The professional services (PS) industry is more competitive than ever. When you factor in the economic uncertainty that is impacting the finances of PS firms and their clients, the margins for success become increasingly slim. According to a report from S&P Global Market Intelligence looking at the challenges professional services decision-makers say they face, pricing transparency, margin pressure, and rapidly shifting client needs are among the top 5 obstacles identified. In that survey, one fifth of PS leaders reported that less than half of their projects are meeting budget, quality and timeline goals, and under half (47%) said that more than 70% of their projects are meeting those goals.
These stressors underscore the importance of ensuring your clients are happy — not just with the end product you deliver but throughout the project lifecycle. Keeping clients satisfied is the best way to secure their return business, ensuring you don’t lose work to the competition and can build recurring revenue that’s predictable and dependable.
Project sentiment refers to how your customers feel about the projects you’re working on together. It not only impacts the success of the projects, it also impacts their overall attitude toward your business. Understanding project sentiment will enable you to make real-time, meaningful changes during project delivery to strengthen client success and safeguard your company’s future. But first, you have to figure out how to measure it.
How Is Project Sentiment Different from Project Quality?
While project quality is an internal assessment of project execution, project sentiment is an external measure of how your clients view project execution and how they feel about the product you deliver.
Project quality is generally measured by transactional outcomes, such as whether or not you deliver on time and budget. Metrics like project burn rate, financial margins, and task completion percentage help you gauge work quality but leave you with blind spots regarding client sentiment. You get a picture of how well the project aligns with your internal goals, but you don’t know whether or not it’s meeting your client’s expectations.
Why Project Sentiment is Often Overlooked
Project sentiment is a qualitative measure that ultimately comes down to client subjectivity. This makes it difficult to capture, as it’s relational rather than transactional. It’s not uncommon for professional services firms to gauge sentiment at the end of a project with surveys or post-delivery downloads. But if the client wasn’t happy during execution, finding out after delivery won’t help you address the issue and course-correct. At that point, you can only apply their feedback to future projects — assuming you haven’t lost their business.
So why don’t more firms send surveys throughout the project lifecycle? For one, sending customer surveys is costly, time-consuming and difficult. Point survey solutions likely don’t integrate into your workflows or reporting and likely lack automation to trigger check-ins throughout the project lifecycle. And if survey data doesn’t connect to your project data, it may be hard to understand the context of responses anyway, which limits their value.
What’s needed is a holistic approach to professional services project delivery powered by a connected cloud platform with the ability to automatically trigger quick, simple-to-answer surveys at multiple milestones across the project lifecycle. Professional services organizations should look to purpose-built tools like Kantata Pulse to enable them to see precisely how projects are tracking to quality goals and analyze this information alongside other KPIs like project margin and Estimate at Completion. This will help you achieve the visibility, agility, and insight you need to keep projects aligned with client expectations and deliver value at every stage of the project lifecycle.
How to Measure and Analyze Project Sentiment
To effectively capture and analyze project sentiment, it’s crucial to ask the right questions and use a systematic approach to interpret the responses. Here are five qualitative questions that can help assess client sentiment:
- How well do you feel the project is meeting your initial expectations?
This question helps gauge alignment between the project’s initial scope and the client’s evolving expectations. - Do you feel adequately informed and updated about the project’s progress?
Communication is key in maintaining a positive sentiment, and this question can reveal gaps in your communication strategy. - How satisfied are you with the level of collaboration and partnership throughout the project?
This focuses on the relational aspect of project delivery, highlighting areas where your team could better engage with the client. - Are there any concerns or issues that haven’t been addressed to your satisfaction?
This allows clients to voice their concerns early, providing an opportunity for course correction before dissatisfaction escalates. - Would you recommend our services based on your experience so far?
This is a powerful indicator of overall sentiment and can help identify potential advocates for your brand.
Once you’ve gathered feedback, the next step is analysis. Responses should be categorized to identify patterns, themes, and outliers. Sentiment analysis tools can be leveraged to quantify qualitative data, providing a clearer picture of client feelings over time. Look for common pain points, areas of excellence, and trends that can inform future project planning and execution. Understanding what needs to change to improve project sentiment means working smarter and communicating better. That way, you can ensure your team’s hard work and efforts for continual improvement strengthen client relationships. That starts with tapping into client opinions throughout the project lifecycle.
Why Project Sentiment Matters
Even a detailed project plan and statement of work can be interpreted differently from either side of the deal — especially if your team’s and your client’s priorities are not fully aligned. Gaining critical insights from the client’s perspective can help you improve project quality and better understand what’s most important to project stakeholders so you can deliver results.
Tracking project sentiment helps PS organizations do better at:
- Mitigating project risks: If clients aren’t on the same page with your project team regarding the scope of deliverables or are unhappy with the product or services being provided, they’re more likely to take the project off-track. That will potentially jeopardize margins and necessitate longer timelines and more resources. This doesn’t just impact this project – those sorts of risks can potentially impact other projects and clients. Proactively collecting feedback from clients at various milestones throughout execution will help your teams get ahead of problems that put project outcomes at risk before it’s too late.
- Identifying trends and themes: With standards and best practices in place, your product and service lines should be executed similarly and with a similar level of quality across projects. Figuring out what’s causing client dissatisfaction across your offerings will help you decide strategically where to invest or focus your resources for the highest possible impact.
- Improving client retention: Soliciting client feedback, responding appropriately, and considering it on future projects will improve overall sentiment about your products and services. That’s why PS organizations with a finger on the pulse of project sentiment often have more repeat clients and smoother processes.
Understanding what needs to change to improve project sentiment means working smarter and communicating better. That way, you can ensure your team’s hard work and efforts for continual improvement strengthen client relationships. That starts with tapping into client opinions throughout the project lifecycle.
Kantata takes professional services technology to a new level, giving people-powered businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Kantata’s purpose-built software is helping over 1,500 professional services organizations of all shapes and sizes in more than 100 countries to focus and optimize their most important asset: their people. By leveraging the Kantata Professional Services Cloud, professionals gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with project delivery and outcomes.
