“I was incredibly impressed with the team at Leading Matters, and importantly Leigh’s ability to use her intuition, experience and understanding of what builds great customer advocacy when interviewing and building customer testimonials. The survey process is built to genuinely understand what your customers value, what they don’t and to provide meaningful and actionable feedback that will deliver results for your bottom line as you action them.
This is no ordinary method and approach – if you are an organisation that wants to truly understand what drives great customer advocacy and loyalty for your company, I would not hesitate in recommending Leigh and the team to help enable your journey.”

Andrew Walduck, Executive General Manager and CIO Information, Digital and Technology, Australia Post, VIC

“As the Managing Director of Exceld, a leadership development organisation, the only true measure of my success is how my clients describe the quality of our relationship and the benefits of their experience. We engaged Leigh Stafford, the Managing Director of Leading Matters to assist us in gaining social proof. Leigh’s approach can be best described as a blend between the highest professional standards, an easy personable approach and high performance. It’s not often you work with someone who consistently operates at the epicentre of these distinguishing attributes.

Leigh’s style and approach goes beyond describing the ‘what’ and focuses on the ‘how’ – she has a unique ability to find the client’s ‘voice and truth’ about their experience. Any organisation that prides themselves on building customer advocacy and delivering to the highest standards of performance, deserves to partner with Leigh.”

Bernard Desmidt, Director, Exceld, NSW

“Award Force is the leading global system providing for easy and intuitive entry, management and judging process with powerful configuration capability enabling any award program to be successful. With so much to manage during an awards programme, our clients need the right system to maximise entries, manage the judging process, and feel confident with the integrity of the results. We’re proud of our feature rich system that includes a no-crash guarantee. Most importantly, we know our clients agree with our claims because of the testimonials and case studies they have given us.

We engaged the Social Proof Rules division of Leading Matters as independent specialists to interview our clients for their feedback about Award Force. The purpose of the interviews was to understand our customers’ experience and gain testimonials and case studies that genuinely reflect their opinions and experience.

Social Proof Rules engaged with our clients on our behalf, conducted the interviews and using the feedback data, collaboratively worked with the clients to word-smith testimonials and case studies they were happy to give us for our use. The results speak for themselves – they are fantastic testimony to the work we do and are essential for our marketing tool kit and sales process.

We are proud to have these on our website and are happy to publically acknowledge that Social Proof Rules is right: It doesn’t matter what we say about ourselves – it’s the opinions of our clients that matters most because they speak with authority as the result of their experience.

Leading Matters came highly recommended to us and everything we were told about their work in gaining social proof is true. They are experts in their field and their collaborative approach is excellent. We trust them with our most valuable asset – our clients and they absolutely work in our best interests. It’s a pleasure to recommend them.”

Richard de Nys, Founder and Anne Nolan, Commercial Director, Award Force, Pyrmont, NSW

“As an outcome of the Leading Matters customer survey process we received 12 pages of brilliant testimonials which we use in our marketing. Our sales have increased substantially on the previous year and the quality of these testimonials can only have helped…”
“Additionally, we know how to do things better as a result of the quality of feedback we got from our customers. Having this information definitely helps with developing customer loyalty and retention, promoting new business development and as a result, improves our bottom line. We are able to better manage expectations and there is a heightened awareness of the whole company about our customer’s experiences and their perceptions. From a staffing perspective we were able to gain extensive insight to staff performance through the eyes of our customers. We know having the right people is critical to improving our bottom line. I unreservedly recommend the Leading Matters process.”

Andrew Matlock, Vice President Sales, NewSat Limited, Southbank, VIC

“We included testimonials developed collaboratively between Leading Matters and our clients in a recent proposal for new business. It’s fair to say that these BTs® were instrumental in us winning a $.75M project. BTs® enable our clients to provide us with proof that we are able to deliver what we say we can.”

Peter Linton, General Manager, LogicalTech SysTalk, Melbourne VIC

“There are several big wins for us with using Leading Matters. We like the way Leading Matters captures the essence of our engagement with the client. Finding out our strengths was the biggest revelation of all.”

Bill Kennedy, Director, Evolve Information Services, Melbourne VIC

“We commissioned Leading Matters to find out what our clients really thought of our services, products and performance and how these could be improved for them. As a direct outcome of our client’s feedback, we invested the extensive time and resources required to ensure the best development of props. The results are brilliant and the money keeps pouring in! Within a few months, the props generated $50,000 of income per month and that figure just keeps growing. We’re really happy with the outcome and so are our clients.
Leading Matters has the skill-set required to expertly find out what clients think and the information gained is invaluable. The relationships we have with our clients are absolutely strengthened as a result of the project Leading Matters carried out for us.”

Joe Caprara, Preston Hire, Ponting Street, Williamstown VIC 3016

“I suppose the initial point of interest for CIPS was the marketing side of Leading Matters service. As we have many happy customers although regardless of how many times we are offered testimonials, referrals, etc we hardly receive them in a useful format where they can be used effectively in our promotional material.  So we started with their Brilliant Testimonial service which is was very useful and gave us exactly the “story we needed to present as testimonials to new customers.

During this process we came to understand the other services of Leading Matters and could see the benefits in delving deeper into the “story of our customers’ experiences with our business. As I mentioned before – CIPS does measure and gauge our customers’ satisfaction however the Leading Matters approach is totally different.

Leigh Stafford and her Staff were able to gain critical insight and feedback by exploring the story of our Company, the Clients enterprise and finally how the two complemented each other throughout our business dealings.  After our first few meetings with Leading Matters we trusted them enough to interview our clients.

CIPS gave Leading Matters the latitude to decide themselves whether each contact would only be a Brilliant Testimonial or would be more suited to a Customer Survey –with the outcome of a Case Study, depending on the direction of each interview. Not only did we provide clients who were our best advocates but we also included some clients where we had difficult but worthwhile relationships. CIPS found that with both groups of clients we gained a wealth of information, as described below;

1. Best Clients

– Leading Matters gained Brilliant Testimonials from our best clients but also delved deeper and gave us insight on;

– Why they stay loyal to us IE. What is it that we do, that they value most?

– What (if any) their biggest concern with our service. i.e, How we can continue to keep them?

– How our pricing compared to others and what helped us win the work over our competitors?

2. Difficult Clients

– In addition to the above points, Leading Matters were able to pin point the exact area of concern that our clients had. IE. They are happy with 90% of our process but it’s just the way we do …..x….. that seems to affect them negatively. Whereas previously CIPS could not get a straight answer from the client to describe their exact gripe.

– Just having the client go through the Leading Matters process gives them a chance to vent and feel as though they have been heard. This means we now have the information we need and a client who feels pacified and is ready to move forward with our business (as long as we implement the necessary changes).

As mentioned, CIPS has procedures for monitoring customer service and as a medium sized business we have a good grasp on how we are perceived but having an external provider tell us, our Story from the customers point of view, really provided some surprises both positive and negative – although much needed.

I recommend the Leading Matters system to any business that values their customers.

Remember there is the immediate benefit of gaining Brilliant Testimonials for marketing purposes but as business owners we should all investigate the, “customer experience our business provides our clients from an objective point of view.”

Justin Rigby, Managing Director, Commercial Industrial Painting Services (CIPS) Chelsea Heights, Vic 3196

“Despite our initial apprehension about doing the survey, we are glad we used your services and we are delighted with the result!  We were a little uneasy about what you might have discovered when speaking to our clients! There might have been a lot of areas we needed to improve upon but we knew we needed to find out! We were also a little concerned about the costs involved and whether it was good use of pharmacy capital. We were way off the mark and we’d have to now say a definite YES! We’re glad we went ahead with the survey. We’re also confident the testimonials will easily help us gain new business. Thank you for the care you’ve taken and detail you have provided.”

Gideon Gunn & David McConville, Gunn & McConville Pharmacy, Balwyn North, VIC3014

“My client was very impressed at the professionalism and tact that Leigh showed him.She asked permission and always made my client feel comfortable and valued through the process.  This particular client was under a great deal of stress at the time and yet he commented about how well Leigh seemed to know the situation and how she was able to ask relevant questions about their experiences with me.  Thank you Leigh for providing the feedback and also for doing it in a way that my client valued and felt positive about.”

Simon Johnson, ActionCOACH, Glenhaven, NSW 2156

“It is always important to know what your customers think of your service.  It is not always easy to find out.  Ask them face to face, and you are likely to hear what you want to hear.  And if you don’t know what your customers think of your service, it is difficult to improve. It is also difficult to get good testimonials.  Clients seldom give unsolicited testimonials, and coaches often find it embarrassing to ask clients outright for a testimonial – and if they do, it is even more embarrassing to chase the clients up when the testimonials are not forthcoming.Leigh Stafford of Leading Matters offers a professional and easy solution to both problems.  As an objective third party, Leigh is well accepted by clients, who feel free to “tell it like it is to her.  Leigh was able to elicit my clients’ true feeling, and highlighted both the areas in which I was meeting my clients’ needs, and the areas in which my clients felt that my service was lacking.  This has enabled me to improve my relationship with my clients, and ensure that they stay with me for longer.  Leigh has provided me with great testimonials, using direct quotes from the surveys. These testimonials have nothing of the forced praise that often comes from solicited testimonials, and, coming from an independent process, have greater weight.  They are great for my website.”
Lex Tannenbaum, ActionCOACH, Elsternwick, 3185

“As a business coach it is critical to have sensational testimonials. Using Leading Matters makes your testimonials look more professional than ever.  You’d be crazy not to use the expertise, experience, skill and insight offered by Leading Matters.”

David Guest, ActionCOACH, Elsternwick, VIC 3185 – World’s top 10% rated business coach