As advisers, you are likely to receive a proportion of your work from referrals and reviews. Businesses often rely on other businesses as a barometer of how effective professional service providers are, so improving the client experience is essential to your growth.
While you may already have many case studies, testimonials and kind words from clients, how do you score across the board when it comes to the client experience? And where do you need to improve?
Determining your success as an adviser comes down to a number of elements, but there is one key metric that is commonly being used now within industry to assess the advice and support that is delivered to clients – The Net Promoter Score (NPS).
What is NPS?
Put simply, NPS measures the ‘loyalty’ of a client to your firm and its service. The surveys conducted to obtain this metric are simple, but the outcomes and insights are incredibly powerful.
In most cases, it will be a single simple question, where respondents are given the option of rating 0 – 10, where zero is not at all and 10 is extremely likely.
The most frequent questions asked are would you recommend these services to another business or individual or are you satisfied with the service you receive?
To get to a final overall net promoter score you will need to first work out who is a:
- Promoters – Score between 9 – 10 and are the most loyal or satisfied clients.
- Passives – Score between 7 – 8 and while satisfied with your services are not at the same level as promoters.
- Detractors – Score six or lower and are generally dissatisfied with the service they receive or pick faults at what you offer. In some cases, they may even go as far as to dissuade others from using your services.
To assess your overall score and review the general health of the client experience you offer, you need to subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
As an example, 60 per cent of respondents are promoters, 20 per cent are passives and 20 per cent are detractors your score would be 40. Be aware, that high client satisfaction could result in a negative score of less than one.
How can NPS surveys help?
Before we lay out exactly what a survey involves it is important to look at the different types of surveys commonly conducted by businesses.
These are typically relationship surveys, put out monthly or quarterly to assess the general relationship between your firm and clients, or transactional surveys, conducted after you have completed a specific instruction for a client.
Both have their uses, but the overall goal of these surveys is to give you a baseline of client sentiment and a metric by which to measure any improvements to the client experience.
- If you make a change to how you deliver communications, for example, does this result in the score improving?
- If you set new rules about response times with a client, what impact does this have on your overall score?
- What happens if you alter points of contact or lose a key member of your team, does the score go down?
Conducting NPS surveys should help you, over time, identify weaknesses within your client care and experience, helping you to identify new strategies that build loyalty among your clients that are key to retaining and winning new work.
Want to give an NPS survey a go?
We are currently helping many firms to conduct and review NPS surveys, as well as assisting in new strategies that help firms to improve the client experience and drive-up scores.
Failing to spot the signs of weakness and act on them leaves you exposed to competition from other practices, particularly where they have already refined the client experience.
To find out more about our expertise in these areas and how we can deliver effective NPS surveys, please contact us.
