All right.
Welcome back to another episode of Agency Journey this week.
I've got the pleasure of bringing on a special guest.
I've got Amber McKay, who is the head of
client services at Finley Agency from across the pond.
Amber, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
Thank you very much for having me.
You wrote an awesome blog post recently.
They got my attention.
I think it was like, what is an NPS score?
And why does it matter
which I'll go pull up here in just a second, but I want to dig into that.
That's one of the reasons that I wanted to
pull you on and kind of dig into what prompted you to start paying
attention to NPS, how you've improved it, how you focused on it.
We'll break down all those pieces.
But first, could you just give us a quick
overview of family agency and your role there?
Yeah, of course.
So finally, Agency is an inbound marketing agency.
We're based in Canterbury, in Kent, in the UK.
We specialize in the engineering and manufacturing industry, and we have a
multidisciplinary team spanning digital web development, video, graphic design.
And we are also a Platinum HubSpot partner
as well, which runs through an awful lot of what we do.
My role as head of client services
is essentially to head up the account management team.
I'm generally responsible for kind of ongoing client success.
Project success, which means I work really closely with our management team, our head
of Ops to kind of ensure everything runs smoothly and that we've got all the
processes in place to consistently get the best possible results for our clients.
Basically, I am also an account manager day to day as well.
So I do keep my finger on the pulse, and
I'm heavily kind of involved in the day to day, which really does help me work really
closely with my team to kind of make improvements almost every day.
It's busy, but it's good fun, right?
What's the model that you have?
So you've got account managers.
So you're kind of overseeing a team, plus being on that team of account managers and
are using a pod structure beneath that or shared resources.
How's the internal team structured
internally, our account managers, they're kind of more seen as project leads.
So that's actually another interesting point that we're kind of looking into is
kind of the hybrid between account management and project management.
I'm not sure necessarily the industry kind
of knows the difference, but we do an awful lot of product leadership.
We're involved in the strategy, but we are
kind of at the top of every project that we do.
And then we manage the kind of delivery teams, but we don't have pods.
We have myself included.
We have three acts, three account managers, three project leads, and we kind
of deal with all of the projects that we've got.
We kind of just split out right in an average week.
Then between your own client, and I assume
you're probably interfacing with your clients on a weekly basis.
Yes.
How many calls between your own clients and you're managing and kind of jumping,
I'm assuming probably occasionally you're jumping on other people's calls with them.
Or maybe you're not.
But how much are your week is spent on calls, then?
Goodness me, to be honest, between internal meetings,
which we keep in touch regularly and client calls, I'd say a good half of my
week definitely is speaking to clients is a big part of what we do,
especially my role as kind of making sure everything is happening as it should do.
I do join calls with my project managers,
but a huge part of what our project managers do is manage their projects.
We have a lot of power to kind of crack on and get the best out of our clients, and
we have really good relationships with them.
So yeah, we do speak to them an awful lot, depending on the client, depending on the
project, it might be that we speak to them to them daily.
Sometimes it might only be weekly, smaller ones.
It might be bi weekly or monthly, but we are regularly in touch with them, right?
That makes sense.
So let's talk a little bit about NPS.
Then the reason I ask about call volume is you've got a lot going on.
So I'm assuming that's part of where the need for NPS, the need for having say, I
need some quantitative measure of how likely to retain these customers.
Obviously, at the end of the day for
agencies, the metric we're looking at is on a customer by customer base is kind of
lifetime value, which is your indicator of how successful are we at retaining
clients, plus up selling them, getting them on the right services and capturing
the value that we're hopefully delivering for them.
So NPS is kind of a leading indicator to that. But when did you decide
what's the prompt for it? And then when did you decide to start implementing NPS?
The NPS process for us actually is quite new.
I became head of client services last
year, and this is one of the first things that I ever really stumped my teeth into.
So we really sort of started running it at the start of the year.
It wasn't working very well to begin with.
The initial process we had wasn't great.
The update wasn't great, so we changed that up and that's now a really well
practice process that we continue to replicate.
It was a goal of mine.
I kind of saw that as a really good way to
start making some improvements in my Department.
That kind of separated my role from just project management.
It was kind of a way to improve my Department.
But having an NPS score as a metric was kind of just one thing.
It's a really useful benchmark.
You can add it to business reports.
It's something to continually measure on
it gives a bit more of a scientific view of everything that's going on.
But for me, it's still really only the first step for us.
It's more asking the NPS question.
But then getting the feedback is actually
really important because we instantly act on that feedback.
We kind of always we take what our clients
say, and then we make that actionable and we go and do it straight away.
So it means the improvements are happening
straight away and that we're constantly learning.
And obviously the improvements we make
means more success internally and externally with our clients as well, which
hopefully in turn means more recommendations to work with us.
Right.
Well, I guess first thing we should do here is just break down what it is.
So NPS, I was just stand for net promoter score.
It's a question everyone's seen a million
times to refer this product or service to a friend or colleague.
And then from an equation perspective, it kind of breaks down into these three
different buckets of promoters, which are your nine s or your tens passives, which
are the sevens or eights, and then the tractors, which are your six.
You used a word in this post that first of all, how British?
Second, I had the wrong impression.
You said promoters are chuffed and loyal brand ambassadors.
Yeah.
I don't know why I thought chuffed meant the opposite way.
Like, I'm a little bit upset.
Okay.
Now in British, chuffed means super happy.
Okay.
This is great to know. So what's a synonym
for chef? Is this just, like, excited or does it mean something else satisfied?
Like super satisfied? Like really happy.
Okay.
And then obviously, to get your score, you're taking your percentage of your
promoters and subtracting the percentage of the tractor.
So if we just make the math really easy,
if you have ten people respond to this and you've got six people who give you a nine
or a ten, then you got 60% of your audience as promoters.
And if you have two people who are your detractors, that's 20%.
So 60 -20 is 40.
And you've got your score is of 40 on the NPS route.
You did that much quicker than I would have been able to.
I actually have a really handy website
that helps you do the calculations because math.
I've spent more time in NPS in the last couple of years.
Okay.
Although I like the tool itself, I think it's a handy kind of metric that you can
use and can be somewhat centered across places.
But there's a lot of variables which we'll get into that are challenging.
So industry average here.
And I think you mentioned in the post, it's around six.
Retently put out some stuff a couple of years ago or a year and a half ago.
Maybe the industry average services or agencies space specifically is like 62,
and that's obviously coming from it's an NPS tool.
Let's talk a little bit about
some of the technical pieces, and then I want to get into impact and the strategic
side of what you've built out. So technically, are you using HubSpot to
measure NPS or what tool are you using to send and manage NPS service?
So yes, we did.
We did use HubSpot, and we used automated
emails, which meant that people would kind of drop into workflows depending on their
life cycle stages and any of the specific kind of categories we put them in.
It wasn't working.
The uptake was not great. Everyone is busy.
People's inboxes are full anyway, so to speak.
I am the tool
me with my slide presentation on the call with my account manager.
We're the ones doing it now.
So it's technically a manual process, but it's actually not really a process at all.
It's actually a conversation. Okay.
So you're actually asking them.
Are you saying that script verbatim to them a scale of one to ten?
Yes.
When we change it a little bit, we kind of
use, sort of say, on a scale of one to ten or not ten.
How likely are you to recommend us or how
much do you love us is sometimes if we're really close to them, we might change it.
So then they're giving you an answer. Does
that live in a Google spreadsheet? Or where are you putting that information?
It does live in a spreadsheet. Yes.
We have an agency scorecard which covers
all sorts of different metrics that we report on bi weekly, and it lives in
there, and it gets updated every couple of weeks.
Yeah. Okay.
Makes sense. And then obviously there follow up
question is, I assume you're following that up with why
do you give the score that you give or they go, yeah.
Makes sense.
And then that's where you're talking about.
We're taking actions. Then off of what feedback they give.
Yeah. Exactly.
That. Okay.
Makes sense.
How frequently are you asking people?
So we ask all of our retainer clients at least every quarter.
That means every three months
we have a proper meeting with them, where we have a shortage presentation, where we
might go over activities in the last three months.
What's coming up over the next three months?
What's going? Well, what's not going so well?
And then we always ask that question right at the end.
If they are just smaller project clients,
we'll probably tend to ask at the end of that project on delivery.
Yes. That makes sense.
And then in terms of who gets surveyed, I'm assuming most of the time on client
calls, you've got one point of contact, maybe two.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah.
So we ask every client gets asked.
We're in the process of asking everyone as
we go along, but everyone will at some point be asked.
And it will be the key stakeholders that
deal with their project lead on an ongoing basis.
Okay. So just to say back to you, then if you've
got let's say you're dealing with the marketing manager at a manufacturer,
but the VP of marketing or owner of the business, depending on the size of the
business, is the one writing the checks, but not getting on calls with you.
Are you sending that via email, then are
you calling them directly at some point or just trying to pull them into a call to
ask that question, like on a quarterly planning call?
How are you making sure? I guess that you get the touch point to
maybe impact the decision, but aren't on the weekly calls with you.
Yeah.
We're actually really lucky at finding agency.
We work with the clients that we work with.
In general.
We are always in touch with the key decision maker.
So we need to speak to the CEO BMDs or as
you say, the people writing the checks, we are fully in contact with them.
If they're not on the course, we retain a call for whatever reason.
If they're busy. Yes, we would always give them a call.
We would speak to them separately.
As I said, the key is to speak to the
people that you are dealing with every day because they are the ones that can tell
you how well or how well you're not doing right.
Okay. So let's talk about the impact.
First of all, you wrote in here about kind of your takeaways and experience with NPS.
So what is finally agency's NPS?
So we are currently running at 80.
We have approximately 25 clients that
we're currently working with on kind of various levels.
That number is probably bigger, but on different various levels.
And because the process is fairly new, we are still working our way through a lot of
those and depending on kind of where they are at their life cycle.
But as I say that everyone gets asked
regularly enough that we are constantly reporting on that number.
Are you leveraging that?
Do you know,
it seems like that's a number that I would want to be pointing out NPS internally.
I don't know that we've ever done a huge
public push on it, but we should or we could, I guess, is another way to say it.
You certainly could as well, obviously, anytime that you're picking out a metric.
If that's not the industry accepted metric, it's hard to say.
Well, we're Navy and someone else.
It's all internally reported.
So anybody can say, yeah, we're 98.
Yes.
But are you all using that in your market?
It's on the blog, which is super cool that you wrote about it and put yourself out
there. But are you using that in marketing or sales at all?
Currently, not as a metric? No.
But that kind of brings you back to the point of it's not that the metric and the
number itself is only really the starting point.
So the biggest thing for us is the feedback and then the positivity or
the structural help that clients give us when they give us feedback.
So a big one for us is customer
testimonials, and we have a videographer in house and we do
a lot of video work and a project that we obviously used to work on.
Post code precovid.
I was heading out and meeting with our clients.
Now we will be doing that more again.
And the best part of it is that is it your clients, your biggest selling point.
So for us, the metric is the starting point.
And then going out to those clients that
we work brilliantly with and getting a testimonial from them, recording us,
having an interview with them and discussing our projects and all that stuff
and then reporting on the results of the projects which we always do.
We post a lot of case studies.
We post a lot of results, reports, all of that material gathered together
with the metric is just such a fantastic story to sell.
Right. So you are getting so many different
questions here, but you're three quarters into running NPS.
Now, as we're recording, this is the beginning of Q four here.
So do clients know who aren't your clients
or working with a different account manager know?
Amber's on the call?
I'm going to get asked NPS or How's that receipt conversation then?
No. I think they see me on the call.
They think, what have we done wrong now?
I think, because it's part of the process now our project leads.
We ask the question all the time.
They expect it to come up.
It's not supposed to be an intimidating question.
It's not supposed to be a question where
they suddenly think, if I'm honest, I'm going to upset someone or I'm just going
to give them loads of great positive praise, because that's all we want to do.
It's not supposed to be a difficult question.
It's supposed to be a conversation staffer.
It's supposed to open up about.
It's meant to be transparent.
It's meant to help our communication going forward.
The more we ask our clients kind of
actually, the more they get into it, and the more that they see that it's helpful.
I think it's always a slightly strange question to be asked for the first time.
It can put you on the spot.
But I think if you can't answer that
question or if it's an uncomfortable question that you're asked and you don't
want to say it there, and then we've got words to do anyway.
So to me, the honesty is really helpful both ways.
And if you're not honest, everyone's doing each other a disservice.
Really. Right.
Well, I think
there's a couple of things I like about what you're doing that are really cool,
and they're different from what I would normally recommend to people.
One is in our NPS set up.
I want to isolate the person that they
have a relationship from from the person who's asking the question.
I don't want them to have to give me an answer in front of the person they deal
with on a day to day basis, because I think that is easy to buy.
You have to make a decision in that moment.
Do I want to potentially offend somebody
who I'm going to work with or talk to on a daily basis?
And I have some type of relationship with.
But you've mentioned a couple of different things here.
One is it's part of your process.
So you mentioned update rate, and what
that normally looks like for agencies is sending out emails and nobody.
If you introduce that to 25 clients today who've never had to do that before,
most of the time, they're just going to ignore that.
So the cool thing about running a services
based business is you get to make whatever the rules are around.
How what it's like to work with you.
So if you set strong expectations on the front end for every new client who's
working with us, this is just part of what you do.
When you work with us.
You pay your monthly bills, you show up to your calls on time and you have to answer
your NPS survey, and those are nonnegotiables.
You get to make those and set them up.
And so you've forced that on people by doing it on a call.
And then the real key is exactly what you said, which is NPS is a great metric.
It's awesome to put on a scorecard and to
work around and you need those central points.
But the real magic is not asking people to survey questions.
The real magic is, what do you do with the answers from that?
And how do you continue to build and
strengthen those relationships you mentioned?
We're taking action right away.
So someone tells you, hey, I'm an eight.
They are passive.
The obvious question is what's one thing
we could have done to make your experience better?
What's the difference? Why did you not score it lower than that?
Why did you not score it higher than that? You got all these different follow up
questions. Are there any specific examples that come to mind of how you've dealt with
that feedback right away to improve client relationships?
I think largely.
Usually.
I think communication is a big one.
Sometimes if you're particularly busy
period, communication can sometimes fall down.
I mean, that's both sides
a lot of the work we do relies quite heavily on client input.
From an education point of view.
We're working in quite a technical sector.
So a lot of the time we rely heavily on our clients being able to give us
information and give us answers so that we can create content or we can create
campaigns that are technically and that are technically correct to their industry.
So we do rely quite heavily on their input.
And if our communication isn't strong
enough and we don't make that clear, from the outset.
Sometimes if things are held up because we're waiting on things from their side,
that can be quite frustrating on both sides of it.
So that does come up quite often.
And once we've spoken about it, we said, how can we make that process easier?
How can we not add to your to do list but see us as something crucial that you have
to do every other day or something during the week?
We work with them to make it as easy as we possibly can.
Right. That makes sense.
I guess a couple of questions.
Is there a point at which let's say you're
talking to an agency, which you are right now, obviously.
But they're thinking about NPS.
This conversation has been wondering, should we implement it?
Is there a team that's too small to bother setting up NPS, or is there a point where
you're like, hey, 25 people sounded 25 clients sounded right.
Or ten clients would have been the right place to put.
Is there a right place to put these tips and metrics in place and systems?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
I think obviously, the smaller you are,
and we have a handful of clients that we adore as well.
I should say, obviously, we adore working with all of our clients.
We love all of our clients, but
we do have a selection of clients we work with for a long time.
We have really well established
relationships with who would always score us really highly.
And of course, they feed into the great score that we do have.
But time and time again, we do great things.
We will always have the odd thing that we
can improve on and we can do and we continue to do better.
But if you've only got a small number of clients and they all love you, it's going
to inflate and you're going to look fantastic.
But then again, that's where it comes into.
It is just a metric.
And that's only the starting point.
You should always be asking.
No matter how many clients you have, you
should always be asking them, how well are we doing?
What can we do better? That's the biggest part of it.
I think maybe the metric side of things, you could probably have a limit.
Otherwise you'll be, as I say, inflated
and look and look much better than you are.
But not necessarily true.
I'm sure people are fantastic,
but yes, I would say you do need to take that into account.
Right. That makes sense.
And then prep you to go down this road.
But you mentioned something earlier that always catch my attention.
You mentioned scorecard. Are you running on the EOS or do you have?
Yeah. Okay.
So on that scorecard, then, on a weekly basis,
feel free to share what you're comfortable sharing or not sure what you're not
comfortable sharing, but what are some of the other key metrics that you care about
from specifically your role leading client success at an agency.
What are some of those metrics that you care about.
Our EOS system?
We have all the team leaders from all of our delivery teams are in there.
So from a digital point of view, we report
on the number of marketing leads we've received that month.
I think we do them bi weekly, as we report on that quite heavily.
My NPS score is in there.
We report on Business one that week,
we report on our financial status, which is obviously helpful from us internally.
The number of blogs written, the number of
blogs published, that sort of thing because we put out there quite a lot about
how important education is, and we do a lot of content for our clients.
We then practice what we preach, and we do a lot of that as well.
So we report on quite a wide spectrum of things.
To be honest, just because we have
everybody in our company in our agency management wise, comes to those meetings
and reports on what their teams are doing, right?
That's awesome. So in those blogging numbers, those are
your internal, like the finally agency content production.
That's awesome.
One of the things I think I was the challenge would mention really like
lifetime value of clients is one of the biggest metrics to pay attention to.
The problem is, you don't know the
lifetime value of someone until they're no longer until their lifetime is value.
So that's what we're really trying to use.
Nps is kind of a proxy for how likely are we to retain clients
when you get clients who say a six or lower, they're detractor.
What is in your playbook or what are some of your go to? What are the things that
you are looking to do to fix? And how do you know when to draw the line between
saying this relationship is not working? We're better off moving on from them
versus hey, this is one that we just have an issue in communication or we haven't
had enough time that expectations are just off a little bit here, but it's a good
account that we should still continue working.
It's a really tricky situation.
I have to say, we are lucky that we've not been in that situation very often.
And to be honest, if you have a detractor
who is not happy, the chances are you already know about it.
So it's not going to be a surprise when it comes to that retaining review.
It's not going to be a surprise when you
suddenly have that meeting to discuss the activities.
You will know that things aren't going well, and hopefully you would have already
been starting to do things to make that better.
Whatever is in your power to make better, you're already doing that.
So that when you're having these regular
meetings, you say, Well, we've tried to do this, and here's what we've implemented.
And here's how this has helped.
And here's how this hasn't.
And it's a constant iterative process.
But unfortunately,
you do have those clients where unfortunately, the relationship is
for whatever reason, on whatever side is not ideal.
We would always schedule a follow up calls.
I would always say we can take this
offline and you and I can have a conversation separate from the delivery
teams and really get to get to the bottom of it and get that feedback through.
And again, a huge part of what we do is retrospective meetings as well.
So we're always talking about how great projects are and we go through
retrospectives and we talk about, yes, we need to do this again.
And yes, this is great.
Let's replicate it.
But you really have to focus on the negatives as well.
You have to focus on what is not going so
well, whether that's when a client, if when a client leaves or even if it's just
the end of a project, there's always going to be things that you could do better.
But I think the main point of
communication and what we really strive to do is for nothing to ever be a surprise.
We speak to our clients so regularly and
we're in touch regularly in reporting all the time.
We report monthly that if a problem comes up, we would have faced it head on, and
it's not seen as something that will absolutely kill the relationship.
And as I say, we try our best at all times and we learn and we keep going right.
Okay. Let's put the script into the other side.
Your most chuffed, your ten,
your best promoters are there standard act you mentioned we
care about testimonials and refer, like getting referrals back in.
That's one of the items we're running EOS as well.
One of the things that we look out on a weekly basis outside of NPS is on the
scorecard as well, and NPS by service line.
But we care about how many of those people who say they love us are actually doing
what promoters do and promoting us as well, because it's a huge growth lover.
Are there go to things when someone says
they were attend like, are you going right into will you leave us a clutch review or
do you have anybody in mind you can make a recommendation to are there go to things
that you have or is it case by case? What's the playbook on that side?
I think it's probably case by case and
would largely depend on whether they're a retainer or a project client with us.
But I think the go to for us would always
be to at least gather a testimonial, which we would pop on our website.
We're hot on social media.
Linkedin is a big platform that we use for our clients and for ourselves.
So any testimonials, any client videos
that we do, we'll be then sharing on social.
They become part of our marketing Journeys.
And again, we do written case studies on
our websites as well, where we kind of show.
For example, if it was a rebrand, we'd
show what the client looked like before and what they look like.
Now we'd then include a testimonial.
If we were lucky to have got a video with them, we would include that as well.
And I think our website and our LinkedIn channel is
kind of our biggest push for that sort of thing.
One of the things I'm going to give a
shout out here to Jeremy Wise, who runs Rise 25 along with John Corporate.
They run the podcast right now for us.
But one of the things that they do really well is around social proof.
So Jeremy and I were on a Zoom.
This is like a couple of months ago,
and I was just telling him it's been a great experience.
And right away he was like, in that
moment, he was like, hey, we're on Zoom already.
Let's just record it really quickly.
And so it made it super easy.
No extra friction for me to go record a 92nd or two minute long testimonial sniper
here's been my experience working with them.
And so that opportunity, like, in that moment, the cool thing about you asking
folks live is you get the opportunity right then to say, hey, let's schedule
either schedule follow up right then, or you can get it.
Capture it in that moment. That makes a ton of sense.
Are you normally lining up?
I assume, especially if you're doing a longer case study, you're probably lining
up a follow up call off of that versus recording live.
Yes.
Our case studies take a little bit of time
to put together because we write the content around it.
We go back and we pull all the stats and
we do some sort of, like, number crunching just to kind of really Hone in on where we
were benchmarking and then where we are now.
But, yeah, when things are going great, we grab a
testimonial, even if it's literally just typing away what that person has said.
And then we can make it a testimonial later, and then they can just approve it.
We put it anywhere.
If it's a case that we want to do, we want
to put them as part of our new customer testimonial video project that we have.
We tend to put those in, and we actually
tend to do more videoing with them during those sessions.
So we might capture
campaign footage at the same time as capturing our own testimony.
So it doesn't feel like they are.
They're just working hard to promote us.
We will then we return the favor when we
do some campaign work, or we have another meeting when we're there.
And it's just kind of part of building a relationship.
Really.
It feels like a natural relationship builder, for sure.
That's awesome.
Well, Amber, this has been really fun.
You've given folks a lot to think about and a lot of helpful feedback.
Just first hand experience kind of running NPS.
So let's point people to a couple of places.
One is obviously.
Finally, agency, which we will include in the show notes, is the agency site?
Is there anywhere else that you'd want to direct people is the best place to go
connect on LinkedIn, or is there a better way to reach out and connect with you?
Absolutely no. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Connect with the rest of the final team on LinkedIn.
We have our own.
If you've heard of it, seen or heard of us
promoting the engine room, which is kind of a webinarpodcast that we do.
That's another great. You can follow that hashtag on LinkedIn.
Hashtag. Finallyengine, where we give out all sorts
of different help and advice from social media all the
way through to web and digital and SEO and that sort of thing.
The resource section on our website is fantastic.
We're writing blogs all the time, and it's
the people in our agency actually writing the blogs on their discipline.
So we're regularly posting all sorts of new things up there.
So, yeah, absolutely.
Find us on LinkedIn and you won't miss us.
We talk on there an awful lot. That's awesome.
Cool. We'll make sure we link up to the engine
room and all of the resources that you mentioned here.
But, Amber, I appreciate it.
Thanks for making time and coming on with me today.
No worries. Thank you very much for having me.
All right. Just enter the recording.
Amber, you crushed it. Thank you.