CMOs should focus on service levels and not the Net Promoter Score
Today’s professional services market is fiercely competitive. Growth is still possible but it’s getting harder every day. To succeed, rather than just using the Net Promoter Score, firms and their CMOs should focus on their service levels — and inform their decision-making with the right data.
By monitoring, tracking, and increasing service levels CMOs can start to see and deliver real results
The job of CMOs in sectors like investment banking, law, and management consultancy has never been more complex or challenging. In such a competitive market, the pressure on them to drive growth is enormous.
But by monitoring, tracking, and increasing service levels, and eventually replacing the NPS with a single standard metric that captures client experience, CMOs can start to see and deliver real results.
Service levels are more important than anything else
Today, for professional services organisations, only one thing matters: their service levels. How satisfied are their clients with the level and quality of their service? This is increasingly the only metric CMOs should focus on. And they need to focus on it relentlessly.
Clients are willing to forgive almost everything else if they receive a top-line client experience
Service levels are more important than the intellectual capital and professional experience in an organisation. More important than the quality of the product they provide or their current professional reputation. More important than practically anything else.
Service levels are key because, increasingly, clients are willing to forgive almost everything else if they receive a top-line client experience. A massive 7 in 10 people now say their buying experiences are based on how they feel they’re being treated, according to McKinsey.
The rise and rise of service levels
This is not so surprising. First, over the last few decades we’ve seen an explosion in the number of professional services companies. We’ve also seen the emergence of a new class of freelance consultants, biting into professional services’ traditional market.
In the past, it might have been possible to succeed just on the basis of having unrivaled professional experience. But that is no longer the case. There are too many companies, and clients have too many options. In a world where people have so much choice, it’s service levels that really count.
Secondly, over the last few decades, economies in the west have undergone a ‘services revolution’. Just 30 years ago, a large component of our economy was based on goods, now more than 80 per cent of the UK economy is based on services, according to the latest ONS figures. Competition is increasing on a daily basis, with no signs of abating, and customer expectations are rising.
Service levels are your greatest marketing asset
But, today, CMOs have the tools to fight back and turn service levels into their best marketing asset.
Word-of-mouth marketing is crucial in professional services, where trust is at a premium. According to Heinz Marketing, 84 per cent of business decision-makers start the buying process with a referral — much higher than most other industry segments.
Whereas you might buy a physical product on the basis of an advert, you are unlikely to do the same for high-value professional services. When you’re in the market for a professional service, you’re looking to build a mutually beneficial longer-term relationship. That’s why referral, and trust, is key.
The best way to encourage people to talk about your company, and refer others, is by delivering a top-class client experience; by surprising them with the quality of your service. Great client experiences make people feel something, and tapping into people’s emotions is the best way to encourage them to share. According to research, more than 90 per cent of emotional experiences are shared and discussed to some degree.
But you have no idea about the service levels in your organisation
But most professional organisations, and their CMOs, don’t know whether they’re delivering a good client experience or not; they know very little about their service levels. They aren’t collecting this data, or if they are, they aren’t collecting it in sufficient detail.
They are much less likely to know what that same group of people thinks about their service levels
For example, many companies have rich detail on how they’re perceived in the marketplace — their expertise and specialties. They collect this through deep market research. They may know exactly what percentage of their potential customers recognise them as the expert on a specific area of consultancy.
But, from my personal experience, they are much less likely to know what that same group of people thinks about their service levels. And they will almost certainly not know how they compare on that metric against their competitors, or how that service level metric breaks down across different departments within their organisation.
What do potential and current clients think of the service delivered by the sales department? What do clients think of the service delivered by the research department? How do these departments compare with similar departments in competitor organisations?
This cannot be simplified to NPS
At this point, many CMOs will say that they are, in fact, measuring the Net Promoter Scores across their organisation; that is, they are asking clients whether they would recommend their products, services, or organisation to other colleagues. Subconsciously using this as a proxy for measuring service levels.
We need to start designing a single standard metric that measures service levels
But this is not enough. First, the Net Promoter Score usually focuses on whether clients will recommend a ‘product’ or ‘service’, which prompts them to focus on the product or service itself — and its features — rather than service levels. It hides how clients feel about service levels under this other information.
Secondly, the goal of the NPS is usually to provide executives with a single all-encompassing metric to capture how clients feel about their organisations. The NPS does not break-out this information on a departmental level, so it’s impossible to see how different departments within an organisation are performing.
In my view, if we’re going to tackle this issue, we need to start designing a single standard metric that measures service levels.
How to start measuring service levels
There’s no doubt that we can learn from the Net Promoter Score.
And it’s no surprise that the NPS has succeeded, and gained wide acceptance across the industry over the last decade. It’s simple and, vitally, enables companies to easily compare themselves to competitors in their sector. That is because it is standardised; it is based on asking everyone the same question, regardless of sector or type.
As we seek to find and codify a metric to measure service levels, we should take both of these things into account: it should be simple, and it should be standardised. We should work together as an industry to find a single protocol for measuring service levels.
This is, in fact, what we are trying to do at ViewsHub: attempting to develop a standardised protocol for tracking service levels. In practice, we ask clients how their service providers, at a departmental level, score on the following metrics: project delivery (getting things done), operational excellence (how technically good are we at our jobs), and responsive attitude. These enable us to triangulate service levels.
We focus on collecting this feedback at a departmental level as it gives managers and CMOs the richness of detail they need to take action. It enables CMOs to see service levels within different departments, such as sales, accounting, and research, meaning that if one department is falling behind on service delivery, managers will immediately be able to see it and take targeted action.
One of the benefits of triangulation is that these scores are also rich enough to point managers in the right direction. If we had simply asked “How happy are you with service levels?”, it would have hidden the reasons why they scored high or low, leaving managers at a loss as to where to focus their attention. But if, for example, within your organisation, ‘responsive attitude’ continuously drags down your overall score, you’ll know precisely where to look.
Service levels are the most important thing for today’s professional services firms — both for retaining and acquiring new clients. But the data that CMOs have on service levels is poor. If we’re going to continue to drive growth in the future, it’s time this data was not only collected, but standardised too.
Ab Banerjee is CEO of ViewsHub, the team-to-team scoring and feedback platform.
Find out more about ViewsHub: https://viewshub.com
