We run a high-touch professional services firm and want to measure customer sentiment on our weekly Scorecard. How do we capture client satisfaction as a real-time weekly metric instead of relying on lagging quarterly Net Promoter Scores?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

In a professional services business, waiting for a quarterly Net Promoter Score to tell you how your clients feel is a recipe for high churn. By the time the survey results land, the client has already decided to look elsewhere. You need weekly leading indicators that show client sentiment through their actual engagement behavior. To capture this on your weekly Scorecard, focus on tracking client behaviors that serve as proxies for satisfaction. The first leading indicator is the weekly meeting attendance rate. If your clients are regularly canceling or rescheduling their strategy sessions, their engagement is dropping. Track the number of missed or rescheduled client meetings each week. The second metric to track is the average response time to client deliverables or approvals. When a client takes longer than usual to approve a project milestone, it often indicates they are checked out or unhappy with the direction. Put a metric on your Scorecard for outstanding client approvals past forty-eight hours. Finally, track proactive client touchpoints. This is the number of scheduled, non-transactional check-ins your account managers conduct weekly. By measuring these behaviors, you create a real-time warning system. If missed meetings are up and proactive touchpoints are down, your operations seat owner knows there is an issue to IDS® in your Level 10 Meeting™ long before a client cancels their contract.