Most MSPs use scorecards to manage business performance. Tracking scorecard metrics helps you ensure performance aligns with business objectives, and makes it easier to adjust if you get off track.
But many MSPs don’t include customer sentiment as part of their scorecard metrics. Given Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback is critical for measuring client sentiment and business performance, adding this data to your scorecard is a no brainer. That’s because understanding what’s going well (or not) helps you reduce churn and improve customer satisfaction.
In this article, we’ll share why customer sentiment is so important to collect and track, how you can measure it just like your other KPIs, and how you can develop scorecard processes to support this key data.
Table of contents
- Why including CSAT and NPS metrics in scorecards reduces churn
- How to include client sentiment on MSP scorecards
Why including CSAT and NPS metrics in scorecards reduces churn
The scorecard metrics you measure depend on your business and goals. Here are a few common metrics MSPs measure across the board:
- Net and gross profit (by tech, team, and company)
- Ticket volume
- Ticket kill rate
- Mean time to notify (MTTN)
- Mean time to resolve (MTTR)
- Proactive incident resolution percentage
- Team efficiency
- Days backlogged
- Billable utilization
Client sentiment (represented by CSAT and NPS data) is arguably the most important metric of all because it impacts every aspect of your relationship.
For example, you may be hitting your “mean time to resolve ticket” objectives, but your client’s could be unhappy with the way tickets are resolved. Employees could be providing answers that put a bandaid on a problem, but don’t truly solve it. Without asking how their experience was, clients may not share their feelings and could be eligible to churn.
Collecting CSAT feedback at the close of each ticket, and sending out NPS surveys several times a year, helps you dig beneath the surface of your other metrics to ensure quantitative data aligns with qualitative feedback.
Top Tip: If you aren’t collecting NPS data yet, read our guide on How To Set Up Your First NPS Campaign.
Interestingly, data shows that only 38% of MSPs track customer satisfaction. Those that do track (and take meaningful action) on feedback report higher average renewal rates of contracts than those who do not.
Which brings us to our next point. What gets measured gets managed. This popular statement is true, but missing a key component: organization. What gets measured and strategically organized, reviewed, and actioned gets managed.
You likely already have your scorecard up and running. You know what metrics matter to your business, you’ve set SMART goals, and you review scorecards in your weekly or monthly L10 or service desk meetings. This helps you stay on top of business objectives and priorities.
Including CSAT and NPS data on your scorecard will help you dig deeper into what processes, tools, workflows, features, etc. are working well, what can be improved or streamlined, and lead to tangible conversations on how to build more meaningful client relationships.
It also helps you prepare for and ace QBRs so you a) aren’t surprised by the feedback you receive and b) are ready to present actionable next steps on meeting day.
Client sentiment shouldn’t only be discussed when things are going really well or poorly. It should be touched upon every single meeting alongside your other business critical metrics.
How to include client sentiment on MSP scorecards
Now that you know why CSAT and NPS data is critical to include on your scorecards, the next step is including this key data on your scorecards.
When it comes to cadence, you’ll want to look at CSAT both weekly and monthly and NPS monthly only.
Why? Because CSAT is captured every day, whereas NPS is often collected on a monthly or quarterly basis (depending on how your business has it set up). So, including NPS data weekly wouldn’t provide meaningful insights.
You can pull CSAT and NPS data from the SmileBack app easily. There are plenty of ways you can filter or segment it, but we recommend grabbing customer-wide data to include on scorecards. It’s easy to view directly in your CSAT and NPS dashboards or, even better, you can automate reporting using SmileBack’s new enhanced reporting functionality.
This way, you’re tracking high-level sentiment across the board. Looking at data on a customer basis or by segment is important for preparing for customer-facing meetings or internal manager meetings, but not necessary to include on management or executive-level scorecards.
Top Tip: To learn about how to automate reports in SmileBack, read our help center guide to creating reports.
Key takeaways
The metrics that MSPs commonly measure on their scorecards are critical in order for your business to run smoothly. However, without CSAT and NPS data, it’s difficult to know if a seamless experience translates into positive client sentiment.
CSAT and NPS data help you dig deeper into efficiency metrics so you can understand if your clients are happy, or not, so you can tailor their experience accordingly.
Curious to learn more about how to include survey data in your scorecards? Book a call with our team.
