How to Use NPS in Family Law to Measure Client Satisfaction - #34

The most famous client satisfaction number in the world is Net Promoter Score (NPS).

The survey question is: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

Responses of "9 or 10" equal a promoter.  "7 or 8" is a neutral.  6 or less is a detractor.  Blend all the responses and get your NPS. 

We have made this single question the cornerstone of the Sterling Family Law client strategy.

In this episode, my partner, Tony Karls, and I break down everything we have learned over the past decade in implementing NPS into our family law practice.

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Transcript

Jeff Hughes: 0:00

And so I looked this morning and our numbers are at 56.4 on what we call post-matter so after the case is over. So these post-matter survey questions we send out were at 56.4, which is a. For those of you who hear 56 and go, that's a failing grade. It is exactly the opposite of a failing grade. Well, hello and welcome to the J Sterling Hughes Show, where we share the secrets and strategies of how we are building a rapidly growing family law practice. You know, over the past nine years we have grown from zero attorneys to 25 and doing over 15 million in revenue.

Jeff Hughes: 0:37

My purpose here is to document what's working and what's not working in our practice, with hopes that you can take that and you can recontextualize that for your practice, in short, and your success curve. My guest today is my partner, tony Carls. Tony and I together started the firm way back in 2014. We first started talking about it in the 13, started it in 14. He has a wealth of information to share on our topic today, which is client service scores. In particular, we use the net promoter score called NPS, and Tony is a master of business processes, service processes and so he's the expert in talking about this in our firm. So, tony, I remember when you approached me, boy going back probably year two, and said, hey, I think we should use NPS, and I said what is NPS? And I'll let you explain what you told me.

Tony Karls: 1:25

So NPS is an acronym for net promoter score, it's client service survey. It's not a very forgiving survey or process but essentially tells us how well we're doing and how likely we are to get referrals. So it's used by lots of large companies. It's now in, you know, 2024, more widely used. When we first started using it we were probably on a early adopter curve. There is mostly big businesses would use it. Small businesses weren't using it very much. But basically, what does it's up? It's one question survey how likely are you refer family or friend?

Tony Karls: 1:56

Scale of one to 10, you get a nine or 10, you get a point. You get a seven or an eight, you get zero points. If you get a six or a lower, you get negative one points and you take your, your points you divided by your survey. So if you get a 10, an eight and a six, your net promoter score is zero because you have zero points. One, one plus zero, plus or minus one. Divided by three, your net promoter score is zero. Zero. Divided by three On a Google score, what you're going to see is a four. So for all of you shoppers out there, if you are, if you're buying stuff and you're buying stuff from a four star rated business. It's net promoter scores probably zero. It's a very unforgiving score but it's super helpful operationally so we can get in front of stuff. We use it.

Jeff Hughes: 2:38

We use it quite a lot, yeah, so if someone gives a eight, that's me, that's pretty good, but you're saying that, no, that's not so good. That means they're neutral. Right, they're neutral.

Tony Karls: 2:49

Yep, they're a neutral actor in the marketplace. So which means statistically, they, if asked, they will say positive things about you, but if you don't ask them, they're going to say nothing about you. Okay, we're a, we're a net, we're a six. They're going to actively go blast you all over the world. They're going to just say everything mean and dirty about you that they can. Nines or 10s are going to actively go tell people in their network how great you are. So, seven or eight is it's. It's basically useless because unless someone asks them, they're not going to say anything.

Jeff Hughes: 3:20

Yeah. So the question is on a scale of one to 10, how likely you'd recommend Sterling law to your friend or your family member. And if they say 10, they're like, yes, they're all over that. If they say eight, you're like, oh well, at least you're not blasting us. If they say six, that's like red alert time. You need to, like, fix that relationship before it gets any worse. So so we started employing that and we've used that in various different ways. So walk through the evolution of how we started using it and how we use it today, why we made changes along the way, what we've learned about it.

Tony Karls: 3:55

So first off, this is for law firm, so you might be getting this. But our team at the early outset. They hated this so they couldn't stand it. Some of them today still don't like it. They think it's unfair. It is unfair, it's a very unfair scoring system. So we got resistance right away because we're kind of digging into the weeds of like, how well are you serving the client? And in our space specifically, we're not selling, you know, puppy dogs and fairy tales, like we're probably.

Tony Karls: 4:24

People navigate really hard situations and we can do the best we can. We can't out guarantee any outcome in court and when our team does what they should be doing from a legal perspective and executing that really, really well and then they get a negative score, there's there's kind of a cognitive dissonance there. But what we found is our team that services the clients well. Even if they get a negative outcome in court or not a favorable outcome for the client, they can still get good client service scores and those clients will still refer clients to us because they felt like we flopped for them. They felt like we cared. That's why we use it, because we want our clients leaving feeling like we, we carried, we carried the burden during this time we did what we could to help you be in the best possible place with your family after you walked through a divorce or paternity action. Those are fun situations, yeah, yeah. So your original question is how do we deploy it? So at first we first launched it. We just launched it after the case was over so we can measure what their total experience was, and that was good. But it was kind of a reactive score and it helped us and helped us learn a lot, but we weren't out in front of client issues or potential client issues as we navigated that and started talking about it and campaigning it internally and working through helping the team understand the why we added two more scoring intervals. So the first one we do is actually right after the consultation, because we really care about how you feel coming in. So if we're not getting 9s and 10s in those, we have an issue in terms of how we're showing up, because you're, if you're a client going through one of these scenarios, like we need to show up for you so that you know that we're, we have your back when you go through this. So and like it's super easy for us to show up in a consultation, which doesn't matter other than, like we have to show up in the consultation Right and we have really good scores there, like now we're in the 90s consistently, which is fantastic. So that's helped in our how we're showing up in the consultation room.

Tony Karls: 6:19

We also do it after 90 days, after funding, and we do that so we know how well were they onboarded, how well did they get onboarded and how are they feeling about our service before the case is over. This is an opportunity for us, if it's not going great, for us to fix it. Or if we weren't, if they weren't onboarded, well, maybe it's. Maybe it's on our team, maybe it's on the corporate side with some process for running or some team member there that's helping with the data gathering at the beginning or some issue there that we need to address that, like set the attorney up to get a bad score. So we now do it at three different intervals right after the consultation, 90 days into the case so we know how we're doing, how likely are we going to be successful there and then after the case is over. So what we care about the most is the one after the case is over, because that's the one that they're leaving with. So if they have bad taste in their mouth, then we're not in a good spot.

Jeff Hughes: 7:14

Approximately how long is our average case as?

Tony Karls: 7:17

of today, it's like 204 days Roughly.

Jeff Hughes: 7:22

So when you're taking their temperature roughly 90 days, you're almost at the halfway point. So now you've evaluated onboarding. That also gives us a chance to fix things if they're south over these next half of the case.

Jeff Hughes: 7:35

Essentially that's where all the heavy stuff happens anyway, whenever you're concluding it right, right after the console, at 90 days and then after the case is over, and that's the one that we measure the most, because that's, after all is said and the dust has settled. That's what the client is telling us. They feel Right and I know that a lot of times I mean these scores go to the lawyer's work, but a lot of the work that's done with that client is outside of the of that lawyer. We have paralegals, we have certainly support staff that interact with the client. How have we managed the quote fairness around that for the lawyer? Because sometimes they don't have any control and they get impacted by stuff outside of their control.

Tony Karls: 8:17

We're seeing a score that's directly related to kind of how we've serviced them with a support team member that's going to be assigned to work. So it doesn't impact the attorney's individual score because we do manage them to NPS. We have expectations around that, but we don't delete it. We acknowledge it and we look for opportunities to improve where we need to. So it doesn't matter which team member it hits. It's our responsibility to own the fact. Now there's a consumer in the marketplace that didn't have a great experience with us and that's you know. It's not a great place to increase marketing costs and decreases referrals. There's a whole host of issues with not doing this well that show up on your financial statement that they're kind of hidden. You don't really see them unless you experience going from one end to the other from a service perspective.

Jeff Hughes: 9:05

So when we send out these surveys the NPS survey, at those three different intervals, what is the typical response rate from clients that we see on each of those? So those go out by email. Is that right, correct, yeah.

Tony Karls: 9:18

So we'll send them out by email. All of them have about a 30% response rate on there after you, so they're super high click through rate on these emails in total of the ones we send out by clients and get about 30% back. So on a daily basis now that we're bigger, there's some of the emails I still pay attention to. The most is like just scan through all our NPS surveys, you get about 15 to 20 a day and I'm just in my head doing a calculation how many do we got? What's our score today? Yeah, it's a pretty good measuring tool for me to see, like, how well are we servicing our clients?

Jeff Hughes: 9:56

And approximately how many responses do you think we need before we have a pretty good statistical relevancy on that particular lawyer or legal team members? Nps numbers for their clients.

Tony Karls: 10:10

So we're looking at it from, like, a performance perspective for attorneys. If it's less than 30, it's likely not a good enough volume of scores. So just looking at the score and not looking at the volume is dangerous, because you might have three and like if one is a negative and one's neutral and one's positive. We already talked about what that score would be. It'd be a zero, but your data set is super small so it's not super relevant. So when we look at our team member, what we're looking at as a comparison is what is their 12 month trailing NPS score? That typically puts us in a spot where they'll have at least 30 scores against their all time score. So we're comparing those two so we can see where they're trending. How are they doing, if there is any issues, the notes that we get back from them, kind of like day to mind, and see the pattern.

Jeff Hughes: 10:59

You touched on this earlier around. We're in family law, so we're dealing with clients that are, by and large, really in a hurting spot in their life and we know hurting people hurt. They lash out. That's just the nature of our humanity, right, and sometimes they do things that really are not reasonable or fair. That's just the way this business goes and we've allowed for some carve out for our team for those type of clients. Could you talk to some of the exceptions or maybe the caveats that we've carved out around those type of clients?

Tony Karls: 11:32

They're pretty limited. But if we run into a client that is like dealing with some sort of mental health thing and we receive a score there, that will usually discount Like there's limited situations, there's not a ton. Those are going to be evaluated on a case by case basis almost exclusively and it'll get kind of our managing partner involved and the attorney and we'll do a touch base with the client on those. We'll just kind of see like what's happening here to get the whole story and then it'll be up to the managing partner to decide whether or not that score is included or not included. That's kind of how that process works. So it's not many that get removed. We want to see an athletic score but in rare circumstances that'll happen. So I would say if I were to tell you a percentage, it's probably one out of 90 to 100. It's a pretty rare circumstance.

Jeff Hughes: 12:23

I mean, yeah, what's unique to what's interesting to me is that over time there are a consistent group of attorneys in our practice that consistently have high numbers. You're in and you're out, so you put all that together that just tells you how good they are at really taking care and loving on these clients. You know, one of the things that you were talking that came to mind. Some of the mistakes that we've had and this is something that took us a while to kind of figure out how to get right consistently was when a client would leave, generally under a negative circumstance. They would get upset, they didn't like something and they would leave. We would still send them the MPS score later and just rub salt in the wound that they felt right. So what have we had to do to kind of prevent that from happening and how have we managed through that Again?

Tony Karls: 13:09

that's a pretty easy process that we managed through Slack. But in the rare circumstance that happens, the attorney lets the managing partner know and they'll contact the who runs our marketing to put them in our do not contact list. That client is scored. So like they don't, it doesn't disappear, doesn't like get not scored, it gets automatically scored as a negative. But we don't like punch the bees nest on purpose to just get stung in the face again. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So because usually in those circumstances the managing partner or partner has already gotten involved, they talk to the client prior to leaving. So like we've already done the thing that we would do after we got a negative score back. So doing that process again just essentially is like stepping in a hornet's nest.

Jeff Hughes: 13:51

Yeah, and so I looked this morning and our numbers are at 56.4 on what we call post-matter so after the case is over. So these post-matter survey questions we send out were at 56.4, which is a. For those of you who hear 56, they go oh, that's a failing grade. It is exactly the opposite of a failing grade. So I've looked at multiple lawyer NPS survey results and the average of all of those cases that I've looked at multiple surveys and sources is about 27. So the average lawyer is at 27.

Jeff Hughes: 14:24

We're in family law, so we should be half of that at best, because that includes all the happy law and the state planning and all that kind of stuff and the personal injuries and et cetera. We're in the area where people don't like to be the most, probably other than maybe in probate court. So that means you're dead. So outside of that, we're at 56.4, which is a testament to just exceptional client service from the part of our lawyers and our paralegals and our support team. So kudos to everyone on our team. This is like a high watermark over at least the last few years that I've seen 56.4. So we're more than double the average of lawyers in general.

Tony Karls: 15:01

So yeah, then, like some good cops, that we looked at when we started this. So when we started the program to like see, like all right, what can we possibly do? What's the target that we're trying to aim at? Because our internal target is 50. So when we launched this, like, we compared it to Disneyland experience, which at that point in that so the around 2016, they were at 84. So, like going to Disney and riding on the rides and like meeting Mickey Mouse and doing all the things that are related to like what that looked like back in 2016 was at 84. Our target was 50. Knowing we're working with people that are going through divorce or paternity action, we're pretty proud of that. We also wanted to crush the industry standard. So I think we've done a good job with that. It was not without a lot of effort.

Jeff Hughes: 15:49

A lot of learning over the years implemented. Well cool. Thanks for sharing this with us today, and many things you want to close with on NPS.

Tony Karls: 15:55

If you're going to do it in law firm, I would. You're going to run into challenges, but they're worth it. They'll drive referrals. They'll drive down your marketing costs. It's a super useful tool, but it's not without challenges, all right.

Jeff Hughes: 16:08

Cool. Have a great week everyone.