Customer Experience Across the Praxity Alliance
Praxity member firms consistently score highly on customer experience metrics, but until now there has been no consistent measurement or rating of this metric Alliance-wide. A credible, crowd-sourced, data-driven score could give a proof point for members’ excellent client service. The challenge was – how do you do this consistently across a global alliance?
Why CX is so Important
Client experience differentiates good firms from everyone else. A firm that’s committed to good client care shows to the world that both their business affairs and their external relationships are being looked after properly. Good service communicates confidence, reliability and passion for the job.
Word-of-mouth has long been the most powerful tool for connecting a client’s need with the right firm. Online ratings are perhaps the modern equivalent, demonstrating far and wide the quality of the firm’s offering. Customer Experience is hugely important to accounting, with so many variables and so many metrics that will vary client-by-client. Without having a way to verify just how good your CX is, it can be difficult to advertise it.
A NPS (Net Promoter Score), verified by a third party, is a fantastic way to advertise the offering to clients. Accounting for a wide range of service points, a concrete numerical score contracts this neatly into something you can showcase in the market. It also alerts a firm’s leaders and managers to where improvements can be made.
A Commitment to Transparency
The Praxity Alliance has partnered with American firm ClearlyRated, ensuring that Alliance member firms have third-party verified NPS scores for their customer experience. The scoring is threefold –
- First, each firm will have their own firm CX score.
- Secondly, the Praxity Alliance as a whole will have a score, based on the aggregate of all members.
- Thirdly, custom scores are created for multi-firm pitches and projects, which is an aggregate score of all the firms involved.
This gives clients a very clear understanding of what clients are getting before committing to the project.
For any firm hoping to publish their NPS score, there are inherent commitments to be made – for one, firms must collect data from their clients to help inform their score. Most importantly, employing a third-party verified CX score means committing to transparency, showing confidence in your offering and advertising that to the market. As well as communicating good client service and good governance at the top, any firm will need to be honest internally about what is great already and what could stand improvement. In fact, the aspect of internal review has been an extremely popular part of the strategy, with firms tweaking their client service to perfection.
How is a NPS Score verified?
Across the Alliance, customer feedback has been collected in a variety of ways. This is a very common issue when attempting to standardise, as there is no “one way” to do it. However, committing to the same methods as other firms gives a measure of consistency that begins to form the basis for a credible score. ClearlyRated use a methodology that gives clear, measurable responses, meaning that client feedback can be measured as well as interpreted. Defining CX under one numeric score is challenging, however having a third-party expert at the helm of the initiative helps to give the data credibility and rigour, as well as making data-collection easy.
As a diverse community with members of varying sizes and resource capacities who consistently uphold high standards in work and client service, some members may have differing levels of marketing capacity and customer reach. This diversity is key to the Alliance and the ClearlyRated offering needed to suit the needs of all member firms equally well.
In Practice Across the Alliance
While the communication strategy is being rolled out throughout the Alliance, member firms FORVIS in the USA and JA Del Río in Mexico have been incorporating ClearlyRated’s methods into their CX strategy ahead of wider implementation. Bernado Del Rio, Managing Partner at JA Del Río, had this to say -
“When we have our business review with our clients, we are one step ahead, knowing where we need to improve and where we “shine.” We have an improvement plan and can work together to improve their overall experience with our firm. This brings us closer to our clients and they feel they are listened to and considered.”
The depth of data that third-party verification gives is a key benefit, amounting to an internal audit of how the firm is performing in the marketplace, beyond raw numbers. FORVIS now use the in-depth data received from the process as part of their own internal reviews, ensuring that any improvements are measured in a similar way.
CX scores will be published on Praxity member firms’ websites in due course, with the Alliance being totally transparent about its CX rating. This is a measure of member firms’ confidence in their quality of service, as well as a commitment to bettering their offering continually. As part of Praxity’s commitment to its members, we are supporting implementation globally, to ensure that the Alliance speaks with one voice, and that firms’ excellent client service is shouted from the rooftops.
Commenting on Praxity’s CX initiative, Praxity CEO Samantha Louis stated:
“While it is not mandatory for member firms to participate in this important initiative, we hope that all our members will think seriously about how they measure their clients’ experience. In working with ClearlyRated, we have come up with a range of solutions and price points for firms of varying sizes in different markets. They have the added benefit of being independently compiled and verified. We want all our member firms to take CX seriously and help feed into our global aggregated score which benefits all firms.”
If you’re a Praxity Alliance member firm and would like to know, more please contact us at executiveoffice@praxity.com