How Do Your Customers Really Feel? (Infographic)

Clearly, you love your clients, but do they love you back?

If you're like me, you really enjoy working with your clients. You may even feel like you have developed personal relationships with them. But, when it comes to how your clients feel about you, your team and your company, you need data, not just a gut feeling.

There is a major difference between having a relationship with a client and having a client who is satisfied with the work your company is providing.

How do you know if your client is actually satisfied with your company?

According to McKinsey & Company’s The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction, client satisfaction depends on being consistent. So, you need to ensure all members of your company deliver consistency with your clients.

That may seem easy enough, but how do you define and measure consistency? At Rhythm Systems, we manage client satisfaction a variety of different ways. Basically, we use a three-step process to define, measure and monitor it.

Define Client Satisfaction
In the spirit of "Begin with the End in Mind," we start by figuring out what each client needs to feel satisfied. We ask questions: What must we do? How will our customers behave when they are happy?

Though we tailor the definition for each client, we have found one truth that applies to all our clients: Customer satisfaction is not just about us doing what we said we would. It’s also about the client doing what they promised.

Measure Client Satisfaction
With that in mind, we measure both our work and our client’s engagement. For example:

How We Measure What We Do:

• Help client prepare for quarterly planning.
• Help client review plans and make sure they are "execution-ready."
• Train executive team and departments to run effective weekly meetings.

 How We Measure What Clients Do:

• They held quarterly planning session and their plan is complete.
• Executive team and departments are using Rhythm well every week (updating status, commenting when there is a problem, putting in action items to fix the problem).
• They are paying invoices on time.

Monitor Client Satisfaction
When we know what customer satisfaction looks like, we use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor progress and keep our team focused each week on delivering a great experience. KPIs such as Net Promoter Score and the Client Health Index enable us to be proactive in how we manage our client relationships, allowing us to better retain our best clients. We talk about these KPIs during our weekly adjustment meetings, and every team member gets the chance to offer solutions for improving these KPIs.

In our meeting, we never focus on what went wrong or assign blame - whatever happened has already happened. Instead, we focus on how we can fix the situation, make the customer happy and ultimately, go the second mile to ensure our clients are satisfied with our work.

Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images