ML’s Client Service Team: Setting Our Clients on the Path to Success
In this month's blog we feature some of the members of our Client Services Team who are the face of ML to our clients and drive strategy for each program.
Do you know your net promoter score?
ML’s is 84.
More specifically, when our clients were asked “on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to refer ML to a colleague with a similar need,” 84% answered with a 9 or 10. The remaining 16% ranked us at an 8, which on the classic net promoter scale, means they are “passive” about promoting ML. No one gave us a ranking below an 8 which means at this time we have no “detractors.”
The net promoter score is a great benchmark for establishing an overall client satisfaction rating. The great thing about benchmarks is that they give you something to measure against so you can tell if you are improving or not. Not knowing what your don’t know leads to missed opportunities. Our net promoter score this time last year was 75, so you can imagine how much we are celebrating that jump in client satisfaction!
But that jump didn’t happen by accident.
While measuring client satisfaction overall certainly has value, we believe that to truly make the most of the opportunity, you must go deeper. We find that when we craft the right questions, even clients who are very satisfied and would not hesitate to recommend ML still have a lot to say about areas where we can improve or have a bigger impact on their business results.
We focused our questions on five key areas:
Based on the feedback, we focused on areas where we saw opportunity. Some clients thought we could be more strategic in how we set program objectives to align with their overall growth strategy. Others thought we could be more consistent in hitting program objectives. We realized those two areas were actually linked. In our business, it’s not really about just setting a goal for a number of leads and then doing everything you can to hit it.
We know that we are better serving our client if we invest more time on the front-end understanding their real sales objectives. Is it really about getting more leads, or is it about focusing on the type of leads that are more likely to progress and result in new business?
On that line of thinking, ML shifted our focus and started investing more time to understanding the client’s overall objectives and then mapping those back to a program that would not only help them achieve those objectives, but also give them data to better understand the market and refine their strategy as needed.
This shift had a residual benefit. The reports we generated for our clients began to have more meaning. Rather than just showing activity and the subsequent results, we started reporting more trends and then mapped the implications of those trends back to our clients’ sales objectives.
As a result of taking what we heard in the Client Quality Assessments (CQA) interviews and applying to our business process, we saw improvement in client satisfaction overall as well as in each of the five key areas.
Not surprisingly, the rise in satisfaction scores has correlated directly with client retention and increases in average spend.
By the way, those detractors who pulled our score down last year? Half of them are still with us today, and their scores jumped from detractor to promoter. The other half are no longer with us, and that data point also has meaning. Part of what measuring client satisfaction allows you to do is better define your real customer base there are certain types of clients where we know we can have a bigger impact. Focusing on bringing in more of those clients and recognizing when a potential client is not a good fit is half the battle toward achieving profitable growth.
