How to Implement NPS for Agencies: FINALLY Agency Case Study

Welcome back to another episode of Agency Journey. This week I've got the pleasure of bringing on a special guest. I've got Amber Mackay, who's the head of client services at Finally Agency from across the Pond. Amber, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much for having me.

You wrote an awesome blog post recently that got my attention. I think it was like, what is an NPS score and why does it matter? Which I'll go pull up here in just a second, but so you. I want to dig into that. That's one of the reasons that I wanted to pull you on and kind of dig into what prompted you to start paying attention to nps, how you've improved it, how you focused on it. We'll break down all those pieces, but first, could you just give us a quick overview of Findly Agency and your role there?

Yeah, of course. So Findlee Agency is an inbound marketing agency. We're based in Canterbury in Kent in the specialize in the engineering and manufacturing industry. And we have a multidisciplinary team spanning digital, web development, video, graphic design, and we are also a platinum HubSpot partner as well, which runs through an awful lot of what we do. My role as head of client services is essentially to head up the account management team. I'm generally responsible for kind of ongoing client success, project success, which means I work really closely with our management team, our head of ops, to kind of ensure everything runs smoothly and that we've got all the processes in place to consistently get the best possible results for our clients, basically. I am also an account manager day to day as well, so I do keep my finger on the pulse and I'm heavily kind of involved in the day to day, which really does help me work really closely with my team to kind of make improvements almost every day. So yeah, it's busy, but it's good fun.

Right? What's the model that you have? So you've got account managers, so you kind of, you know, overseeing a team, plus being on that team of account managers and they're using a POD structure beneath that or shared resources. How's the internal team structured so?

Nice. Well, so internally, I mean, our account managers are. They're kind of more seen as project leads. So we, that's actually another interesting, interesting point that we're kind of looking into is kind of the hybrid between account management and project management. I'm not sure necessarily the industry kind of knows the difference, but we do an awful lot of product leadership. We're involved in the strategy, but we are Kind of at the top of every project that we do. And then we manage the delivery teams, but we don't have pods. We have, myself included. We have three account managers, three project leads, and we kind of deal with all of the projects that we've got. We kind of just split them out.

Right. In an average week, then between your own client and I would assume you're probably interfacing with your clients on a weekly basis. You know, we.

Sometimes daily, to be fair.

How many calls between your own clients then that you're managing and kind of jumping. I'm assuming probably occasionally you're jumping on other people's calls with them or maybe, maybe you're not. But how many. How much of your week is spent on calls then?

Goodness me. I mean, to be honest, between internal meetings, which we do, we do, you know, we keep in touch regularly. And client calls, I'd say a good half of my week definitely is speaking to clients is a big part of what we do, especially my role as kind of making sure everything's happening as it should do. I do join calls with my project managers, but a huge part of what our project managers do is manage their projects. We have a lot of power to crack on and get the best out of our clients and we have really good relationships with them. So, yeah, we do speak to them an awful lot. Depending on the client, depending on the project, it might be that we speak to them daily. Sometimes it might only be weekly. Smaller ones, it might be bi weekly or monthly. Monthly. But we are regularly in touch with them.

Right, that makes sense. So let's talk a little bit about NPS then, as you're implementing. The reason I ask about call volume is you've got a lot going on. So I'm assuming that's part of where the need for nps, the need for having. Hey, I need some quantitative measure of how likely are we to retain these customers. Obviously, at the end of the day, for agencies, the metric we're looking at is or on a customer by customer basis, kind of lifetime value, which is your indicator of how successful are we at retaining clients plus upselling them, getting them on the right services and capturing the value that we're hopefully delivering for them. So NPS is kind of a leading indicator to that. But when did you decide, what's the prompt for it? And then when did you decide to start implementing nps?

So the, I mean, the MPS process for us is actually. Is actually quite new. I became head of client services last year and this was one of the first things I ever really sunk my teeth into. So we really sort of started running it at the start of the year. It wasn't working very well to begin with. The kind of. The initial. The initial process we have wasn't great. The update wasn't great. So we kind of. We changed that up. And that's now a really well practiced process that we continue to replicate. And it was a goal of mine. I kind of saw that as a really good way to start making some improvements in my department that kind of separated my role from just project management. It was kind of a way to improve my department. But having an NPS score as a metric was kind of. Is just one thing. It's a really useful benchmark. You can add it to business reports. It's something to continually measure on. It gives a bit more of a scientific view of everything that's going on. For me, it's still really only the first step. So for us, it's more asking the NPS question, but then getting the feedback is actually really, really important because we instantly act on that feedback. We kind of always. We take what our clients say and then we make that actionable and we actually. We go and do it straight away. So it means that improvements are happening straight away and that we're constantly learning. And obviously the improvements we make means more success internally and, and externally with our clients as well, which hopefully in turn means more recommendations to work with us.

Right. Well, I guess first thing we should do here is just break down kind of NPS what it is. So NPS obviously stands for Net Promoter Score. It's the question everyone's seen a million times, which is obviously one of $10 to refer this product or service to a friend or colleague. And then from an equation perspective, it kind of breaks down into these three different buckets of promoters, which are your nines or your tens, passives, which are the sevens or eights, and then detractors, which are your 0 to 6. You used a word in this post that I was like, first of all, how British. Second, I didn't. I had the wrong impression. You said promoters are chuffed and loyal brand ambassadors. Yeah, I don't know why I thought chuffed meant the opposite way. Like, I'm a little bit upset. Chuffed is the same.

Oh, okay. Now in British, chuffed means super happy.

Okay, this is great to know. So what's a synonym for chuffed? Is this just like excited or does it mean something else?

Satisfied? Like super satisfied? Like really happy? Yeah.

Okay, so then. And then obviously to get Your score, you're taking your percentage of your promoters and subtracting the percentage of detractors. So if we just make the math really easy. If you have 10 people respond to this and you've got six people who give you a nine or a 10, then you get 60% of your audience is promoters. And if you have two people who are your detractors, that's 20%. So 60 minus 20 is 40 and you've got your score is a 40 on the NPS route.

You did that much, much quicker than I would have been able to. I actually have a really handy website that helps me do the calculations because math's not my strong point.

I've spent more time in NPS in the last couple years than.

Okay, interesting.

Than I would like to. Although I like the tool itself. I think it's a handy kind of metric that you can use and can be somewhat standard across places. But there's a lot of variables which we'll get into that are challenging. So industry average here and I think you mentioned in the post it's around 60 retinally. Put out some stuff a couple years ago or a year and a half ago, maybe that industry average in the services or in the agencies space specifically, it's like 62. And that's obviously coming from. It's an MPS tool. Let's talk a little bit about some of the technical pieces and then I want to get into impact and the strategic side of what you've built out. So technically, are you using HubSpot to measure MPS or what tool are you using to send and manage NPS surveys?

Yes, we did. We did use HubSpot. We used automated emails, which meant that people would kind of drop into workflows depending on their lifecycle stages and any of the specific kind of categories we put them in. It wasn't working. The uptake was not great. People's. I mean, everyone's busy. People's inboxes are full anyway. So now, so to speak, I am the tool. Me with my slide presentation, on the call with my account manager. We are, we're the ones doing it now. So it's, it's technically a manual process, but it's actually not really a process at all. It's actually a conversation.

Okay, so you're actually asking them, are you reading, Are you saying that script verbatim to them on a scale of 1 to 10?

Yep.

And then.

Well, we change it a little bit. We kind of sort of. Usually we sort of say on a scale of 1 to 10 or you know, 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us? Or how much do you love us is sometimes if we're really close to them, we might change it. But yeah.

So then they're giving you an answer. Where are you? Does that live in a Google spreadsheet or where are you putting that information?

It does live in a spreadsheet. Yes. We have a agency scorecard which is, covers all sorts of different metrics that we report on bi weekly and it lives in there and it gets updated each. Every coup weeks.

Yep. Okay, makes sense. And then obviously their follow up question is, you know, what's the, I assume you're following that up with why do you give the score that you give?

Or they go negative.

Yeah, makes sense. And then that's where you're talking about, hey, we're taking actions then off of what, what feedback they give.

Yeah, exactly that.

Okay, makes sense. How frequently are you asking people?

So we ask all of our retainer clients at least every quarter. So that means every three months we have, we have a proper meeting with them, we have a shortish presentation where we might go over activities from the last three months. What's coming up over the next three months, what's going well, what's not going so well. And then we always ask that question right at the end. If they are just smaller project clients, we'll probably tend to ask at the end of that project on delivery.

Yep, that makes sense. And then in terms of who gets surveyed, I'm assuming most of the time on client calls, you've got one point of contact, maybe two. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, so we ask, every client gets asked. We're in the process of asking everyone as we go along, but everyone will at some point be asked and it will be the key stakeholders that deal with their project lead on an ongoing basis.

Okay, so just to say back to you then, if you've got, let's say you were dealing with a marketing manager at a manufacturer, but the VP of marketing or owner of the business, depending on the size of the business, is the one writing the checks but not getting on calls with you. Are you sending that via email then? Or are you calling them directly at some point or just trying to pull them into a call to ask that question, like on a quarterly planning call. How are you making sure, I guess that you get the touch points who maybe impact the decision but aren't on the weekly calls with you?

Yeah, we're actually really lucky at Findling Agency. We work with the clients that we work with in general, we are always in touch with the key decision maker. So we either speak to the CEO, the MDs, or as you say, the people writing the checks. We are fully in contact with them. If they're not on the quarterly retainer calls for whatever reason, if they're busy, yes, we would always give them a call. We would speak to them separately. As I said, the key is to speak to the people that you are dealing with every day because they are the one that can tell you how well or how well you're not doing.

Right. Okay, so let's talk about the impact. First of all, you wrote in here about kind of your takeaways and experience with NPS. So what is finally agencies NPS?

So we are currently running at 80. So we have approximately 25 clients that we're currently working with on kind of various levels. That number is probably bigger, but you know, on different various levels. And because the process is fairly new, we are still working our way through a lot of those and depending on kind of where they are at their lifecycle. But as I say that everyone gets asked regularly enough that we are constantly reporting on that number.

Are you leveraging that? Do you know if. Or it seems like that's a number that I would want to be pointing out. NPS internally, I don't know that we've ever done a huge public push on it, but we should. Or we could, I guess is another way to say it. You certainly could as well. Obviously, anytime that you're picking out a metric, if that's not the industry accepted metric, it's hard to say, well, we're an 80 and someone else. It's all internally reported, so anybody can just say, yeah, we're 98. But are you all using that in your marketing? Obviously it's on the blog, which is super cool that you wrote about it and put yourself out there. But are you using that in marketing.

Or sales at all currently? Not as a metric, no. But that kind of brings me back to the point of it's not that the metric and the number itself is only really the starting point. So the biggest thing for us is the feedback and then the positivity or the structural help that clients give us when they give us feedback. So a big one for us is customer testimonials and we usually have a videographer in house and we do a lot of video work and a project that we obviously used to work on post. Covid. Pre Covid, sorry, was heading out and meeting with our clients. Now we will be doing that more again. And the best part of it is that is it your clients are your biggest selling point. So for us, the metric is the starting point. And then going out to those clients that we work brilliantly with and getting a testimonial from them, recording us, having an interview with them and discussing our projects and all that stuff, and then reporting on the results of the projects, which we always do. We always, we post a lot of case studies, we post a lot of results reports. All of that material gathered together with the metric is just such a fantastic story to sell.

Right, so you are. Got so many different questions here, but you're three quarters into running NPS now as we're recording this since the beginning of Q4 here. So how has that been? Are you. Do clients know who aren't your clients or are working with a different account manager? They know, oh, Amber's on the call. I'm going to get asked NPS or how's that repeat conversation been?

No, I think they see me on the call. They think, what have we done wrong? No, I'm only kidding. I'm only kidding. No, I think because it's part of the process now, our project leads, we ask the question all the time. They expect it to come up. It's not supposed to be an intimidating question. It's not supposed to be a question where they suddenly think, if I'm honest, I'm going to upset someone or I'm just going to give them loads of great positive praise because that's all we want to do. It's not supposed to be a difficult question. It's supposed to be a conversation starter. It's supposed to open up about. It's meant to be transparent. It's meant to help our communication going forward. So, yeah, the more we ask our clients, kind of actually, the more they get into it and the more that they see that it's helpful. I think it's always a slightly strange question to be asked for the first time. And it does. It can put you on the spot. But I think if you can't answer that question or if it's an uncomfortable question that you're asked and you don't want to say it there and then we've got work to do anyway. So to me, the honesty is right.

Well, I think you. There's a couple of things I like about what you're doing that are really cool. So in our NPS setup, I want to isolate the person that they have a relationship from from the person who's asking the Question, I don't want them to have to give me an answer in front of the person they deal with on a day to day basis because I think that is easy to kind of buy. You know, you don't want to, you have to make a decision in that moment. Do I want to potentially offend somebody who I'm going to work with or talk to on a daily basis and I have some type of relationship with? But you've mentioned a couple different things here. One is it's part of your process. So you mentioned uptake rate and what that normally then looks like for agencies is sending out emails. And nobody, if you introduce that to 25 clients today who've never had to do that before, most of the time they're just going to ignore that. So the cool thing about running a services based business is you get to make whatever the rules are around what it's like to work with you. So if you set strong expectations on the front end for every new client who's working with us, this is just part of what you do when you work with us. You pay your monthly bills, you show up to your calls on time and you have to answer your NPS survey. And that's like those, those are non negotiables. You get to make those rules and set them up. And so you've forced that on people by doing it on a call. And then the real key is exactly what you said, which is NPS is a great metric. It's awesome to put on a scorecard and to work around and you need those central points. But the real magic is not asking people the survey question. The real magic is what do you do with the answers from that and how do you continue to build and strengthen those relationships? You'd mentioned we're taking action right away. So someone tells you, hey, I'm an eight. They're passive. The obvious question is what's one thing we could have done to make your experience better? What's the difference? Why did you not score it lower than that? Why did you not score it higher than that? You got all these different follow up questions. Are there any specific examples that come to mind of how you've dealt with that feedback right away to improve client relationships?

I think largely, usually, I mean it would come, I think communication is a big one. You know, sometimes if a particularly busy period, you know, communication can sometimes fall down. I mean, that's both sides. A lot of the work we do relies quite heavily on client input. You know, from an education point of view, we're working in quite a technical sector. So a lot of the time we rely heavily on our clients being able to give us information, you know, something crucial that you have to do, you know, every other day or something during the week. You know, we work with them to make it as easy as we possibly can.

Right, that makes sense. And then, so I guess a couple questions. Is there a point at which. Let's say you're talking to an agency, which we are right now, obviously, but they're thinking about MPS or this conversation. As I'm wondering, should we implement it? Is there a team that's too small to bother setting up NPS, or is there a point where you're like, hey, 25 people sounded, 25 clients sounded right, or 10 clients would have been the right place to put. Is there a right place to put these types of metrics in place and systems?

I don't think so. I don't think so. I think obviously the smaller you are, you know, we have a handful of clients that we adore. Well, I should say, obviously we adore working with all of our clients. We love all of our clients. But, you know, we do have a selection of clients we've worked with for a long time. We have really well established relationships with who would always score us really, really highly. And of course they feed into the great school that we do have. But time and time again, we do great things. We will always have the odd thing that we can improve on and we can do and we continue to do better. But, you know, if you. If you've only got a small number of clients and they all love you, it's going to inflate and you're going to look fantastic, you know, but then again, that's. That's where it comes into it is just a metric. And that's only the starting point. You should always be asking, no matter how many clients you have, you should always be asking them, how well are we doing? What can we do better? That's the biggest part of it, I think maybe, yeah, maybe the metric side of things, you could probably have a limit. Otherwise you'll be, as I say, inflated and look. And look much better than you are. Not necessarily true. I'm sure people are fantastic. But yeah, I'd say you do need to take that into account.

Right. That makes sense. And I didn't prep you to go down this road, but you mentioned something earlier that always catch my attention. You mentioned scorecard. Are you running on the eos or do you have.

Okay, yeah.

So on that scorecard then on a weekly basis are there other feel free to share what you're comfortable sharing or not sure what you're not going to share. But what are some of the other key metrics that you care about from I'm thinking specifically of your role kind of leading client success at an agency. What are some of those metrics that you care about?

So I mean our EOS system is we have all the team leaders from all of our, all the delivery teams are in there. So from a digital point of view, I mean we report on the number of marketing leads we've received that month. I think we do them bi weekly as we report on that quite heavily. My NPS score is in there. We report on business one that week. We report on our financial status which is obviously helpful from us internally, the number of blogs written, the number of blogs published, that sort of thing. Because we, you know we put out there quite a lot about how important education is and we do a lot of content for our clients. We then practice what we preach and then we do a lot of that as well. So we report on quite a wide spectrum of things. To be honest with just because we have everybody in our, in our, in our company, in our agency management wise comes to those meetings and reports on what their teams are doing.

Right. That's awesome. So in those blogging numbers those are your internal like the findly agency content production. That's awesome. One of the things I think obviously the challenge with mentioned earlier like lifetime value of clients is one of the biggest metrics to pay attention to the problem is it's too. You don't know the lifetime value of someone until they're no longer. Until that lifetime is ended. So that's what we're really trying to use NPS as kind of a proxy for is how likely are we to retain clients. When you get clients who say a 6 or lower they're a detractor. What is in your playbook or what are some of your go tos? What are the things that you are looking to do to fix and how do you know when to draw the line between saying this relationship is not working, we're better off moving on from them versus hey, this is one that we just have an issue in communication or we haven't had enough time. Expectations are just off a little bit here but it's a good account that we should still continue working.

It's a really tricky situation. I have to say. We are lucky that we've not been in that situation very often and to be Honest, if you have a detractor who is not happy, the chances are you already know about it. So it's not going to be a surprise when it comes to that retaining review. It's not going to be a surprise when you suddenly have that, that meeting to discuss the activities. You will know that things aren't going well and hopefully you would have already been starting to do things to make that better. As much, you know, whatever is in your power to make better, you're already doing that. So that when you're having these regular meetings you say, well, you know, we've tried to do this and here's what we've implemented and here's how this has helped and here's how this hasn't and it was in your power to make better, you're already doing that. So that when you're having these regular meetings you say, well, you know, we've tried to do this and here's what we've implemented and here's how this has helped and here's how this hasn't. And you know, it's a constant, an iterative process. But unfortunately there are, you know, you do have those clients where unfortunately the relationship is for whatever reason, on whatever side is not ideal. We would always schedule up follow up calls. We would always, I would always say, you know, we can take this offline and you and I can have a conversation separate from the delivery teams and really get to the, get to the bottom of it and get that feedback through. And again, a huge part of what we do is retrospective meetings as well. So you know, we were always talking about how great projects are and we go through retrospectives and we talk about yes, we need to do this again. And yes, this was great, let's replicate it. But we have to, you really have to focus on the negatives as well. You have to focus on what is not going so well, whether that's when a client, if and when a client leaves, or even if it's just the end of a project. There's always going to, going to be things that you could do better. But I think the main point of communication and what we really strive to do is for nothing to ever be a surprise. We are, we speak to our clients so regularly and we're in touch regularly and reporting all the time and we report monthly that if a problem comes up, we would have faced it head on. And it's not seen as, it's not seen as something that, you know, will absolutely kill the relationship. And you know, as I say, we try Our best at all times and we learn and we keep going. Right.

Okay, let's flip the script then to the other side. Your Most chuffed, your 10, your best promoters are there standard act you mentioned. We care about testimonials and refer, like getting referrals back in. That's one of the items on our score. We're running EOS as well. One of the things that we look at on a weekly basis outside of NPS is on the scorecard as well and NPS by service line. But. But we care about how many of those people who say they love us are actually doing what promoters do and promoting us as well. Because that's a huge growth lover. Are there go to things when you. Someone says they were a 10? Like, are you going right into will you leave us a clutch review or will you. Do you make, you know, do you have anybody in mind who you can make a recommendation to? Are there go to things that you have or is it case by case? What's the playbook on that side?

I think it's probably case by case and would largely depend on whether they're a retainer or a project client with us. But I think the go to for us would always be to at least gather a testimonial, which we would pop on our website. We then are. We're hot on social media. LinkedIn is a big platform that we use for our clients and for ourselves. So any testimonials, any, you know, client videos that we do, we're always. We'd be then sharing on social. They then be, you know, they become part of our marketing journeys. And again, we do written case studies on our websites as well, where we kind of show. For example, if it was a rebrand, we'd show what the client looked like before and what they look like now. We'd then include a testimonial. If we were lucky to have got a video with them, we would include that as well. And I think our website and our LinkedIn channel is kind of our biggest push for that sort of thing.

So one of the things I'm gonna give a shout out here to Jeremy wise, who runs Rise 25 along with John Corcoran. They run the podcast right now for us. But one of the things that they do really well is around social proof. So Jeremy and I were on a Zoom. This was like a couple months ago, and I was just telling him it's been a great experience. And right away he was like. In that moment was like, hey, we're on Zoom already. Let's just record it real quickly. And so it made it super easy, no extra friction for me to go record a 90 second or two minute long testimonial snippet. Here's been my experience working with them. And so that opportunity, like in that moment, the cool thing about you asking folks live is you get the opportunity right then to say, hey, let's schedule. Either schedule follow up right then or you can get it, capture it in that moment. So that makes a ton of sense. Are you normally lining up? I would assume, especially if you're doing a longer case study, you're probably lining up a follow up call off of that versus recording live.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean our case studies take a little bit of time to put together because we kind of, we write the content around it, we go back and we pull all the stats and we do, we do some sort of like number crunching just to kind of really hone in on what we, where we were benchmarking and then where we are now. But yeah, I mean if ever things are, you know, when things are going great, we grab a testimonial, even if it's literally just typing away what that person has said and then we can make it into testimonial later and then they can, they can just approve it before we put it anywhere. If it's, yeah, if it's a case that we want to do and we, you know, we want to put them as part of that new customer testimonial video project that we have. We, we tend to, we tend to put those in and we actually tend to do more videoing with them, with them during those, those sessions. So we might, we might capture campaign footage at the same time as capturing our own testimony. So it doesn't feel like they are, they're just working hard to promote us. We also, then we return the favor and we. Some campaign work or you know, we, we have another meeting when we're there and it's, it's just, it's just kind of part of building a relationship really. It's just kind of, it's just feels, it feels like a natural relationship builder for sure.

That's awesome. Well, Amber, this has been really fun. You've given folks a lot to think about and a lot of helpful feedback. Just firsthand experience kind of running nps. So let's, let's point people to a couple of places. One is obviously finally agency, which we'll include in the show notes is the agency site. Is there anywhere else that you'd want to direct people is the best place to go connect on LinkedIn or is there a better way to reach out and connect with you?

Absolutely no. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with the rest of the finally team on LinkedIn. We have our own. I don't know if you've heard of, seen or heard of us promoting the Engine Room, which is kind of a webinar podcast that we do. That's another great. You can follow that hashtag on LinkedIn FinallyEngine room, where we give out all sorts of different help and advice from social media all the way through to web and digital and SEO and that sort of thing. The resource section on our website is fantastic. We're writing blogs all the time and it's the people in our agency actually writing the blogs on their discipline. So we're regularly posting all sorts of new things up there. So, yeah, absolutely. Find us on LinkedIn and you won't be able to. You won't miss us. We talk on there an awful lot.

That's awesome. Cool. Well, make sure we link up to the Engine Room and. And all other resources that you mentioned here. But Amber, I appreciate it. Thanks for making time and coming on with me today.

No worries. Thank you very much for having me.