Kinetic, K2’s five-year strategic business plan, challenges us to grow without compromise. This means that as we strive to achieve 15% YOY growth (Commercial Success pillar of Kinetic) and to develop the close and trusting relationships that we share with our clients and partners (People & Culture pillar of Kinetic), we must maintain our commitment to delivering a uniquely personal level of service. Listening to and acting upon feedback from our clients on their real world experience of our services is one of the ways in which we do this.
Every other year, we send out a comprehensive client survey (biennial in order to keep disruption to our clients to a minimum). Questions give clients the opportunity to provide honest, structured feedback on a range of aspects of the K2 service offering. These include quality of communication, strength of the relationship with the K2 team, and experience of the service delivered. Once the survey has closed, we analyse the results, identify areas for improvement, and then put plans in place to adapt our service delivery accordingly.
For us, the client survey is a valuable tool, key to achieving a good Net Promoter Score (NPS): currently, we have an NPS of 64. The survey enables us to record this score by helping us to develop a true partnership with our clients; such a relationship involves listening to what they have to say, taking their feedback on board and responding to that feedback as soon as possible. Our client survey is not a mere box-ticking exercise; it provides us with the information that we need to strengthen our client relationships by not only fulfilling needs but also exceeding expectations.
In this way, we allow our clients to guide our growth, extending our service offering to meet their evolving needs, and making changes to the way that we deliver our services in response to their experience of them. The result is responsive rather than speculative growth, as we are meeting a need or a desire that has been clearly communicated to us.
Of course, before pushing ahead with such growth, questions need to be asked and research needs to be done. How transient is the need that we are responding to? How saturated is the market that caters for this need? If a desire rather than a need, is it likely that its priority level will drop in response to predicted shifts in the global economy? That being said, however, responsive growth is typically a sustainable option, one that puts us in a strong position when it comes to meeting our objective of growing without compromise.
