Do you know how your clients rate you out of 11?

For those of  you who have children who have recently gone back to school, you’re probably having very similar conversations with them, asking, “Who’s in their class?”,  “what they’re learning right now?”, “how are their teachers?’, etc.. Well, this morning I had an interesting conversation with my children asking them about their teachers and they chose to describe their teachers’ performance using a scale of one to ten.  For example, my daughter gave her teacher a score of eight out of ten, and my son rated his teacher a nine and a half out of ten. Certainly, I was encouraged by the fact that they were enjoying and appreciative of their teachers. However, it was interesting how they quickly described the performance of their teachers using possibly the most easy-to-apply and understand rating system.

We started discussing what their teachers would have to do differently for them to receive a ten out of ten. In other words, from the student's perspective, what gaps were missing in their teaching performance?

It got me thinking about how my clients would rate my service and value on a scale of ten.  I’m not completely in the dark as from time to time I’ll ‘check-in’ with my clients to ensure they continue to see value in our services.  So my question to you is, do you know how you rate out of ten with your clients? Or, even more profoundly, how would you rate your service and value to your own clients?  And what is it that you could do to close that gap if you’re not scoring the illustrious ‘perfect ten,’ even if you’re scoring a nine out of ten, what is it that you need to do differently in order to achieve that ten out of ten, or better yet, ‘an eleven’ from your client?

Perhaps you already know what you need to do, but you’re just not able to do it for whatever reason.

In your next meeting with your client, instead of making assumptions, simply ask them how they rate your value and service on a scale of one through ten.

Once you’ve had that conversation with your clients, please feel free to share some of their feedback below.  Chances are we can all probably benefit from incorporating those same changes in actions and behaviour in our own business to achieve a higher score out of ten or perhaps ‘eleven’!!!