and managing partner of King & Spalding LLP

Relationships are built on trust and communication, and you have to have both with
your clients in order to become a stronger
company. This starts with getting feedback.
Robert D. Hays, chairman and managing
partner of King & Spalding LLP, who
appeared in our June issue, has a few guidelines for getting solid feedback. He first suggests not sending someone who is directly
involved with the client.

“Let’s say I am the person who does
principle work for your company,” he
says. “If you and I are friends, and I go up
and ask you to give me a candid review of
what we’re doing and suggestions and
how you perceive us and people who
work for me, even if you were candid —
and you may not be — if it’s not flattering,
it’s something I don’t want to hear, I may
delude myself about what I’m hearing,
and that information is not high quality
and doesn’t do us any good. People often
hear what they want and then report it
even more favorably than they heard it.”

It’s also important to talk to several people
at the company.

“You’re more likely to get the honest feedback,” he says. “…What one person at the
client may feel or know or see is quite different than another one, but they’re both right
because they both represent a much larger
enterprise, so you have to get reports from
all corners of that enterprise.”

Once you get initial answers, you have to
look at reasons behind them.

“In the courtroom, you always question all
opinions because everyone has one,” he
says. “As I used to tell juries, opinions are
useless. The only things juries should listen
to is reasons for opinions — what are the
bases for those opinions? Then the people
on the jury make a determination based on
the validity of the conclusion.

“That’s not dissimilar to what you have to
do here, to a degree. You have to probe constantly. Push to another level of analysis —
why do you believe that? What’s your basis?
You keep pushing and pushing. Often people are sincere in what they’re attempting to
convey, but they’re just imprecise of their
expression of it. In that kind of a dialogue,
you often get to a better place than where
you began.”

And once you begin to get to the reasons
behind opinions, look for recurrences.

“Almost nothing will you get uniform
agreement on, but you can find patterns,”
Hays says. “If there are clusters of similar
responses and similar input, be it favorable or unfavorable, you better pay attention to it.”

All of these things will help you get better
feedback and build stronger customer relationships.