How Happy Are Your Clients?
I bet you know what your AVVO rating is. And, you probably know your Yelp star rating. But, do you know what you Net Promoter Score (NPS) is? Even if you’re not familiar with the term, I’m pretty sure you’ve been asked to rate someone using the system.
Have you ever been asked, “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend?”
That’s it! That business is asking for you to contribute to their NPS.
Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “One Number You Need to Grow.”
NPS is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale. People who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called “Promoters,” and are considered likely to be repeat customers or tell others about how great your service is. People who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labeled “Detractors,” and they are less likely to repeat or promote your service and may even speak negatively. A 7 or 8 response would be provided by a so-called “Passive,” and their behavior falls between Promoters and Detractors but they are unlikely to impact your reputation either way.
The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters. For purposes of calculating a Net Promoter Score, Passives count towards the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters and pushing the net score towards 0.
The beauty of NPS is in its simplicity. How likely are you to recommend the business to a friend? Ingeniously, this business metric is what we use as a rule of thumb in real life. When you’re looking for a real estate agent or a hair stylist or a wedding planner or a [fill-in-the-blank], who do you ask? Your friends and family usually for recommendations of who they’ve used.
Lawyers are no different. In fact, if you ask most lawyers how they get clients, they’ll probably tell you it’s by word of mouth. According to Mary Juetten, author of Small Law Firm KPIs How to Measure Your Way to Greater Profits, “Net Promoter Score is a hugely valuable tool for lawyers, especially because they continue to be dependent on referrals and their reputations.” How better to promote your law firm than to harness this word of mouth by surveying it and putting it in quantitative terms you can use to improve your law practice?
A simple tool for incorporating NPS into your daily routine is Delighted. You can manually send surveys by uploading a list of emails or sending them one at a time. Or, you can use Delighted’s API and integrate it automatically with your workflow, for example, when you send out closing letters. Fred Reichheld himself is an advisor to Delighted and has said: “When I first saw the tool, I knew instantly that it could change the way companies measure and manage customer happiness.” Other options for measuring NPS are Promoter.io and Wootric, but whatever option you choose, just do it.
According to management guru Peter Drucker, “What gets measured, gets improved.”
How happy are your clients?