Published by Eric Gregg - 03/23/21

The Business Case for Service Excellence: How Staffing Firms That Survey With ClearlyRated Add Millions of Dollars to Their Top-Line Growth

At ClearlyRated, we try to approach everything from a research perspective—including our own software. We don’t just want to know if something works; we want to know how much it works and why.

And thanks to our clients’ generosity, we have lots of insight into how ClearlyRated’s Net Promoter® Score satisfaction survey helps staffing firms identify at-risk accounts, target growth opportunities, and demonstrate value.

For example, we know that firms that work with us have an average NPS® score 48 points higher than the industry average.

Our clients also:

But these metrics are meaningless if they don’t translate into real revenue growth.

If good service is good business—and the data suggests it is—improving your firm’s operational and service excellence should result in improvements to top-line growth and bottom line profit.

After analyzing a decade of data from staffing firms just like yours, we can confidently say it does: Addressing client and talent satisfaction and at-risk revenue through the ClearlyRated NPS survey program can represent a $1.4M revenue growth opportunity for staffing firms in the ballpark of $25M annual sales.

The ClearlyRated Survey Program

While the real-dollar impact at your firm will depend on a number of factors—including firm size, average client revenue, client satisfaction, and more—the process we use to identify these opportunities is the same at all firms, and it starts with our NPS survey, designed specifically for staffing firms.

Any NPS survey program will include “the NPS question.”

But our surveys also include industry-specific driver questions that target the specific areas of service delivery that most reliably impact NPS—and therefore revenue—according to our staffing firm buyer research.

The results from this survey drive all of the other features of this program and help you get the most from the data you collect from your clients.

If you’re asking how this translates into real-dollar improvements, there are three key areas where our program helps staffing firms realize that revenue benefit:

  1. Upselling or cross-selling accounts that already love working with you
  2. Identifying and addressing dissatisfied accounts and recovering at-risk revenue
  3. De-risking decision-making for new accounts with compelling proof of service excellence

These three areas each represent a powerful opportunity to create internal efficiency, improve the service experience for key stakeholders (including clients and placed talent), and ultimately drive business growth.

Expand Accounts Effectively by Targeting Your Promoters

The most overlooked path to increasing revenue through an NPS survey isn’t actually about addressing dissatisfaction—it’s about effectively taking advantage of the places where you’re already doing great.

Often the only thing standing between a successful upsell or cross-selling opportunity is the basic act of identifying those clients most amenable to increasing their spend and making the ask.

In fact, our staffing client data indicates that your Promoters—clients who answer with a 9 or 10 when asked if they would recommend your firm to friends or colleagues—are likely to increase spend by 11% the following year.

Our dashboard is designed to make it easy to identify these opportunities. After your clients have responded to their surveys, it only takes a glance to see where your efforts should be spent.

For many firms, expanding their existing accounts represents the most immediate source of rapid growth.

According to our model, which is based off of a conservative estimate of $75k annual revenue per client, account expansion alone represents a revenue increase of 2% or more of total annual revenue.

Use Your Survey Feedback to Protect At-Risk Revenue

Of course, no staffing firm is without its Detractors. Asking a client to invest further when they’re already dissatisfied with your firm is unlikely to be successful, making it paramount to identify who’s satisfied (and who isn’t) before making the ask.

Instead, you should be using your survey results dashboard to help you identify opportunities to resolve client or talent dissatisfaction as soon as you’re able. Our program makes that possible in two simple ways.

First, our dashboard automatically delivers Detractor Alerts so you can take immediate action to resolve concerns when someone is less than satisfied.

This allows you to take advantage of the service recovery paradox, which is an increase of client loyalty that results from the successful resolution of their issue or concern.

Additionally, our dashboard makes it easy to see where proactive reachout might be effective by color-coding less-than-satisfied clients and talent, so you and your team can identify opportunities at a glance.

As you know, the staffing industry can be volatile: The average yearly churn alone can represent upwards of 26% of total revenue, and that doesn’t account for Detractors of your firm, who are significantly more likely to reduce spend in the following year.

But our survey program can help you identify and address that churn: Two-thirds of ClearlyRated clients report saving a dissatisfied account identified through their survey program.

In fact, in 2020, 66% of our 300+ annual staffing firm clients reported identifying at-risk revenue through our post-survey follow up.

When it comes to dissatisfied clients, identifying the detractors isn’t enough, however—you have to act on the data you’re gathering to make sure that the service breakdown doesn’t happen again. Whether it’s process updates, communication changes, or other operational improvements, it’s important to take this opportunity to ensure that preventable service failures don’t continue.

We’ve designed the ClearlyRated reporting dashboard to aggregate this data into metrics you can actually use, helping you ensure you’re taking action in the areas that matter most. This allows you to create a culture of operational excellence that helps you reliably meet—and exceed—your clients’ expectations.

Help Prospects Get to “Yes” by Sharing Proof of Service Excellence

When it comes to Promoters and Detractors, our survey program helps you ensure that you’re able to capitalize on the value you’ve created and address areas where you’ve fallen short of expectations.

But business growth is not just about creating value for your clients. You have to compellingly communicate that value as well.

And that’s why we’ve aggregated NPS survey results into a suite of product features that can tell the story of your service excellence.

  • ClearlyRated.com profile pages feature your clients’ positive feedback and aggregated star ratings in a search-optimized format that’s easy for your prospects to find.
  • Star rating widgets allow you to easily add social proof of your firm’s excellence to your email signature and About page.
  • Our proprietary #goodnews suite includes social sharing features and easy reporting for testimonials and other “voice of the client” marketing collateral to make sharing easy.
  • Shout Out notifications broadcast the positive contributions your employees make to your entire organization, helping you tell the service story of your firm internally.
  • Our Best of Staffing Award recognizes firms that meet world-class standards of service excellence, helping derisk decision making for prospects looking to partner with a firm they can trust. (Fewer than 2% of firms nationwide qualify!)

These product features help our clients communicate the value they provide when they’re at their best, mitigating prospects’ fears around the buying process and assuring them that your firm can meet their promises so they can invest in your services with confidence.

As a result, our clients consistently demonstrate patterns of growth well above the industry average.

Through ClearlyRated, staffing firms receive thousands of dollars worth of additional online SEO exposure, and even modest estimates put the value at 3-5x the cost.

98% of our Clients Report a Positive ROI

From these three areas combined, the average staffing firm that utilizes ClearlyRated’s satisfaction survey software sees a real-dollar benefit equal to roughly 4-5% of expected annual revenue.

That means our suite of proprietary client satisfaction features can represent a 30x return on investment for firms targeting 5M in total annual revenue.

The secret to the success of our NPS survey program?

It allows staffing firms just like yours to link client feedback to action. It’s the reason almost all of our clients report a positive return on their investment in our survey software, and it’s the reason so many of our clients have continued to partner with us year after year.

We Work With Staffing Firms Just Like Yours

If you’re wondering what our clients look like and whether or not they represent your firm, we’re confident that they do.

A quick client snapshot:

  • 300+ staffing firms annually
  • 6 out of the top 10 North American staffing firms by size (according to SIA)
  • 35% of the top 100 firms according to SIA in 2019 and 2020

All told, our survey software protects over 40 billion dollars—and counting—in staffing industry revenue each year.

Good Service IS Good Business: We’ll Prove it to You

We’ve designed this entire process from the ground up to deliver world-class service while we help you deliver yours. In fact, 88% of our enterprise-level clients mention the service they receive from their account manager to be among the highlights of working with our team.

All told, our comprehensive program allows your firm to:

  • identify your most enthusiastic supporters,
  • shore up faltering relationships,
  • understand the best avenues for internal improvements,
  • strike at the heart of operational issues contributing to client dissatisfaction,
  • measure the efficacy of the changes you make,
  • and improve your ability to speak to the high levels of service you provide.

Our program gives you the tools you need to deliver on your promises of service excellence—and the collateral to prove it—in an industry where 39% of hiring managers leave their firms because they’re dissatisfied with the service they receive.

ClearlyRated at Your Firm

Interested in the real-dollar impact of implementing our program at your firm? We’ll use the forecasting models we’ve developed off thousands of NPS surveys and years of our clients’ financial data to crunch the numbers for you.

Get in touch.

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