Experience Management Resources

This year, ClearlyRated has the honor of recognizing our first ever cohort of 10 Year Diamond Award winning firms! This award is the crowning achievement for Best of Staffing firms, earned only by a handful of elite organizations that have won the Best of Staffing designation for 10 consecutive years. Among them is TekPartners, an IT staffing provider headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, FL.TekPartners has earned the Best of Staffing designation for Talent Satisfaction 12 years in a row! We had the opportunity to sit down with Jay Bevilacqua, CEO of TekPartners, to hear his thoughts on the Best of Staffing program and what the 10 Year Diamond Award means to the TekPartners team.

Jay Bevilacqua, CEO, TekPartners

What does winning the Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award for Client Satisfaction meant to you and the TekPartners team?

Jay: Winning this award demonstrates that we are staying true to our commitment to give our talent the best possible experience each time they work with us. It is always our goal to provide superior service to each candidate we work with, so seeing the overwhelmingly positive survey responses is a sign that we are in sync with our talent. We take the feedback we receive very seriously and have used those comments to improve our services, continuously honing our processes to meet the changing demands of the marketplace. Winning this award shows that we doing our best and adhering to our Core Values, as well as our mission to help connect the right people with the right jobs so both our talent and our clients can succeed.

What does it take to maintain such a high level of excellence for such a long time?

Jay: It takes a great leadership team, a collaborative environment, and the ability to pivot and adapt when things change. We have weathered an enormous amount of changes in just the last few years, and it was all possible thanks to our team’s ability to harness strategic thinking and a persevering attitude toward the challenges we’ve met along the way. Our company is rooted in the idea of “people helping people” and that’s what it all comes down to – maintaining a focus on helping each person we work with by putting them foremost as we strive to place them.

What's an important lesson that you've learned from participating in Best of Staffing for so many years?

Jay: It’s important to be open to change and to accept all comments, both positive and negative, with grace. Even the occasional negative comment or review can be a learning experience for our team and help us improve our service. Being open to taking that feedback and utilizing it to create positive change is essential to surviving and adapting in our industry. There is always room to grow and change for the better, so keeping an open mind and building on past success is an important part of creating future success.

Were there any surprises along the way?

Jay: The pandemic was certainly a surprise! Any journey this long will have its ups and downs, but the last few years were highly unusual. Our industry definitely saw a great deal of change, but we worked to build deeper relationships with our clients and talent, seizing opportunities as they arose. While it may have been rocky for a little while in some ways, we always knew that the build back was going to be better than the set back. The one thing that came out of all of this is that we all learned to work in a different way, and we got a little closer from working further apart. We have been able to provide life-changing opportunities for our talent as well as for our own employees as a result.

What advice would you give to someone about to participate in Best of Staffing for the first time?

Jay: Be open to the feedback. Take both the good and bad responses to heart, but don’t dwell on it either. You can learn something from each response in order to improve services and processes for next time. Being able to have this insight into your talent’s thoughts on your company is an invaluable tool, so take advantage of that in order to work toward improving and refining your processes along the way.

Do you have any exciting plans for showing off your 10 Year Diamond Award?

Jay: We proudly display our awards in our lobby for everyone to see as they come into our headquarters, so we are looking forward to adding this one to a place of honor. We also featured the award in a press release and on our social media.

Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to share?

Jay: This award means a lot to us as an organization because it shows how we measure up against other organizations in the industry. We want to be a top provider of IT staffing for both our clients and consultants and consistently provide superior service by going above and beyond the competition. This award not only shows us what we are doing right, but helps drive us toward greater achievements in the future.

“2022 Will Go Down As The Year Executives Were Forced To Care About EX” – a prediction by Forrester analysts. This is especially true for staffing firms which tend to focus on client experience (CX) and talent experience (TX) over employee experience (EX). But that needs to change. High internal turnover has been accepted as par for the course for too long.

Our industry now faces frighteningly accelerated turnover which can ruin your ability to deliver positive CX and TX. You must, therefore, win at EX before you have a prayer of success. It’s cemented its position as the next big differentiator for staffing firms.

3 Tips to Get Data and Feedback on Your Employee Experience

To begin, get a solid understanding of where your EX stands now. Gather objective quantitative data and subjective qualitative employee feedback. This information can help you identify what you’re doing right, where you have space to improve, and where your biggest risks lie. By capitalizing on what you do well and learning how you can improve from your employees, you can improve engagement, boost employee wellbeing, and better support DEI initiatives.One of the simplest and fastest ways to obtain essential EX data is via an employee survey program. Use these three tips to execute an employee survey that maximizes its positive impact on your firm:

1. Don’t go too general. Do get specific. Vanilla questions yield vanilla feedback. SO, invite feedback on specific aspects of the employee experience, especially your firm’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. DEI plays a major role in employee experience and engagement. Research shows that inclusive companies are more likely to coach people for improved performance and identify and build leaders–both factors contribute to better retention rates. So include questions that help assess your firm’s performance related to DEI and invite feedback on how you can improve these efforts.
2. Don’t ask for names. Do keep things anonymous. When you launch an employee survey, you want real, honest feedback–right? You’ll be more likely to get it if you keep responses anonymous. This gives your employees the freedom to give candid feedback without fear of retaliation. When you can give your staff peace of mind that their feedback is anonymous, it often increases response rate and yields honest feedback—two elements that go a long way in transforming your EX efforts. So, consider working with a third-party survey provider that will ensure anonymity is protected.
3. Don’t make things complicated. Keep it simple to enable ongoing tracking and unlock clear comparisons. Implement an employee satisfaction metric like Net Promotor® Score (NPS) that can be tracked over time and compared across teams within your firm. The ability to compare scores by manager, office location, or demographics like gender, race, and age can help you identify and learn from bright spots as well as draw out insights on exactly where you need to make improvements. It also allows you to compare your EX to other organizations that use the same metric.

If ever there was a time to invest in EX, it’s now. Internal employee engagement and retention are more essential than ever in staffing and recruiting. Take the next step: Learn more about ClearlyRated’s Employee Survey Program.

This year, ClearlyRated has the honor of recognizing our first ever cohort of 10 Year Diamond Award winning firms! This award is the crowning achievement for Best of Staffing firms, earned only by a handful of elite organizations that have won the Best of Staffing designation for 10 consecutive years. Among them is Carlton Staffing, a staffing agency headquartered in Houston, TX, serving clients across the Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth area since 1980.

Carlton Staffing has earned the Best of Staffing designation for Client Satisfaction 10 years in a row. We had the opportunity to sit down with Annette Monks, President of Carlton Staffing, to hear her thoughts on the Best of Staffing program and what the 10 Year Diamond Award means to the Carlton Staffing team.

Annette Monks, President, Carlton Staffing

What does winning the Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award for Client Satisfaction meant to you and the Carlton Staffing team?

Annette: Well, to win it one time, the ClearlyRated Best the Staffing, is a big deal. However, if you win it 10 times I think it means that we’re not a one hit wonder. I think for us it’s just such an affirmation that we’re doing things right.

What does it take to maintain such a high level of excellence for such a long time?

Annette: I think it takes four things. The first thing is obviously the right people internally. They have to be hard working, have personal drive and passion for what they do, love our company, and hold themselves accountable – that’s for sure. The second thing is you got to have great systems in place: a great sales system and a great recruitment operations system, which we have. Then we have a disciplined execution. We track metrics and results, and we make changes where needed, so that’s critical. Number three: we listen – a lot – for opportunities for improvement, whether it’s this survey, internal surveys for our staff, for temporary employees, even our vendors. We listen and we try to improve on the feedback that we get. And then the last thing is, and I think the most important, is we just keep it fun. We celebrate all the victories, and we try to make it fun so people want to stay and work for us.

What’s an important lesson that you’ve learned from participating in Best of Staffing for so many years?

Annette: So this is very simple, but I think it’s important to keep your information about all your clients up-to-date. I mean honestly, even for back office-personnel, because people move a lot, and it makes it very difficult to reach the response rate. If you’re sending out surveys to people who don’t exist, or are not in that company anymore, it’s not helpful. That’s a big lesson we learned.

Were there any surprises along the way?

Annette: Yeah, there were good surprises and there were… opportunities, I would say. The good surprises were that the recruiters were surprised about all the Shout Outs that they got from their clients. They didn’t think that they made that kind of difference. I was not surprised at all, but they were surprised and that’s cool. One thing that surprised us, which I kind of mentioned earlier, was that it’s very hard to get the response rate, it really is. You think your clients are going to respond, but they’re busy. And they don’t find it as important as you do, and I think that was a big surprise to us.

What advice would you give to someone about to participate in Best of Staffing for the first time?

Annette: Ok, a few things. First, I would definitely use the material that you’re given from ClearlyRated regarding communication ahead of time with your clients. If they don’t know what’s coming, and they don’t understand the importance, they probably will not respond. And make sure your contacts that are no longer there are out of the system, so basically: clean database. Then the last one is, I would assign one person should own it from start to finish – on all the aspects – so that everything is properly executed. Otherwise things will go undone.

Do you have any exciting plans for showing off your 10 Year Diamond Award?

Annette: Well, the good new is that ClearlyRated gives us lots of ideas, and we’re using them all. We do have it on our [email] signature as well, which is really helpful because people ask about it, so that’s pretty cool. We’re going to use everything that you guys have given us and that’s awesome.

Is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to share?

Annette: The Best of Staffing designation is no joke – it’s an investment in time and money and it’s hard to achieve. The fact is, though, we’ve attracted clients and internal staff as a result of having this, so it really does pay for itself and it’s worth the effort.

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Staffing Firms Can (and Must) Hold on to Their Talent

Virtually every business leader understands the importance of customer experience (CX). And, thanks to historically high turnover, most are grappling with a forced reckoning related to employee experience (EX). But staffing companies must deal with yet a third ‘X’: Talent experience (TX). How do they juggle all three? Well, they’re actually interrelated.To explore how the three X’s dovetail, especially in today’s competitive labor market, ClearlyRated’s CEO Eric Gregg led a webinar for the American Staffing Association (ASA) with guest speaker Daniel Culbertson, senior economist for the Indeed Hiring Lab. Their mission: To explain why firms must prioritize employee experience (EX) alongside client experience (CX) and talent experience (TX)—and how to do it. Daniel shared insights about the current playing field using proprietary data from the Indeed Hiring Lab. Then, he and Eric discussed how firms can win the hiring and retention game. In case you missed it, the recap with key insights is below, but don’t miss out on the full webinar. Watch it on-demand with an ASA member login: The Rise of Employee Experience and Client Experience.

Key Insights: The Labor Market Playing Field

Like any economist worth his salt, Daniel described the labor market using supply and demand. When it comes to supply, the U.S. is roughly 2.5-3 million workers shy compared with pre-pandemic numbers. And while demand lowered by 20 million jobs at the start of the pandemic, the tides have turned. Companies are hurting for people to fill their jobs. While supply is low, demand is now high. In fact, U.S. job postings on Indeed are 61% higher than the pre-pandemic baseline. For details on which occupational sectors have the steepest competition and which are faring best, watch the webinar.

So, what’s driving this depressed supply of workers (both employees and talent for staffing companies)? We all know about the Great Resignation, the Turnover Tsunami, the Employee Exodus, but that relates to participating members of the workforce. What about those who were forced out of a job early in the pandemic and haven’t yet chosen to come back? Why haven’t they returned? Will they? Daniel shared data from a recent Indeed Hiring Lab Job Search Survey, exploring potential answers for the nonexistent rebound in people looking for work:

• Unemployment payments did not account for most people who stayed out of the workforce, so the tapering of those payments hardly made a dent.
• Many people have chosen to take early retirement.
• Disruptions to in-person school and daycare continued throughout 2021, even after vaccinations were widely available.

Indeed’s Job Search Survey showed that, while COVID fears have lessened, "care responsibilities" are increasingly keeping unemployed workers from looking for jobs (even after the school year started). And it doesn’t help that the childcare sector has experienced a nosedive in job seeker interest. Daniel pointed out that disruptions to school and childcare disproportionately affect fields that tend to be filled mostly by women as well as industries and companies that depend on part-time and temporary workers (hi, Staffing!). Yet another challenge for staffing is that the HR field is aggressively hiring. “And where does HR love to find its talent?” Eric asked. If you’re in staffing, you know the answer: From recruitment firms. As a result, the two staffing roles with the highest turnover are account executives and recruiters. Our current labor shortage, therefore, hits the staffing industry in two ways: a low supply of talent for placements and a struggle with internal retention. For more information, including turnover data broken down by gender and race/ethnicity, watch the webinar.

What You Can Do About It: The Rise of EX

So why is EX so important? According to Eric, it’s the first ‘X’ to focus on: “Internal employee retention and engagement mark where companies will win or fall behind during the next couple years.” Think about it: If you can’t keep good employees with positive attitudes, how will your CX fare? What about your TX? When you can’t hold onto your people, you risk underserving both your talent and your clients. Internal staff stability is, therefore, key to growth.If you can succeed with EX, your firm will gain the competitive advantage of continuity, keeping good people who deliver outstanding CX and TX. Firms that fail at EX will flounder. As their internal talent leaks away, so will their external talent pool. And as that pool shrinks, so will their client rosters. So, work to keep your employees. Understand what they want and how you can deliver it, realizing that what you want and need from a job may not align with their wants and needs. We touched on this topic in a blog post highlighting the importance of DEI and CX, relating directly to EX. As Daniel pointed out, report after report shows that what most employees want right now is flexibility. According to Indeed data, remote work continues to bring heavy interest from job seekers. That’s not groundbreaking news, but employers aren’t responding quickly enough. Just 7% of employees want to be in an office full-time, yet 38% of companies remain in office environments full-time. Just keep in mind that an increasing number of companies offer remote work, so you can’t count on this as your main differentiator when it comes to flexibility. Given the nationwide struggle with dependent care, consider how to offer flexible options that better support parents and caregivers beyond working remotely. Finally, good workers are in high demand. That means other employers will pay to poach yours. You may have dabbled in short-term hiring band-aids like signing bonuses, but if you want long-term retention, then growth in base pay is essential. That’s especially true when you pair the tight labor market with inflation. Employees’ costs of living are rising. At the same time, they see evidence both of their strengthened negotiating power and of increased mobility between careers. Yet Forrester analysts made the bold prediction that 100% of organizations will fail to appropriately adjust compensation this year. Don’t prove them right. Check your compensation and adjust accordingly to market demand.Companies that anticipate employee needs (and proactively provide for them) poise themselves for victory on the talent playing field. Want more? Use your ASA login to view the on-demand webinar for more data, trends, and takeaways (plus earn ASA CE credit and/or 1.0 PDC for SHRM-CP® or SHRM-SCP®).

We are very pleased to announce the 2022 winners of ClearlyRated's Employee Satisfaction award!While we have a long track record of recognizing firms in the staffing and accounting industries for their exceptional client satisfaction scores, this is only the second year that we invited organizations to survey their internal stakeholders—their employees—and to weigh their employee satisfaction levels against the rest of the industry.Without further ado, here are the winners of our 2022 award for employee satisfaction, by industry:

2022 Best of Staffing® Winners for Employee Satisfaction

• Abacus Group
• Accountable Healthcare Staffing
• ALKU
• Allyon
• APT Staffs
• Atlas Staffing, Inc.
• Brilliant
• Eastridge Workforce Solutions
• Engauge Workforce Solutions
• ExecuTeam
• GDH
• Horizontal Talent
• Infinity Consulting Solutions
• Luttrell Staffing Group
• Medix
• Medstaff National Medical Staffing
• Motus
• PrideStaff
• PrideStaff Financial
• RPC Staffing
• Rx relief
• Sparks Group
• Sterling
• Synergis
• Talon Professional Services
• TempStaff
• The DAVIS Companies
• The HT Group
• The Reserves Network Inc.
• The Squires Group
• Tricom Technical Services
• V-Soft Consulting Group, Inc
• Workforce Unlimited
• YUPRO

2022 Best of Accounting Winners for Employee Satisfaction

• Aldrich Advisors
• Gauvreau & Associates CPA
• McCay Duff LLP
• Stern Cohen
• Stone Rudolph & Henry

We can't speak highly enough of the firms on this list who dedicated time, energy, and resources to asking their internal staff for feedback and ensuring their employees felt supported. In a year marked by high turnover and labor market volatility, high marks of employee satisfaction are truly something to be proud of. Congratulations to these winners!

As a global career platform helping both candidates get job opportunities and recruiters reach out to them through optimized campaigns, Talent.com often receives questions from clients and partners about recruiting specific generations. In this article, find four factors you can apply to your recruitment strategies specific to hiring Millennials, who make up the largest portion of the workforce, and Zoomers, who are coming of age and gradually entering the workforce.

1. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Generally, Millennials and Zoomers tend to want to work for companies whose values are aligned with their own. This trend is often represented in their desire to join a company with a strong stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion. In fact, according to a 2020 survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 79% of new graduates consider a diverse workforce to be ‘’very important.’’ However, as an organization it’s vital to stay away from pseudo-activism and make sure your efforts are authentic. This can be accomplished by using real employee pictures, videos, and quotes on your career page and in your job adverts to highlight your existing diverse workforce, for example.Also, leveraging new technologies now available can be of great help with diversity initiatives. For instance, you can use a programmatic platform to get your job advertisements on niche job boards to diversify your talent sources. Utilizing blind resume screening methods to block out demographic information, or editing tools that make your job descriptions more inclusive, are other ways to make the recruitment process more equitable.

2. Mobile First Approach

It’s no secret that mobile technology is transforming the realm of recruitment. An average of 70% of job seekers are searching and applying for jobs on their mobile devices according to Talent.com data, and that percentage will no doubt increase over time. Therefore, to attract Millennial and Zoomer talent, it’s important to begin adopting not only a mobile-friendly approach, but a mobile-first approach.A fully mobile-responsive website is a must. Plus, with texting as the preferred form of communication for Millennials and Zoomers, now is the time to include it in your recruitment strategies. This can be accomplished by leaning on the technological capabilities of your existing job platform partners, such as using SMS job alerts. For example, candidates can sign up to receive relevant, daily job ads directly on their phone as they job hunt on the go. What’s more, engagement with SMS alerts is on the rise. On Talent.com, the delivery rate of SMS job alerts has increased by 29%, while the click-through-rate has seen a 10% increase since 2019.Lastly, have you ever heard of recruitment chatbots? These digital assistants can be useful for busy recruiters looking to save time, send mass texts, and reach younger generations. Chatbots can schedule interviews, help with pre-screening candidates, and are available 24/7.

3. Flexible Work Advantages

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of our personal and professional lives. The world is now learning how to better foster a more flexible work environment, something that Millennials and Zoomers have long preferred. Adjusting work hours to fit an employee’s needs is one example and, of course, working remotely. The option to work remotely from any city or even country is a highly coveted perk for a young workforce.This preference for remote work is clear from job seeker behavior on Talent.com; jobs advertised with ''remote work'' options are getting more clicks. If you have remote jobs to recruit for, don’t be afraid to include “work from home” in the job titles, as well as geo-expand your advertising. This means using your job platform to post your jobs in multiple locations at the same time to reach top talent in various cities.

4. Salary Transparency

Through Talent.com’s periodic user experience research, it was discovered that job seekers, by and large, want to see the salary associated with a job. Disclosing salary information early on (for example, directly in the job ad) saves time for candidates and recruiters. Plus, if the salary is competitive, it can give you an edge over other employers and even attract passive candidates.While a high salary is a great tool to attract quality hires, it certainly isn’t the only one and, sometimes, isn’t even the most attractive. In fact, Millennials and Zoomers report paying great attention to benefits and perks, such as pet-friendly offices or student loan repayment assistance, when evaluating a potential future employer.

Connecting with Technology

Take away with you one or all four of these tips, but know they are not the only tools available to you for recruiting young job seekers. Updating your recruitment strategy to be more inclusive, mobile first, and targeted to the aspects of work that appeal most to Millennials and Zoomers can be a complex task. It requires a multi-level strategy, and you can and should utilize technology to help.Another area to explore, for example, is the power of social media platforms for attracting Millennial and Zoomer candidates, from Instagram to TikTok and beyond. The young people entering the workforce are digital natives who grew up on smart phones and with the internet at their fingertips. Meet them virtually where they're at to find success in recruitment in 2022 and beyond!

Today, nearly every client experience in nearly every business service sector is driven or supported by rapidly-evolving digital technology. And as more firms invest in initiatives that measure and improve the client experience (commonly known as ‘CX initiatives’), we are seeing the significant impact of technological innovation on the implementation and outcomes of CX strategy.In our work as a client experience research firm as well as a client satisfaction survey provider, we’ve long enjoyed a multi-industry, cross-border view of the issues that are at the cutting edge of CX strategy for business service firms. And while there are hundreds of CX solutions clamoring for executive attention (and investment dollars), there are 5 technological trends we expect will serve as leading indicators for the solutions that will deliver outsized impact today, and keep your firm at the cutting edge of CX for years to come.

Here are our top 5 technological trends to watch for business service firms investing in a CX initiative:

1. Integrations (i.e. integrating client feedback data into your client database): Integrations are rapidly becoming the way of life in our software-empowered world. Businesses realize the exponential power that can be derived from data that exists beyond just one piece of technological “real estate.”Similarly, we are seeing integrations make waves in the CX space. The question, “Where does the client feedback data live?” draws a line in the sand between gate-keeping and democratizing access to that data. For example, most firms engaged in a CX program employ digital survey software to gather feedback from their clients. But if that survey data doesn’t make it into the platforms where your client-facing team can see it, weigh it, and take action on it (think CRM or ATS systems), then the CX program is cutting itself short on impact.More than that, integrating client feedback data into other business databases provides insight into deeper relationships between client sentiment (as recorded in your survey), client behavior (like contract size and renewal history), and client demographics (like the client’s industry, team size, and annual revenue). These side-by-side data points, and the trends that can be built when they are tracked together over time, offer a remarkable opportunity for forward-thinking firms to build a CX-centered business plan.
2. Automation (i.e. automating surveys to capture client feedback at critical moments): Just like integrations can help democratize access to client feedback data, they can also help reduce the amount of manual effort that goes into launching a survey, especially when it comes to identifying the right clients to invite feedback from and when to trigger that request.Let me take a step back… It’s common for businesses starting out with a CX program to conduct an annual or quarterly survey, “timing” the ask for feedback around a larger business cycle. This strategy makes sense for garnering feedback on the overall relationship with a client, especially when there is a great deal of effort that goes into moving through a single feedback cycle. Typically, most of this effort is spent sourcing, scrubbing, and finalizing client contact lists, and requires a team member (sometimes even an entire team) to manage the process to collect these critical insights from clients.Survey automation changes all of that. Through automated survey programs, businesses are able to trigger automatic surveys from their CRM or ATS database to specific clients at specific “moments in time.” You can ask questions that are tailored to each specific client and the critical moment that triggered the survey (i.e. onboarding, mid-contract, end-of-engagement, renewal, etc.), providing a number of new opportunities to gather critical intelligence on the client experience.
3. Predictive Analytics (i.e. leveraging client feedback for predictive modeling): In the section highlighting integrations, I touched on the benefits of merging client data sets to develop a more holistic view of a client’s behavior and sentiment profile. But that’s just the beginning. Beyond analyzing 1-to-1 relationships between client feedback and behavior, or even historical trends between them, there is an opportunity to mine these data sets in a way that develops predictive indicators that can help your firm model out future-state revenue. You can also use analytics to understand how resource allocation may impact a given client’s experience and willingness to continue working with your firm. One powerful example comes from my friends at Rehmann, a top 50 accounting and advisory firm, with locations across 3 states. They run a comprehensive, automated client survey program, but aren’t content to stop at “how are we doing?”. They also look at engagement levels in other ways, such as email, phone or in-person meetings, registration for webinars, and time-since-last-contact to develop a more fully formed understanding of their clients’ engagement. Wilson Allen, a consulting firm that helps professional service firms improve business performance, works alongside firms like Rehmann to help build and connect an entire ecosystem of engagement data to their core processes, putting the keys to growth in front of each partner in real-time.Many firms are barely scratching the surface of the predictive intelligence that can be mined across client data sets. This will most certainly be an area of investment and expansion in the world of CX for professional service providers.
4. Online reputation (i.e. translating client feedback into online ratings and reviews): Online ratings and reviews are a growing interest for providers of professional services. Since the onset of COVID-19, in-person connection and word-of-mouth marketing are more difficult to come by. Your brand’s online presence, and the virtual thoughts and feelings shared by your clients, significantly impact your chances of sourcing new opportunities and winning new clients. Leading-edge programs tie their CX initiatives directly to online reputation strategy. Working from real customer feedback, these firms drive new, validated online ratings and reviews to deliver more credible proof of the service they provide in the channel where prospects spend the majority of their time researching—online. Today this looks like adding functionality to your survey program that asks clients to rate you on your target websites (perhaps Google, Yelp, or Glassdoor if you’re focused on surveying employees). Some firms go further by investing in client feedback programs like G2 and ClearlyRated that automatically translate client satisfaction scores into online star ratings on a validated and indexed rating site. With prospective buyers increasingly turning to online research, and consistently trusting information from your existing clients more than any sales or marketing you could publish, we expect this technology trend to drive the future of CX strategy in an outsized way.
5. Mobile-first technology (i.e. centering mobile design and user experience in CX): Believe it or not, mobile technologies (i.e. smartphones) likely represent your firm’s primary channel for client engagement. Many other consumer-based industries have been fast to adopt this strategy, but business service providers have moved more slowly to adopt a mobile-first mindset and prioritize the mobile user experience in their CX strategy. In a survey conducted by Adobe, 92% of respondents consider their smartphone to be their primary device. In many firms, a shift towards mobile has already happened (or is happening) related to digital marketing efforts, but what does this look like for CX initiatives? First and foremost, ensure that any content you ask your clients to interact with, like surveys or third-party applications, are designed with mobile in mind (responsive design is the gold standard). You could even think about mobile as a separate communication channel from the web. Many CX technologies enable texting (in addition to emailing survey invitations) to supplement feedback campaigns, meeting clients where they are most likely to pay attention and improving engagement and responsiveness to survey requests.

For further information regarding technology trends and how they will impact the future of CX, please feel free to contact ClearlyRated—our expert team would be happy to walk through how we can assist your firm in designing a CX strategy for sustained ROI!

We know a positive client experience is a critical factor in any insurance firm’s success. In fact, recently published research suggests clients who have a poor experience with their firm (as indicated by their satisfaction rating) are nine times more likely to be actively looking for a new insurance provider1. And as the industry and our client base continue to navigate unprecedented change and disruption, many business leaders are taking another look at their existing CX programs to examine success, and look towards innovations that may deliver an outsized impact for their firm. At ClearlyRated, we’ve worked with more than 350 business service firms, including providers of commercial insurance, and our team has fielded more than 5 million surveys to fuel their CX initiatives. Here are 4 strategies that we have seen transform CX initiatives and fuel real growth in our modern business climate.

1. Understand the client journey. It can be easy to misinterpret the “client experience” as a monolith. But in reality the client experience is not static. It ebbs and flows with the client journey, which starts the moment a prospect decides to work with you (or even before, during the sales process). Understanding the client journey will help you build a more robust CX program by identifying critical moments when the client experience is most likely to be impacted. From onboarding to paying an invoice, renewing a contract, seeking additional services, or even—because it does happen—terminating a relationship with your firm, each of these moments represents a unique facet of the client experience that you can be capturing in your client survey program to fuel insights and transform your CX outcomes.
2. Add outsized value for true CX impact. If you think of your CX strategy as a series of levers, do you know which levers your team can pull to create an outsized impact on the client experience? Put differently, do you know which actions and processes to invest time and energy into that will demonstrably improve CX outcomes? Recent research identifies critical client perceptions that are tightly correlated with high satisfaction (as reported by the client)¹. Those perceptions include (from most valuable to least valuable):

1. These findings are an aggregate view of key drivers of client satisfaction for insurance providers based in the U.S., and as such they offer a strong starting point for identifying key areas of investment. But your firm can, and should, leverage your CX initiative to identify those client perceptions that are most tightly correlated with satisfaction in your own client base, and use that intelligence to build a plan for improving the client experience. Building a data-informed foundation for your CX strategy will deliver an outsized impact on any investment. According to McKinsey & Company, delivering a superior customer experience requires significant investments, relentless improvements, and collaboration across customer channels and business functions.
2. Reduce stress during the buying process. Prospective clients are facing a challenging and complex landscape when it comes to purchasing commercial insurance. In fact, 92% of business service buyers say they experience stress during the buying process². Competitive differentiation between service providers is slim, and in the aftermath of COVID-19, buyers are feeling more risk averse than ever. Fortunately, your CX program can help reassure prospects as they navigate these uncertain times. Asking for referrals from happy clients identified in your CX initiative can deliver on prospects’ most ideal resources during the purchase process: a referral from a friend or colleague1. Testimonials, the second most persuasive resource buyers use during their purchase decision, can (and I would argue, should!) be sourced directly from your CX initiative to supercharge business development efforts and deliver credible proof of the service you deliver. Similarly, satisfaction scores and online ratings (both of which can be tied into your CX program) go a long way towards easing the anxiety of the buyer, and are proven to be more persuasive than your own sales and marketing materials, even your website1.
3. Empower your client support team. At its heart, a CX initiative is an intelligence gathering campaign. But who has access to that intelligence, and how quickly? While it’s impossible to overstate the value of integrating client feedback into larger business initiatives, it’s even more critical to ensure that feedback is available to the teams who can use it to inform relationship efforts as soon as humanly possible. If you’re working with a digital client survey to source CX insights, be sure to integrate those findings into your CRM or database where client relationship managers and support teams have access. These folks are the face of your brand, they are the true source of the client experience. Empowering them with real-time feedback data will help them tailor the service they deliver based on the wants, needs, and sentiments of the clients in their portfolio. In short, giving client support teams access to client feedback in real time will empower them to perform to the best of their ability.

I hope these 4 strategies have provided new insights for thinking about (and measuring the success of) your firm’s CX initiative! If you’d like to discuss any of these strategies with my team, please feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to share more about our mindset related to CX strategy for insurance firms, details about our research, or to discuss how ClearlyRated can help your firm level-up its CX initiative. Interested in learning more about our NPS survey program? Click here for our feature on the Insurance Marketing and Communications Association's (IMCA) website.¹ Source: ClearlyRated’s 2021 Service Benchmark Study² Source: ClearlyRated’s 2020 Service Benchmark Study

Any firm that embarks on a CX (or “client experience”) initiative knows that means asking their clients for feedback. These days, that feedback method is usually a digital survey, sent to clients via email, asking for quantitative and qualitative feedback on the experience they’ve had with your firm. But how do you avoid exhausting your clients with questions, also known as "survey fatigue"?The benefits of implementing a digital survey are immense and we are certainly not telling you to stop. A well-designed digital survey provides access to client feedback in real-time, makes responses easy to search, segment, and filter, allows you to integrate client feedback data with your CRM, ATS, or other important client database, and sets the stage for a scalable CX initiative that grows with your organization and team. As more businesses implement CX initiatives and digital surveys, clients are, in-kind, being asked for feedback more frequently by the brands and service providers they work with. I’ve heard from many business and service leaders who are concerned about clients expressing overwhelm (survey fatigue) with the amount of feedback they’re being asked for. This can dramatically impact survey response rate as well as general client sentiment as it relates to your CX initiative.

What Can Your Firm Do About Survey Fatigue?

Survey fatigue is real. Your clients are experiencing a deluge of demands on their time, and everyone from their dentist to their coffee shop to their software provider are asking for feedback, and they’re asking often. Your firm is just one more drop in the bucket of feedback requests. When faced with survey fatigue, it’s easy to become discouraged, to think about surveying less or not at all. But, as any firm embarking on a CX initiative knows, asking for and responding to client feedback matters. We know that client satisfaction is tightly correlated to survey frequency—and that if the goal is truly to improve the client experience, that surveys must maintain their seat at the center of the strategy.

6 Strategies for Combating Survey Fatigue

We have found a few key strategies that, when integrated into a CX initiative, can help boost client engagement with your survey initiative and keep response rates high for the long run:

1. Personalize the ask. In their simplest form, surveys can feel wildly impersonal. Some might see this as a benefit but, in reality, an impersonal ask for feedback is a one-way ticket to low response rates. At ClearlyRated we find that the more personal the ask, the more likely a client is to take the time to provide feedback. We encourage firms to send survey invitation emails from an actual human (rather than a generic inbox) and to have relationship owners sending supplemental emails and making phone calls to encourage their clients to respond to the survey. Not only does the personal touch make it more likely that clients will respond, but it will begin to demonstrate the import of their feedback to your business.
2. Follow up on responses. Regardless of how a client responds to your survey, hearing back about their response goes a long way to keeping them engaged in the survey process. It’s critical to follow up with any unhappy clients (once you’ve identified a service issue the speed and caliber of your response are critical to retaining that account), but even clients who are “fine” or “happy” deserve to know that you have received and processed their feedback. This can be as simple as bringing up a client’s response on your next account call with them, taking time to thank them for their feedback, and using their feedback to guide the conversation about how you can create a remarkable experience for them going forward.
3. Communicate about results to your entire client-base. Your clients deserve to know what you learned from your survey, and what actions you plan to take based on it. Whether they participated in the survey or not, being privy to the findings and next steps will help your clients feel included and make it more likely that they will take time to respond to future surveys.
4. Keep the questionnaire short. Perhaps the simplest strategy (but the most difficult to stay disciplined on) is survey length. We’ve tested all manner of surveys, and have found that no more than 10 questions (ideally fewer!) maximizes response rate. What’s more, most of those questions should be multiple choice, so that the total time burden of the survey stays small. Be sure to let clients know that it’s a brief survey when you send your survey invitations!
5. Provide opportunities for clients to recognize star performers. Clients who feel supported by your team will want to seize every opportunity to recognize the folks who have gone above and beyond for them. Providing an avenue for clients to formally recognize service superstars on your team will give them one more reason to prioritize your survey over the many other feedback requests that they receive every day.
6. Offer an incentive. A final tactic to increase survey response rate is to offer an incentive. You may have seen this idea applied through a “drawing” for some type of monetary value. For example, survey respondents are entered into a drawing for a gift card (we commonly see $150 or $200 values used in this incentive). Another route, which some of our professional service providers have seen success with, is to make a monetary donation on behalf of all respondents. For example, your firm could donate $2 (or other sum) to a community organization or non-profit for every client who completes the survey. This route provides the benefit of clients feeling a direct impact based on their action, and provides another talking point (sharing the total donation made) when your team follows up with their clients about their survey response and findings. It’s important to note that, to the greatest extent possible, the incentive should be tailored to match the interests and motivations of your clients. Be sure to mention any survey incentives at the time of the ask (for example, in the email where you ask clients to participate in the survey) and also within any additional communications to support the survey program.

Set Your Survey Apart, Supercharge Your CX Initiative

Implementing the steps above will demonstrate to clients that their feedback is an integral component of your business strategy, and that the time and energy they spend to complete your survey will fuel continuous improvement in the service you deliver and the experience they have with your firm. Once clients understand that your survey is more than “just another survey,” they’ll feel invested in the process and help to fuel the insights and improvements that your CX program is designed to deliver. At ClearlyRated we have researched backed data to help you develop a well-planned survey and get the desired results. Contact us today if you have further questions and would like to start the conversation to begin your CX initiative.

At ClearlyRated, our mission is to help business service providers put the customer and employee experience at the heart of their growth strategy. And we’ve had the privilege of working with insurance firms to this end for 8 years. This year, I’m very pleased to announce that the ClearlyRated team has launched “Best of Insurance”—an annual award program that will recognize industry leaders in customer and employee satisfaction!

Learn more>>

How do insurance firms earn Best of Insurance?

Best of Insurance is an unbiased, transparent industry award where customer satisfaction and service ratings are the sole drivers of whether a firm earns the Best of Insurance designation. Participating firms invite feedback and service ratings from their customers (and, if also seeking an award for employee satisfaction, from their internal employees) utilizing ClearlyRated’s research-backed Net Promoter® Score (“NPS”) survey. This online survey provides the basis for the ratings that will dictate whether a firm wins the award, as well as critical information about the health of your customer relationships.First time hearing about NPS? Here are a few resources for you:

• NPS 101 for Insurance Firms >>

• 2021 NPS Benchmarks for Insurance Firms >>

• Net Promoter® Score ‘Fast Facts’ >>

After meeting a minimum response rate requirement, your firm’s Net Promoter Score is the single factor that dictates whether you will earn Best of Insurance.

Our goal with this program is to set a high bar: winning firms must earn at least a 50% NPS (considered an “excellent” service rating) to qualify for Best of Insurance. When it comes to validating survey responses and satisfaction ratings, ClearlyRated’s research team acts as a third party to calculate and validate all customer feedback. All customer and employee feedback is available to participating firms in real-time. So is your Net Promoter® Score, so you’ll be able to track your progress and will know at the end of your survey program whether you have earned the Best of Insurance award. Learn more about the ClearlyRated survey process here >>In February of 2022, ClearlyRated will release the inaugural list of winners of the Best of Insurance award! Our Product team provides winners with a robust marketing toolkit to help make the most of their win, including a set of award logos as well as a press release template with industry and firm-specific metrics to help you tell the most compelling story possible with your service ratings. Our Marketing team also goes to great lengths to ensure that the list of Best of Insurance winners is put in front of the public, with a dedicated press release as well as email and social media announcements from ClearlyRated and our partnering organizations.

What can participating firms expect from Best of Insurance?

Like all of our other industry award programs, Best of Insurance is so much more than a simple designation of excellence. We built this program to function as a customer intelligence platform, a reputation engine, a marketing and business development tool, and an award program—all in one. In addition to competing for the Best of Insurance award, firms that survey their customers through ClearlyRated are also able to:

• Quickly identify at-risk revenue, as well as upsell and cross-sell opportunities, with real-time access to customer feedback and satisfaction ratings.
• Get a customized Financial Impact Report that provides insights and guidance about which customers to follow up with in order to secure the greatest revenue impact of your customer feedback.
• Capitalize on positive customer feedback through our automated testimonials tool which helps firms exponentially grow their catalogue of approved customer testimonials.
• Invite customers to help recognize internal service champions through the ClearlyRated Shout Out feature.
• Build online reputation by translating client feedback into online ratings on ClearlyRated.com.

I’m thrilled to invite you to participate in our inaugural year of Best of Insurance!

The past 18 months have brought about wide-scale disruption, unprecedented uncertainty, and a heightened aversion to risk across the business landscape. I am incredibly proud that the ClearlyRated team was able to focus our efforts towards bringing Best of Insurance to life at a time when our insurance industry customers need more ways to differentiate from the competition and provide credible proof of service to their prospects and customers.

I hope you’ll consider joining us for this inaugural year of Best of Insurance! For more information on the program, you can:

• Get a primer on Best of Insurance >>
• Preview the ClearlyRated survey process >>
• Contact the ClearlyRated team for a walkthrough of the program >>

American businesses are well into #TheGreatRehire – jobs are coming back and economies are recovering – but millions of workers remain unemployed. Staffing firms completely pivoted strategies, even as their own workers managed a pandemic and its economic repercussions. Now that we are a year into the pandemic and weathered hiring rollercoasters, what’s next? Where do staffing firms go from here?The good news is that staffing firms are in a unique spot to drive and predict the future of hiring.

Continue to utilize temporary workers

Temporary work is a great indicator of employment and industry growth, as we saw after the 2008 recession. We’re in an atmosphere where customers are going to be risk-averse and invest in temporary labor, opening up a huge opportunity for staffing. For example, in February of this year, more than 50,000 temp jobs returned to the workforce, reflecting a yearlong trend. While the economy recovers and employers start hiring again, it will continue to move slowly. Temporary or contract workers can help build confidence, while also playing into the now-normal of working remotely.

Certain roles will return faster or have a greater need

Throughout this economic recovery, we’ve seen the rise in childcare and education roles, as daycares and schools re-open or shift. The growth of industries that were hardest hit should be of primary focus for staffing firms in 2021 – specifically in the retail and hospitality sectors. Those jobs will come roaring back full-force and staffing firms should be ready.Also on the rise are accounting, finance, and customer service roles, along with heightened remote work options among all professional roles and even in contract or temporary jobs. Firms who can serve these increasing and shifting needs will see success.

Prioritize skills-based hiring

Like so many other workplace trends, the pandemic accelerated the growing practice of skills-based hiring. This strategy is a smart way for employers to find the best matches for the team while supporting candidates changing industries.Focus on skillsets instead of primarily on previous job titles or specific experiences to widen your talent pool and promote diversity. Additionally, you’ll make employment more accessible for the 84% of job seekers who are open to switching industries.Upskilling and reskilling candidates will continue to be a viable option for employers, as candidates have strong interpersonal or soft skills, or even transferable technical skills, but they need a boost.

Lean on technology

Staffing firms have not been immune to layoffs and reduction of teams. With limited time and smaller staffs, you need more ways to be efficient with your HR technology. Find tools that are designed to save you time and consider how our needs to connect virtually have changed.Move beyond just Zoom and Microsoft Teams, as this digital-first work world isn't leaving any time soon. With platforms that allow for scheduled chat sessions with 10 people in one-on-one interviews, to automated talent network features, make sure your tech is working for you.Focus on automation, virtual hiring events, and other ways to outsource daily recruitment tasks to technology. This will allow recruiters to focus on people and finding the perfect candidate, instead of manual administrative duties.

The takeaway of 2020 will be diversity and overall candidate experience

National conversations on race, equity, and discrimination are shaping workplace conversations just as much as the pandemic. While we’re seeing a good portion of staffing firms organize around diversity and inclusion, there is still a long way to go.CareerBuilder has been focused on its own initiatives, including better understanding how our technology can help firms and clients remove bias from their process. Companies should consider the strong, tangible benefits of diversity and work to find solutions that move them toward a more inclusive environment.This also directly relates to the candidate experience, from the moment they land on a website and apply for a role, to that initial call with a recruiter. Candidates will have questions about how companies have responded to both the public discourse on equality and the coronavirus pandemic. Staffing firms and their clients should be prepared for those answers. Additionally, with millions of Americans unemployed, we know how difficult it can be to try to serve everyone. But don’t lose sight of the fact that if a candidate has a bad experience with you, they’ll remember that.Take note of trends on which roles are emerging or changing, lean on technology to navigate change, prioritize candidate experience and diversity, and continue preparing for a more competitive candidate environment because we’ll get there again.

A common question we hear from B2B firms that survey their clients is how to improve their client survey response rate. Put differently, they want to know how they can grow the percentage of clients who provide feedback when asked.While this may seem like a basic question, these folks are right on track. It doesn’t really matter what your response rate is - improving that number will ALWAYS improve the return on your client survey investment.Fortunately, the team here at ClearlyRated has fielded our fair share of surveys (more than 1 million in the last ten years) and we’ve found 4 best practices that, when applied strategically and systematically, can help any business –especially professional and B2B service firms – facilitate powerful response rates on client surveys.

1. Master the science of survey design.

When it comes to maximizing response rates, “survey design” is as much a science as it is an art. Beyond using nice looking fonts and colors, there are 3 tactical elements to survey design that can make the survey-taker’s experience feel easy and efficient. The below recommendations aren’t about look-and-feel, they are about leveraging discipline and attention to detail to improve response rate.

• Personalize the Survey Invitation – One of our top recommendations is to personalize your survey outreach wherever possible, and the emails that you send inviting clients to take the survey are just the place to start. Your clients are more likely to open an email from a person they know, like their primary point of contact, much more so than a generic email “from” the company. That applies to the styling of the email as well! We’ve found that ditching HTML in favor of plain text survey invitations elicits higher response rates – likely because the client perceives the email to be coming from a person they know.
• Keep the Questionnaire Succinct – Here’s where discipline comes in to play… it can be tempting to add question after question to a client survey, but this approach can also be massively detrimental for your response rate. We find that surveys longer than 10 questions have lower average response rates than their shorter counterparts. And easy-to-answer (mostly multiple choice) questions can mean the difference between a survey that’s abandoned versus completed!

Sample Net Promoter Score® survey question:

• Create an Intuitive, Accessible Survey Experience – It’s 2019, which means that your clients are accessing digital experiences from devices of all shapes and sizes. Client surveys are no different! Ensuring that your survey is optimized for mobile viewing can mean the difference between a client taking the 2 minutes to respond on the run versus archiving the invitation and forgetting it entirely. We have also found that the ability to see or “preview” the entirety of the survey creates a higher likelihood of survey completion. If the client is able to see all questions at once, they can assess the amount of time they will need to invest to complete. Assuming you took our advice on keeping your survey succinct, allowing the respondent to “preview” should work in your favor by encouraging a quick completion.

2. Communicate - before, during, and after your survey.

Consistent communication, while simple in theory, is the most-often missed component of client survey initiatives. If your team is able to think about and execute a communication plan that “wraps around” your survey initiative (like a bow tie, or a bear hug) your response rates are bound to improve. We always recommend that businesses think about the following key touch points to communicate about (and encourage feedback via) a client survey:

• Before the survey invites go out.Have account managers or relationship leads give their clients a heads up that they should expect to see a survey invitation hit their inboxes in the coming day or week. Bonus points if you provide context about the purpose of the survey and make it clear how much that particular client’s feedback means to you (personalization, anyone?!).
• While the survey is in the field. Monitor and follow up with clients who haven’t yet completed the survey. Reach out again to communicate how valuable their input is to your business. Best-case scenario? You earn more survey completes and a higher response rate. Worst-case scenario? You earn bonus points for proactively letting clients know how much their experience means to you. There are no losers here!
• After the survey closes. If you have time, it can be very powerful to follow up individually with clients who have taken time to provide you with feedback via the survey. Not only will they feel the figurative “love” – but it offers you an opportunity to be personal (there it is again!) with your messaging, responding to concerns or recognition individually to build the relationship and foster goodwill for future surveys.

Even if you’re not able to follow up with everyone who completed a survey individually, you absolutely MUST follow up with your entire client base to share what you’ve learned from the survey. Why would clients feel compelled to respond to surveys in the future if they aren’t able to see how their feedback is impacting your business?

Our favorite way to accomplish this is through the “2-1-1 follow up methodology,” generally executed as an email follow up to your entire client base at the close of a survey.

In that email you will:

• Share 2 things you learned you’re doing really well.Start by taking the opportunity to "toot your own horn" - share 2 things you learned you're doing really well. Do a majority of your clients think you're very responsive? Share it with pride! Satisfaction surveys aren't (and shouldn't be) meant to just identify what you're doing wrong, but also recognize and reinforce areas where your organization and team excel.
• Share 1 area you learned needs improvement.Next, share 1 area of your service delivery you learned you can improve on. While you will likely receive feedback that identifies opportunities for improvement in various aspects of your service offering, the key is to zero in on your most common service issue that can realistically be improved.
• Share 1 action you’re taking to improve.Wrap it all up by sharing a brief description of 1 plan of action you've implemented to establish change that relates to resolving the service issue identified. Something measurable is best so that your clients can actually read and recognize the improvement as it's happening and equate it to the feedback they've provided.

Failing to continue the conversation after a survey closes invites disappointment from your clients who did take time to provide you with feedback, and may have a negative impact on response rates in the future. Follow up, follow up, follow up!

3. Ensure clients receive your survey invitations.

You’ll undoubtedly agree, whether or not your survey invitation emails actually land in your clients’ inboxes has a massive impact on the number of responses you will receive. And while email deliverability is a hot topic for marketers in the modern era, it’s an easily overlooked aspect of maximizing survey response rates.

Of the many factors that can affect email deliverability, server reputation plays a critical role. Emails consisting of large contact lists are often sent through an automated process through a third-party vendor... For this reason, it is crucial to check your service provider’s IP address before you begin sending emails. Good or bad, these servers most likely already have a reputation themselves - and the success of your deliverability relies on a strong server reputation.

You’ll also want to pay attention to how you can minimize email unsubscribes and bounces. Start by taking CAN-SPAM seriously. One of the frequent reasons emails are not delivered has to do with a low sender score. Internet Service Providers reject any emails that fall below a certain score threshold (your Sender Score is tied to the IP address of your outgoing mail server). Email bounces can be avoided by keeping your contact lists pristine (just keep scrubbing!).

4. Make it personal.

You’ve heard it at least 5 times in this blog post. Creating a personalized experience for your clients is the most powerful way to boost response rates.

Your clients have no relationship with your marketing department - their relationship is (and should be) with an individual. People asking for feedback will always beat a faceless brand because service is personal! And if you can’t make your survey look like it’s coming from one individual to another, it will be difficult to persuade someone to take the time out of their day to give you feedback. One way to personalize your brand is to switch up the conversational tone by adding in pronouns like “we” and “I” - your customers will respond positively to the more informal tone and you will walk away with actionable feedback!

Interested in learning how ClearlyRated can help you launch a client survey that maximizes response rates and ROI? Simply fill out this form or call us at 1.800.921.2640 to discuss best practices and get a tour of our survey platform.

In today’s data-centric world, it can be tempting to gather data about everything.And while it’s easy to see how client satisfaction data helps us learn more about our clients’ experience with our firms, we hear all the time about just how overwhelming it can be to look at all that aggregated information and figure out what to do with it.

As one firm leader put it: “It’s great that I have the data, but what do I do with it once I have it?”

Effective Action Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

Here at ClearlyRated, we understand that it’s not just gathering the data that’s important—you have to be able to act on it.But if you’re not a survey expert yourself, how do you know what action to take? Luckily, we’ve got over a decade of experience translating data into real business insights for B2B firms just like yours.

With our Financial Impact Report, you can see your firm’s opportunity to address at-risk revenue, your best options to grow your most satisfied accounts, and the real-dollar impact of your reputation-building efforts at a glance.And thanks to the financial modeling we’ve done with actual client data from firms in the industries we serve, we can confidently predict the real-dollar benefit that results from taking action on your NPS survey data, helping you prioritize the course of action that’s likely to contribute most to your business development efforts and your firm’s bottom line.

How the Financial Impact Report Helps You Translate Your Data into Dollars

It makes intuitive sense that high client satisfaction results in a financial benefit for your firm, and our client research confirms that there is a clear—and predictable—correlation between NPS and revenue.Click here to learn more about the link between NPS and revenue in the staffing industry >>Our Financial Impact Report applies modeling generated from that data to your firm’s NPS survey results, translates your data into a dollar amount, and—critically—links you to lists of the relevant accounts with a single click, making it easy to reach out and take the action indicated in the report.

Take Advantage of Multiple Avenues to Manage Risk and Grow Your Firm

One of our key intentions with the Financial Impact Report is to highlight all of the different ways you can use your NPS survey results to improve, share, and benefit from your efforts to provide world-class service at your firm.This is how ClearlyRated's Financial Impact Report simplifies that process.

1: Maximize Client Retention

After their results come in, the most immediate point of action for most of our clients is following up with the Detractors that have been identified through our NPS survey. In case you’re new to the NPS® methodology, Detractors are survey respondents who rate your firm between 0 and 6 on the Net Promoter scale, indicating that they would not recommend your services to a friend or colleague.A majority of our clients report that they have identified at least one at-risk account through our survey, and our research indicates that firms can typically recover one-third of the detractors they identify through our survey program.

When these results surface—and they inevitably do—you should follow up with them as soon as possible and do what you can to make the situation right. In this category, the cost of inaction is high: Our research shows that Detractors are 40% less likely to order from their firm the following year. If they do stay, they’re likely to decrease their spend by 17%, as they shop around, looking for a firm who can address their service concerns.

The Financial Impact Report aggregates all the information you need to take immediate action and highlights the revenue at stake, enabling outreach while helping you set revenue expectations for your organization based on the detractor recovery rates from our model.Take Action: Reach out to your Detractors, understand the cause of their dissatisfaction, and do what you can to make it right.

2: Address Declining Trends in Satisfaction

While most firms intuitively understand the importance of addressing immediate service concerns, our experience has shown that it’s harder to tease out those accounts where proactive action could prevent future dissatisfaction.ClearlyRated's Financial Impact Report does that work for you. With a single click, you’re able to see a list of accounts with declining satisfaction trend lines—former Promoters who now indicate they are not as likely to recommend you to a friend or a colleague.

And while the financial impact of a Passive isn’t quite as significant as that of a Detractor, they do have a tendency to decrease their spend on an annual basis. But the real threat to your firm is just how easily a Passive can transition to a Detractor with a small slip in their service experience, which could potentially mean a further reduction of spend down the line.Learn more about the impact of Passives on your staffing firm’s bottom line >>Take Action: Investigate the survey responses your clients have provided and work to understand how their experience with your firm has negatively impacted their satisfaction.

3: Upsell Existing Accounts

While it’s easy to see the impact of addressing at-risk revenue, one of the most overlooked avenues for expansion lies with your most satisfied clients. Strategically, these are the accounts that present the most opportunity to expand revenue—our data indicates that promoters increase their spend by 8% in the following year.The Financial Impact Report generates a list of your most satisfied clients, helping you target your expansion efforts towards the accounts that are most likely to reward your efforts with a "yes!"

Take Action: Confidently reach out to your satisfied clients with upsell, cross-sell, or expansion offers.

4: See the Impact of your Online Reputation

We believe that good business is driven by good service, and we stand behind that. But we also know that part of the struggle to drive growth is about getting your firm in front of prospects and proving that service commitment in a way they find believable. Especially in the post-Covid economy, online reputation is key to success in that effort.When you survey with ClearlyRated, your firm gains access to an online profile page that displays star ratings, testimonials, and your “Best of” award status.

Our Financial Impact Report aggregates the impact of these combined features, presenting you with easy-to-understand analytics and attaching the traffic you’ve attained to its associated dollar value.

Learn how accounting firms use ClearlyRated to build their online reputation >>Take Action:Reach out to your Account Manager to request a ClearlyRated Profile SEO Audit and then follow the steps we provide to improve your firm’s search engine optimization (SEO).

5: Validate the Value of Your Program to Internal Stakeholders

While it can be overwhelming to distill your data into concrete forward action from an operational perspective, it can be even more difficult to communicate that operational value to internal stakeholders and decision makers, who may be inclined to see things differently than you do.Especially when times are uncertain, the value of your work and your insight into client satisfaction might be hard to enumerate.Our Financial Impact Report allows you to simplify the process of proving out the value of your survey program to the other stakeholders in your organization.

In a single—automatically generated!—email, you have all the information you need to compare the current and future impact of your survey program with the investment you’ve made into gaining insight into client satisfaction.Take Action: Share the Financial Impact Report in a PowerPoint presentation highlighting your team’s recent wins.

Our Client Data Helps You Take Action on Yours

It’s natural to have questions about where our financial models originate and whether you can expect to have similar results at your firm.While every firm is different, and your exact outcomes may differ from our predictions, we’re confident that our models—which are based on thousands of NPS scores and years of financial data—will be instructive for your firm.Know your firm’s ACV? Run some calculations for yourself based on our model >>We protect billions of dollars of revenue for North American B2B firms in staffing, accounting, HR Services, and more, and we’d love to help you understand how our model can help you link your satisfaction data to your financial growth goals.Learn more about how our financial models can identify opportunities for expansion at your firm or get in touch!We’d be happy to walk you through the exact impact you can expect when you launch a NPS satisfaction survey at your firm.

I'm very pleased to announce the first-ever winners of ClearlyRated's employee satisfaction award!While we have a long track record of recognizing firms in the staffing, accounting, and HR services industries for their exceptional client satisfaction scores, this is the first year that we invited organizations to survey their internal stakeholders—their employees—and to weigh their employee satisfaction levels against the rest of the industry.Without further ado, here are the winners of our 2021 award for employee satisfaction, by industry:

2021 Best of Staffing® Winners for Employee Satisfaction

• ABR Employment Services
• Accountable Healthcare Staffing
• ALKU
• AREVO Group
• Abacus Group
• Alexander Technology Group
• Atlas Staffing, Inc.
• BANKW Staffing
• Beacon Hill Staffing Group
• Brilliant
• Carlton Staffing
• Connexion Systems And Engineering, Inc.
• Davis Management Group, Inc
• Delta Healthcare Providers
• Delta Operations
• Delta Physician Placement
• EMI Staffing, Inc.
• Engauge Workforce Solutions
• Flux Resources, LLC
• GDH
• GForce Life Sciences
• Helpmates Staffing Services
• In-Flight Crew Connections, Inc.
• KBW Financial Staffing & Recruiting
• Kimco Staffing Services
• LC Staffing
• Luttrell Staffing Group
• Medix
• Medstaff National Medical Staffing
• Motus
• PRG - Peyton Resource Group
• Preferred Healthcare Staffing
• PrideStaff
• PrideStaff Financial
• Roth Staffing Companies
• Rx relief
• Softworld
• Sparks Group
• Sterling
• TempStaff
• The CSI Companies
• The DAVIS Companies
• The Delta Companies
• The HT Group
• The Nagler Group
• The Reserves Network Inc.
• The Salem Group
• The Squires Group
• TransTech IT Staffing
• United Personnel Services
• V-Soft Consulting Group, Inc

2021 Best of Accounting Winners for Employee Satisfaction

• Gauvreau & Associates CPA

2021 Best of HR Services Winners for Employee Satisfaction

• Questco

I can't speak highly enough of the firms on this list who, despite all of the obstacles that they faced in 2020, dedicated time, energy, and resources to asking their internal staff for feedback and ensuring their employees felt supported. In one of the most disruptive years in recent history, high marks of employee satisfaction are truly something to be proud of. Congratulations to these winners!If you want to learn more about how your firm can be considered for this award in 2022, get in touch.

Even before the coronavirus outbreak swept through the United States in March of 2020, the Aronson LLC team was investing time and resources to map out a client survey initiative.“Aronson has always had a firm commitment to client service, but we have relied on anecdotal feedback gathered by partners to determine how well we are delivering on that promise. At the start of the year, we set out to find a way to build quantitative evidence of our clients’ experience with the firm, and we wanted to use that feedback to identify opportunities to innovate and deliver greater value across our service lines and industry groups.” - Carrie Hankey, Director of Marketing and Business Development

I had the opportunity to sit down with Carrie Hankey, Aronson’s Director of Marketing and Business Development, to discuss their decision to begin surveying clients, how their client survey program has progressed with ClearlyRated’s Net Promoter® survey program, how they are leveraging client feedback in their day-to-day operations, and how they hope to expand this client intelligence initiative in the future.

About Aronson LLC (and their decision to launch a client survey during COVID-19)

Aronson LLC is a nationally ranked Top 100 assurance, tax, and consulting firm. Based in Rockville, Maryland, the Aronson team has organized firm growth around three pillars: delivering outstanding client service, ensuring opportunities for their team members, and building authentic relationships in the community.

Aronson and ClearlyRated partnered in 2020 (in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic) to field the firm’s first ever client satisfaction survey. Like all businesses, the Aronson team was looking for every opportunity to deliver value at a time when clients were facing massive uncertainty and new complexities that were challenging the bedrock of their business operations.“We knew that we wanted to launch our client survey in 2020, even before the pandemic hit. But COVID really expedited the need. We wanted to understand what was happening in our core industries, and we knew that a survey would be able to give us deeper and more comprehensive intelligence than we could collect individually.” - Carrie Hankey, Director of Marketing and Business DevelopmentFielding their client survey during the pandemic has provided Aronson with unprecedented insight into their clients’ journeys. Beyond the perceptions that clients have about their experience working with and being supported by Aronson, Carrie and her team were able to measure the impact that the firm has been making with their efforts to provide outsized value during COVID-19. Their ClearlyRated client survey provided evidence about which of the additional resources, webinars, and consultative offerings were providing the most value as clients navigated through the first phase of economic disruption.

Operational Focus: The driving value of Aronson’s NPS initiative

One of the biggest priorities for Carrie and the Aronson team when fielding their first client survey was to keep the partner group heavily involved in the survey communications and outcomes. Creating a sense of inclusion around the client survey effort helped ensure that partners bought into the strategy, and allowed them visibility into the methodology and how that information would be used. With the support of Aronson’s Managing Partner, Larry Davis, Carrie was able to keep each partner closely tied to their respective clients’ feedback, maximizing their visibility into survey results and providing them with actionable information.Additionally, the NPS data gathered from clients across the firm has provided a much-needed structure for assessing the health of relationships. The initial survey results have provided the Aronson team with a benchmark set of data to build from and allow partners to work into their own assessments."We knew going into this client survey that we’d be measuring NPS and drivers over time. That long-term vision has allowed us to create benchmarks from a firm-wide client experience perspective, and also from the partner perspective. These benchmarks allow our partners to see what they're doing well and where they might need to work on client service, and they can choose to invest and improve as they are able." - Carrie Hankey, Director of Marketing and Business Development

Unexpected benefits of the NPS survey program

As Carrie and I spoke, there were two things that she identified as unexpected (and outsized) benefits of moving through a client survey program.

1. Identifying at-risk revenue

As their NPS survey results came in, the Aronson team identified an at-risk account that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Due to a small internal disconnect, the stakeholders at this account hadn’t received some information they’d expected about an upcoming transition and were feeling dissatisfied as a result.Thanks to the real-time feedback generated through ClearlyRated’s client survey program, Carrie was able to alert the partner in charge of that account, who quickly picked up the phone and worked with the client to clarify and resolve the issue.“While the aggregated feedback from the NPS survey is valuable, the immediate feedback that’s generated when a client has a concern is immeasurable. I think, ultimately, we're saving an account because of it." - Carrie Hankey, Director of Marketing and Business Development

2. Spotlighting outstanding achievements in client service

In addition to uncovering (and quickly resolving) unforeseen client service issues, the Aronson team has seen an outsized impact from one of ClearlyRated’s flagship survey features: Shout Outs.Clients who identify themselves as very satisfied are invited to recognize members of the Aronson team who they believe have gone above and beyond for them. What comes out of this recognition is a “Shout Out” - and each Shout Out that is collected within the survey dashboard can be pulled in aggregate or segmented in any way that client feedback is organized.“When our Head of Talent, Kevin Gerrity, found out about the Shout Outs and testimonials generated by the client survey, he realized they would be ‘a gold mine’ for our People Team. We have since granted his team access to the survey dashboard so they can access the results, allowing them to take advantage of glowing client feedback to spotlight internal employees and increase employee engagement. Additionally, they are incorporating client Shout Outs into personnel files to use as another piece of quantitative evidence for tying performance back to client service. It’s a win-win.” - Carrie Hankey, Director of Marketing and Business Development

Building for the Future: Where Aronson plans to take their client survey practice in 2021

Carrie and the Aronson team have a robust vision for how to continue to operationalize client feedback in the day-to-day operations of their business. An immediate opportunity that Carrie is working to implement is the integration of the ClearlyRated survey program with Aronson's CRM system.“Being able to deliver real-time feedback within client records in our CRM will empower our partners with even more information in the environment where they spend the most time. We expect that, as more surveys are rolled out, that the ability for partners to track client experience trends over time directly from the CRM will add exponential value.”After integrating their ClearlyRated client feedback into their CRM, the Aronson team will be exploring additional opportunities to survey across critical moments in the client experience. Beyond an annual survey to measure the status of client relationships, they will explore surveying at end of engagement.Last, but certainly not least, Carrie plans to focus some of her team’s efforts towards leveraging client feedback in their marketing and business development strategy. In their first survey alone, Aronson gathered 87 new testimonials from clients who gave them a 9 or 10 on the Net Promoter scale. Those testimonials are available on Aronson’s profile page on ClearlyRated.com alongside their 4.9 out of 5 star client rating!

What’s more, Aronson LLC earned an exceptional Net Promoter Score of 86.6%. This is a huge feat when you consider the fact that anything above 70% is considered a world-class NPS, and it is an especially powerful number when you compare it to the industry average NPS of just 23%.

These proof points will be powerful resources for the Aronson team as they find new and innovative ways to tell the firm’s story of client service excellence.

Closing Thought: What Carrie wants you to know about launching a client survey

I asked Carrie to share one piece of advice that she would give to other accounting firms who are launching a client survey initiative. Here is what she had to say:“Lean on ClearlyRated! They know how to leverage best practices to create a successful experience for stakeholders and clients alike. In addition, take the time to involve your client relationship partners. With their buy-in, the process will be smooth and they’ll be eager to help and receive the results!”Thank you so much to Carrie and the entire Aronson team for entrusting us with your first-ever client survey! We can’t wait to see how you will harness the power of client feedback to build stronger relationships and fuel firm growth.

Interested in working with ClearlyRated to launch a client survey at your firm?

We'd love to explore the potential of a program just like this at your firm. Get in touch today!

It is my most sincere honor to share that ClearlyRated has earned the 2020 Top Workplaces designation from the Oregonian. We proudly take our place at number 21 on the list of 45 small Oregon and SW Washington employers honored as Top Workplaces this year.

What This Honor Means This Year

2020 is the second year in a row that ClearlyRated has made the sought after Top Workplaces list. But it’s almost impossible to communicate the full scope of this accomplishment (and what it means to me and the rest of the team) to be recognized in this way, in this year. Our team has somehow, some way, navigated together through the difficulties and perplexities of 2020 while keeping the ClearlyRated company culture intact, and while maintaining an unwavering commitment to one another to show up as best we can, in any given moment, to move our business forward. That endurance, that resilience, that drive, and that compassion are the spirit of this organization, and I believe that they, more than anything, are the qualities that make ClearlyRated a Top Workplace.

What the ClearlyRated Team Has Accomplished in 2020

I have asked so much of the ClearlyRated team this year. Like many organizations, we pushed hard to innovate and make ourselves “essential” to the businesses that we serve. We launched additional features for our clients, we launched new product lines to more comprehensively serve our target industries, we launched real-time research projects to track business and professional sentiment at the outset of COVID-19. We did this all while navigating frozen budgets, while trying to build around the loss of reliable channels for business development, while keenly and meticulously tracking our micro goals and financial outcomes, and while completely reimagining and rebuilding the nuts and bolts of just how we work together to get business done. But wait, that’s not all. Our team moved their work into their homes, where their children also live and play and, now, attend school. The parents (and the partners of parents) working at ClearlyRated have taught me about the depths of the human capacity for resilience, for tenderness, and for vulnerability as we have all stumbled to understand how to make space for full-time parenting, full-time teaching, and full-time work. Much of the ClearlyRated team was affected by the massive wildfires that have burned millions of acres of our western states. Each member of the team found ways to continue to get work done while surviving the worst air quality in the world, while responding to calls for evacuation, and while mourning with friends and loved ones who lost their homes to fire. We are so grateful to report that the ClearlyRated team is safe and back at home, but we grieve with the rest of Oregon and the Western United States the loss of wilderness, property, and human life that has been caused by these fires. Being based in Portland, Oregon, the ClearlyRated team has also experienced (in many cases first-hand) the 4+ months of protests that have brought national attention to our city, and that show no signs of slowing down, as national calls for racial justice and reform echo throughout our society. As an organization, we’re moving through an internal reckoning about just how to address and dismantle systemic racism and systemic oppression from within. I expect this will be an ongoing, lifelong project with no real end. We’re prepared for that. We’re also asking questions about how we can make an impact as an organization outside of our four walls. In our 2020 State of the Staffing Professional research project with CareerBuilder and the American Staffing Association, we added new questions to address employee perceptions and experience through a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) lens. When building our latest product offering, an employee satisfaction survey, we made the decision to add in questions specifically designed to help business owners assess their organizational performance as it relates to DEI. As an organization, we are committing energy and resources towards helping our business partners “lean in” to conversations about (and commitments to) anti-racism and anti-oppression.

ClearlyRated, Let’s Raise a Glass

2020 has been a monster of a year for everyone, and we at ClearlyRated no doubt have many privileges that have empowered us to move through the past 8 months with more support and more confidence than many of our fellow humans. And…looking back on this year, I am in awe of the depths of resilience of this team, and I am so proud of what we have accomplished together. While it’s our second year to win a Top Workplaces nod, this one feels different. On behalf of the entire leadership team at ClearlyRated, I want to thank the dedicated and compassionate people who make this business work. You all are amazing. Let’s go get 2021.

At ClearlyRated, we take pride in building bridges between our Net Promoter® survey program and the technologies that power your relationship with your clients. We know that the ability to see survey results directly within your company’s CRM is just one way that we can help you make your survey results visible throughout your organization and, more importantly, get critical client feedback into the hands of the teams that can take action on it. Guided by our clients, we have built critical integrations with both Bullhorn ATS and Microsoft Dynamics, and I am now thrilled to announce that the ClearlyRated NPS® survey program also integrates with Salesforce! Even better, this integration also applies to Bullhorn for Salesforce (formerly known as Talent Rover), which is a Salesforce-based CRM and ATS hybrid designed to support recruiting firms.

Equip your team with client feedback and insights

A client satisfaction survey program is only as powerful as the actions you take (and improvements you make) on the client feedback that you receive. This feedback is only effective when it is made accessible to your client-facing staff, giving the relationship holders within your organization an opportunity to implement change.Unfortunately, many professional service firms field surveys without considering how to efficiently and effectively deliver client feedback back to their client-facing team members. We know one of the largest obstacles that professional service providers face when trying to capture this ROI is finding an efficient way to tighten the feedback loop. The ClearlyRated Salesforce integration helps business service firms maximize the ROI of their NPS survey program by making real-time client feedback accessible within a client’s contact record in Salesforce. The members of your team who oversee a specific client relationship can immediately access the client’s current and historical satisfaction ratings, sentiments, and service perceptions—directly from within Salesforce.

Access client survey data directly within lead and contact records

With ClearlyRated’s Salesforce integration, feedback from your client satisfaction survey program is accessible in the detail view of your leads and contacts within Salesforce. This integration allows for access to real-time information that improves client relationships (like historical satisfaction scores and feedback) to be seamlessly accessed directly in Salesforce. ClearlyRated survey responses can be displayed within the Salesforce interface on the Lead page or Contact page (or both: you get to decide). This allows you to see survey responses associated with each Salesforce contact without leaving Salesforce.

How to get the integration

If you are currently using Salesforce and are actively subscribed to ClearlyRated—the integration is available to you at no additional cost! Head over to your ClearlyRated dashboard for a step-by-step guide with built-in documentation for how to set up your Salesforce integration. You will need a Salesforce administrator to set up the ClearlyRated integration within your Salesforce account. If you don’t already work with ClearlyRated, we’d love to chat more with you about how we can help measure the client (and employee) experience at your firm. Please feel free to contact us for more information about our survey program. Or, you can read about ClearlyRated’s survey program for your industry here.

Here at ClearlyRated, we are always looking for ways to make client feedback more accessible. We know that one method to accomplish this is by leveraging technology to make survey data available directly within the systems that your team already relies upon for their day-to-day work.Which is why we are excited to announce that the ClearlyRated NPS survey program now integrates with Microsoft Dynamics—a CRM widely used by professional service providers!Our integration with Microsoft Dynamics will allow your team to view their clients’ survey responses directly within the affiliated contact record in Microsoft Dynamics. That means a client’s historical Net Promoter® ratings for your firm as well as their responses to open-ended and driver survey questions are easily accessed from the place where your team is most likely to look for information about that client—your CRM.

Empower your team with real-time insights into clients' experiences

Your client feedback is only as powerful as the action that is taken with it. And we have seen time and again that one of the largest hurdles that professional service providers face when trying to capture this ROI is getting client feedback into the hands of the people who need it the most: your client-facing staff and relationship holders.The ClearlyRated Microsoft Dynamics integration empowers professional service providers to automatically, and seamlessly, share real-time client feedback with their client-facing teams. Leveraging this integration, service providers are able to bypass the more manual aspects of distributing client responses, and secure the full ROI of their NPS survey program from start to finish.

ClearlyRated data appears as a custom tab in Microsoft Dynamics

Once integrated, any member of your team can easily navigate to the ClearlyRated tab in Microsoft Dynamics. The custom tab appears in the top navigation bar within a client contact (but may also be integrated in different ways depending on your preferences in the Microsoft Dynamics platform).

If a client has participated in a ClearlyRated survey, all of their historical survey responses as well as any new feedback will automatically populate in the ClearlyRated tab within the client's contact record in Microsoft Dynamics. Using iframe technology, the information in the tab will look the same way it appears in the ClearlyRated survey dashboard. This information includes:

• Full survey response
• Historical view of responses for that contact
• Testimonials and shout outs
• Issue tracking

How to get the integration

If you are currently utilizing Microsoft Dynamics and have an active subscription with ClearlyRated—the integration is available to you at no extra cost! To ensure your data is secure, email-based authentication will occur on the first use of the integration and every 30 days following. Head over to your ClearlyRated dashboard for a step-by-step guide with built-in documentation for how to set up your Microsoft Dynamics integration (note: to set up an integration, you must be an admin-level user).And, if you don’t already work with ClearlyRated, we’d love to chat more with you about how we can help measure the client experience at your firm. Please feel free to contact us for more information about our survey program. Or, you can read about ClearlyRated’s survey program for your industry here.