Looking back on 2019, I see yet another year of fantastic encounters with our clients and different groups of stakeholders. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to everybody for a very busy year. We continue making our best efforts to exceed your expectations in 2020!
I would especially like to thank everyone who took the time to respond to our client satisfaction survey. We received lots of positive feedback concerning our reliability, response times and how easy it is to reach our experts. Development needs we identified included our consultation services and the teamwork we do on the customer interface. The NPS we received in the client satisfaction survey is also worth mentioning: a score of 60 is an impressive feat even on the global scale, and a great reference in any field of business, but particularly for entities providing legal services! We were thrilled to learn that our clients consider us worth recommending.
We are thankful for all the feedback, as it allows us to continue doing the things we already do well and to work on areas where there is still room for improvement.
Economic growth in Finland remained slow in 2019 and, according to economic forecasts, it will continue to slow down over the current year. The situation with the economy in Europe and the rest of the world does not seem much better. However, times of economic recession and depression often bring about a wave of new innovations, as difficult times require new kinds of creative thinking. We have certainly noticed this among our clientele: companies have come up with new and different ways of doing things more efficiently, often by using technology or similar solutions. This has even led to the creation of brand new businesses. It is great to be a part of this development work and to witness the innovativeness and persistence of companies.
New ideas and creativity are fuel for intellectual property rights (IPR). To successfully turn IPR into a competitive edge for a company, you need solid expertise, diverse competencies, systematic planning and experience, not to mention a good grasp of the big picture. Berggren’s range of services and professionals are an exceptional package in this respect: we already have the solutions and the required know-how to meet virtually all IPR needs in Finland and abroad. In addition to our consultation services, we are planning to launch new services related to, for instance, rights monitoring.
We also will take part in new cooperation projects as service providers, with carefully selected partners. For example, in 2019, we set up a Global Business Development team, which includes professionals with direct experience in key foreign jurisdictions, to develop our international services and cooperation network. One of the purposes of the unit is to maximise the value of services by carefully evaluating the price-quality ratio of our international partner network. For our clients, the international team´s efforts mean that they will receive further improved service quality at reasonable prices with responsiveness at or better than the international standard.
So, we start the new decade inspired and energized by our great results with several development projects already at full throttle. It will be fascinating to see what we can accomplish with our clients during this first year of the new decade and beyond.