Surveying for client satisfaction

I just read an interesting article on surveying your clients and customers to assess their satisfaction levels. It’s targeted at law firms, but many of the ideas could apply to any business.

It’s an excellent article, but I think there’s one piece that’s missing or been under-emphasized, though.

All of the practices outlined are excellent practices, but law firms — any firms really — are still going to struggle if don’t do the initial groundwork of defining what client service success looks like. The first step should really be to define success metrics.

For instance, here at Fruition (even though we’re not a law firm) we’ve been doing post-engagement client satisfaction surveys (online, bien sur)  for about a year now. Before we started surveying, we decided that Net Promoter Score (NPS) was going to be our primary performance indicator for client satisfaction. NPS is an averaged, aggregated number representing clients answers to the question, “on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Fruition to a friend or colleague”.

NPS isn’t going to be the right metric for every firm, but without knowing exactly what it is you’re measuring, you’re going to have a hard time defining how you’re going to measure it.

Update: A weird coincidence here. Mere hours after I posted this, Vertical Response did a whole piece on Net Promoter Score. It’s a great resource. You can check it out here: http://ht.ly/1Kl3M

via Texas Lawyer Coach | Client Interviewing | Client Interview | TopLawyerCoach.com.