When you want to be the industry leader, it makes sense to learn what you do best and what you can do even better. In this case, the firm’s management wanted to get a precise qualitative report on their clients’ loyalty levels and get a clear understanding of how their partners could improve their legal services even further.

After consulting with Commerzial on the best way forward, the firm’s management team agreed to carry out an NPS survey. Contrary to many other customer satisfaction survey methods, NPS is easy for clients to use.

The NPS survey takes only a few minutes to complete and gives clients the opportunity to describe, in their own words, what the company does well and where there is room for improvement.

In essence, the Net Promoter Score is calculated based on responses to a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague? The score for this answer is based on a scale of 0 to 10.

Those who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called Promoters and are considered likely to exhibit value-creating behaviors, such as buying more, remaining customers for longer and making more positive referrals to other potential customers.

Those who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labelled Detractors, and they are believed to be less likely to exhibit value-creating behaviors.

Responses of 7 and 8 are labelled Passives, and their behavior falls between Promoters and Detractors.

Once clients complete the rating, they can write an individual assessment of the company’s performance. Based on this relatively simple data, the company receives highly qualitative input, which, when processed correctly, makes it easy for the company to go into a dialogue with each client, with a view to improve each customer’s loyalty and satisfaction with the company.

The firm hired Commerzial to facilitate and develop the systems and the entire process for the NPS survey. This included:

• Categorizing the firm’s clients based on company type and legal needs
• Creating guidelines and processes for how the firm’s partners should follow up on the answers they received from the survey, in which order and with what objectives
• Implementing the NPS survey in to ensure the entire workflow, from sending out the questionnaire to follow-ups, reminders and evaluation
• Analyzing the answers and reporting results to the management team
• Developing a personal dashboard that enabled each partner to see their individual NPS score and read what their clients thought of their services

The survey revealed an NPS score of 72% for the firm, which is very high, but it also gave the management group some valuable insights into how and where they could improve their business and services.

Case in point: the survey revealed that several clients wanted a different pricing model of standard deliveries and felt a need for a better match between certain jurisdictional services and the clients’ business areas.

The processes and the systems that Commerzial built for the NPS survey made it possible for the firm – and the individual partners – to engage in closer dialogue with their clients and improve the quality of their services.

We believe that customer satisfaction and -loyalty is an oft-overlooked business parameter in many B2B businesses. Every management team ought to pay closer attention to their clients’ satisfaction levels especially considering the increasingly competitive environments, most companies face.

The more loyal clients, the easier it is for the company to increase profits through additional sales to their existing clients, and the easier it becomes to attract new, impacting competitiveness as well as reputation and position in the market.

In Commerzial’s experience, implementing a regular, systematic method for measuring your company’s customer satisfaction not only makes good sense strategically; it is also a wise investment that yields significant short- and long-term benefits.

It demonstrates that you are serious about your company’s reputation and wellbeing. It also provides you with specific operational data and input that enables the management team and the client teams to identify and correct any negative trend before it is too late.