It’s always easier to retain and expand services with existing clients than it is to sign a new client. For IT solutions providers, client satisfaction affects your bottom line: happier clients lead to longer contracts, project expansions, and better referrals.
If you're not actively tracking how clients feel about working with you, you're making decisions based on gut feeling in one of the most competitive markets out there. Understanding client satisfaction metrics can be the difference between predictable revenue growth and constant client churn.
Why client satisfaction is critical in professional services
Unlike in product-based businesses, where customers may never interact with a human, solutions providers interact directly with clients, often during stressful situations such as outages, migrations, or security incidents. A client’s experience will shape their overall impression of the business in areas that matter most to solutions providers:
1. Retention and recurring revenue
Keeping clients on contracts and retainers helps predict financial stability. It offers recurring revenue you can use to scale your business. Capturing a new client takes time, labor, and energy as a lead progresses through the pre-sales and sales cycles. This is why it’s always “cheaper” to maintain an existing client and foster that relationship.
2. Pipeline management
When client satisfaction drops, clients leave, taking their referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations with them. When all your clients are satisfied, you are more likely to maintain a robust pipeline of potential new clients. Your customers can refer new business and handle your marketing for you.
3. Operational efficiency
Dissatisfied clients create escalations. Escalations drain engineering time. When customers are happier, support volume and complexity drop. That means smoother operations and better margins.
4. Competitive differentiation
Most solutions providers sell similar tool stacks and similar services. What differentiates many businesses is experience—the reliability, communication, and predictability of your delivery process. Measuring satisfaction helps you optimize that experience.
Key metrics for measuring client satisfaction for solutions providers
In IT solutions, projects can span months and support relationships last years. It’s therefore essential to ensure you are measuring the correct data to paint an accurate picture of your relationship with your clients.
1. NPS (Net Promoter Score)
NPS helps measure long-term sentiment, not just moment-in-time happiness. It often consists of the single question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a colleague?” Respondents choose an answer 0-10, indicating not at all likely to very likely. The NPS is simple, making it easy to track consistently across projects, service areas, and time periods without survey fatigue.
2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT measures satisfaction with specific interactions and touchpoints. In IT solutions, this is useful for gauging sentiment after events such as onboarding, ticket closure, or a project milestone. CSAT provides granular data on specific aspects of your service delivery, helping identify pain points and areas where you consistently excel.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
This metric asks clients, “How easy was it to get your issue resolved?” If a client has to chase updates, re-explain requirements, or escalate for answers, they are likely not experiencing the frictionless support they want—low effort results in satisfied clients. Clients who put in a lot of effort for support will reflect that pain in the CES.
4. Project delivery satisfaction
For project-based IT services like cloud migrations, network overhauls, and ERP integrations, you need a metric that captures delivery quality, not just support interactions. Prompt clients to score whether the project management, communication, and change management met expectations. This is important for providers who need to demonstrate consistent delivery quality.
Methods for gathering client feedback
After determining what you want to measure, you need to build a feedback system to collect data consistently. These methods work for gathering information:
1. Surveys and questionnaires
Targeted questions embedded directly in the workflow can capture client sentiment at key touchpoints. You can set triggers in your CRM to automatically send surveys at key times, such as after ticket resolution, upon milestone completion, and after onboarding. These mini surveys yield higher response rates and valuable insights because they’re brief and easy to complete.
2. Post-project debriefs
Many IT solutions providers conduct retrospectives internally, but very few do so with the client, despite the insights they could glean. Schedule formal post-project reviews with your clients and ask specific questions, such as “Where could communication have been clearer?” and “What went well technically and operationally?” The benefit of a face-to-face conversation is that you can press for further information and ask follow-up questions, revealing information that survey scores alone won’t capture. Document these conversations and use the feedback to improve your project management process.
3. Quarterly reviews
These larger reviews can serve as standing feedback opportunities between the client and the provider. Use this time to ask questions about what is and is not working. In addition to making a client feel heard and recognized, a QBR can reveal new project opportunities tied to client frustration. For example, a client might share that they enjoy working with their provider team, but are disappointed by how often their VPN drops.
4. Ticket data
A lot of client communication happens through tickets. Review the types of tickets submitted and conduct qualitative analysis to identify common issues and feedback. If you see the same comments or support tickets repeated, there may be an area you could tighten up. Clients who have positive experiences with the services they receive typically have high satisfaction ratings.
How to track client satisfaction over time
Your client data is only valuable if you spot trends and then act on them. You can’t leave this information buried in spreadsheets and notes, losing the opportunity to add value to your business. Create a framework for tracking client satisfaction:
1. Centralize the data
Put all your metrics and gathered data into one place, such as a PSA, CRM, or client account folder. Centralization will make it easier for patterns to emerge.
2. Create specific trend lines
Though it’s good to get your average satisfaction score, you’ll get more insight by segmenting into groups. You can break up data by individual client, service tier, annual contract value, and tenure, for example.
You might discover that your satisfaction scores are strong with enterprise clients but struggling with mid-market accounts, or that onboarding is your weak point but ongoing service is excellent. These insights tell you where to focus improvement efforts.
3. Compare satisfaction to delivery metrics
When you tie data to a specific aspect of delivery, it will be easier to create a plan of action to improve that score. For example,
- A low CSAT can stem from missed SLAs
- Low NPS can correlate to poor scoping accuracy, skewing the project from inception
- High CES could be from inconsistent communication
How to use client satisfaction data to improve your services
After gathering feedback and developing workable insights, the next step is to turn the insights into improvements.
That starts with closing the feedback loop. After a client gives you feedback, make sure to tell them about your action steps. This demonstrates that you’re listening and not just asking to be performative.
Start iterating your processes, making high-impact changes first. Redesign workflows that have satisfaction issues. In doing so, make sure to tackle the root cause of each issue, not just the symptom. For example, if you’re struggling with support tickets reopening, look for a systemic cause, such as poor scoping or unclear ownership.
Sometimes it’s a people problem, not a process problem. Be sure to train and coach based on patterns as well. For example, an engineer might be technically brilliant, but struggle with client communication. The data may reveal coaching moments around specific skill gaps.
Strong client satisfaction comes from consistent, predictable delivery
A top driver of satisfaction in IT services is predictability. Clients don’t expect perfection, but they do want operational consistency.
This means no surprises, clear communication, realistic timelines, and accurate project scopes. They want to know what to expect, when to expect it, and that you'll deliver on your commitments every single time. When satisfaction scores drop, it's rarely because of a single catastrophic failure—but rather an accumulation of small disappointments.
If you don't scope accurately from the beginning, you’re starting your client journey on the back foot. Budgets and timelines stem from the initial discovery meetings, so it is imperative to define the scope as precisely and accurately as possible.
ScopeStack gives you a head start in automating your scoping process, enabling you to create better scopes faster than ever.
If you’re interested in learning more about what ScopeStack’s CPQ can do for your and your client’s satisfaction, book a demo today.
You might also like: