Because we don’t want our homepage to be too wordy, it can be hard to fully describe all our services, features and benefits. In particular, there is one element on the page that I’ve come to realize is often misunderstood or even overlooked altogether: the client satisfaction score.

Like many companies who provide client support, we use a ticketing system to track the status of help requests, to see them through to completion and to communicate progress to our clients.

When support tickets are closed, clients are notified and are also given the chance to rate the service they received.

Those ratings – gold for amazing, green for good, yellow for okay and red for needs improvement – are then collected over a rolling 6 months and converted to the live satisfaction score you see displayed on our homepage.

Okay isn’t Good Enough

Not all clients use the rating feature, of course, but as the ratings come in, both the gold (amazing) and green (good) ratings are counted as positive readings toward our satisfaction score, no surprise.

That said, we have some flexibility in how to handle the yellow (okay) responses. Rather than counting yellow scores as neutral replies that have no impact on our satisfaction score, we treat them as negatives, just as we do with the infrequent red (needs improvement) ratings that come in.

In short: at KaufmanIT, an “okay” client experience is not good enough.

To get a sense of how few negative remarks it takes to knock our score down from 100%, by the way, here’s the breakdown of nearly 400 recent client ratings:

Just five subpar ratings — 3 of which were, in fact, neutral — out of nearly 400 is what it takes to maintain such a high score. The image above is up to date as I write this post, and the ratings are from the past rolling 6 months through yesterday. Again, that score seen on our homepage is live. You will notice it fluctuating if you visit us often.

One-of-a-Kind Openness

Do you know other IT service providers like us? Can you imagine they’d be willing to so publicly risk their reputations by showing a live feed of their clients’ satisfaction like this?

If one of our local competitors is doing this so transparently, we certainly haven’t seen it.

We’re willing to lift the curtain in this way because we know our technicians are always available and easy to reach. Our all-U.S. team members must be good communicators to be hired here in the first place. And our bonus and awards structures built solely around client satisfaction keep this already talented crew laser-focused on what matters most: service.

Indeed, our team’s dedication to happy clients is what allowed us to celebrate the maintaining of a 98% satisfaction score for 12 straight months earlier this year (a streak that remains intact as I write)!

Comments, and How We Handle Them

As you can imagine, a client calling in with a tech-related issue isn’t starting from a happy place; even a simple issue like a forgotten password or not being able to connect to a printer can be quite frustrating to the non-technical user who just wants to do his or her job.

Thus, to take a client from that unhappy moment to a place of total satisfaction is no small feat. Here, for example, is what our most recent reviews look like:

And that’s what our client feedback basically always looks like: a literal wall of gold star reviews. In fact, our team members give each other a friendly ribbing on internal messaging channels when one of them ‘only’ receives a green review!

But we don’t focus only on positive feedback received. Of the clients who take a moment to rate our service, nearly half also leave comments. Often, they’re quite short. Sometimes, however, they are detailed and very enlightening. Regardless, at each monthly all-team meeting, we read every single comment received and we use all yellow and red comments as learning lessons and opportunities for improvement.

Some months we won’t receive any yellow or red comments, but we’ll read them if we do!

And along the way, we’ll keep bannering our client satisfaction score on our website for all to see. In our minds, it confirms our commitment to great service and keeps our eyes focused on what matters most: the satisfaction of our clients.