Client Satisfaction
Satisfying clients with engaged employees
As a professional service firm, our first raison d’être is to identify the important problems of our clients and to help solve them (learn more about our purpose in ‘Why we exist’). Their satisfaction with the services we provide is at the very foundation of our success as a firm.
To reach maximum client satisfaction, we must help them understand and respond to the ecosystem they belong to, which is a key prerequisite for their sustainable existence. We must then understand their requests and expectations, and be ready to disrupt our service delivery model according to evolving needs and market changes. Our objective is to help solve problems in complex systems, and to provide distinguished value through customised services and professional expertise.
Our people are a core element of this. Achieving true client centricity requires employee engagement; how they interact and collaborate with the client ultimately drives the client experience we are looking for. That is why we look at client satisfaction from the perspectives of both our clients and our people.
Asking client feedback to improve our service delivery
The satisfaction of our clients is measured by the outcome of our yearly Client Experience Survey (CES). It is based on an online questionnaire, which we send out once a year. Based on its results, we build a (1) Client Loyalty Index and (2) Net Promoter Score. Both are important indicators of how satisfied our clients are with the overall working experience with PwC Luxembourg and the relationship with our teams.
As suggested by our 2019 Client Loyalty Index and Net Promoter Score, our clients are overall very satisfied with our services. This is what they particularly like:
However, listening carefully to what our clients say, we understand that there is also room for improvement in some areas. This is what our clients need us to become better at:
It is crucial for us to receive honest feedback from clients as these comments will help fine tune the services rendered by PwC and help our teams respond better to clients’ needs. To understand what we can improve concretely, we systematically follow up with clients who give low ratings in the Client Experience Survey. In the case of ratings of six or below to the two key questions, the relevant PwC partner, director and manager receives an email alert. Additionally, the concerned Industry leader and the Clients & Market Committee leader are informed. A follow-up is done individually with each client by the partner in charge. In the FY 2018/2019, we noted an improvement for all clients who we followed-up with after receiving a low satisfaction rating.
Additionally, the concerned Industry leader and the Clients & Market Committee leader are informed. A follow-up is done individually with each client by the partner in charge. In the FY 2018/2019, we noted an improvement for all clients who we followed-up with after receiving a low satisfaction rating.
We also ask to what extent clients see us demonstrating value-based behaviours. This is key for us to be able to provide the best possible service.
As we are aiming at creating societal impact with the services we are offering (see ‘Societal Impact’), we are continuing the conversation with clients on potential cooperation on sustainability topics. They tell us that they would like to learn more about how concretely PwC can support them in related areas. Our dedicated Sustainability team analyses the results in detail to take appropriate action.
Client Satisfaction surveys as part of a bigger picture
Our Client Experience Survey complements other PwC survey programmes. Employee engagement drives customer engagement – linking the two helps us understand how customers and employees interact within our firm. Looking at the results of both, our Client Experience Survey and People Engagement Survey (see ‘Employee Journey’ for more detail) in a broader context allows us to make more insightful decisions on how to ensure service excellence. The increase in client loyalty versus the decrease in people engagement suggests that we need to put a greater emphasis on our people dimension and investigate further what makes this trend.
The interdependency between both the engagement of our people and customers is also reflected in our client feedback. One of the recurring points of criticism of our clients, as shown on the above feedback quotes, is the high turnover and lack of continuity in our teams. We are conscious that the retention of talents is one of our biggest challenges and a systemic issue of our business model (see ‘Employee Journey’ for more detailed information) and we are working to find answers to this problem.
The best way for us to develop concrete solutions to this is by obtaining comparable satisfaction information from both our clients and our people. We are therefore planning to conduct three mutual satisfaction pilots, one in each of our service lines (Assurance, Tax, Advisory). Besides this, we believe in the power of our people. To help them address difficult client situations by themselves, we take a systemic, firm-wide approach to equip them with the skills to deal with client-related challenges. Related workshops have been implemented in our promotional training events, such as GO Senior, GO Manager and ‘Boost your development’ and separate soft skills, such as ‘Building business relationships’ this year.
Mutual satisfaction remains a focus topic and a metric to measure our performance in the area of client satisfaction.
This material references Disclosures 102-44, 102-46, 102-47, 103-1, 103-2 and 103-3.
