When I was leading 3Pillar, we managed hundreds of client relationships, each of them vital and deserving of care and insight. But like most professional services firms, we leaned heavily on the industry-standard tools to measure satisfaction: NPS surveys, CSAT checks, and red-yellow-green client scorecards.
They were supposed to be our window into client health. In reality, though, they were fogged glass.
The NPS Mirage
Take Net Promoter Score. We sent NPS surveys on a semi-annual basis, and we aimed to gather a casual verbal “pulse check” of the score every six weeks in order to have a more real-time, operational signal of where we stood between the semi-annual surveys. Despite best efforts, we consistently struggled to make this pulse check a routine.
Teams found endless reasons to delay. “We just had a tough delivery,” “Let’s wait until next sprint,” and “Now’s just not a good time,” were just a few of the commonly-cited reasons why this pulse check should be pushed back. And when we did ask, despite our good intent, responses were often gathered in informal, inconsistent ways.
Here’s the problem: the very moments when it’s not a good time to ask are usually the ones when you need insight most. What could we have done better in the client’s moment of need? What can we do going forward to make it right? Avoiding hard discussions isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s proof that the system isn’t working.
The same happened with NPS surveys. If a release was rocky or a deadline was missed, we hesitated to send it out. If a client was under budgetary pressure or there was recent executive turnover, we avoided the question altogether. Why? Because someone on our team already knew the answer, and the very institutional visibility that we sought. What we called a “metric” was instead just an episodic, often self-reinforcing, feedback loop, warped by human bias and organizational friction.
Scorecards Without Substance
When we realized the system for gathering client feedback wasn’t working as designed, we also built client scorecards for self-reporting. These were your classic red-yellow-green spreadsheets that aggregated perspectives from Sales, Delivery, and Account Management. Over time, we realized something troubling: these scores rarely aligned with each other.
Sales thought a client was green because the renewal was likely to occur. Delivery flagged the same client as yellow due to mounting scope issues. So we created two scores: a Delivery Health Score and a Client Health Score. Then we added a third. We kept slicing the record-keeping to increase the fidelity, but we instead ended up swimming in confusion.
Suddenly, we were not only working from outdated signals that were weeks or months old, we were left interpreting conflicting ones. The system was noisy. And it only got worse the more we scaled.
We weren’t suffering from a lack of data. We were drowning in anecdotes and opinions, with no unified signal. There was no institutionalized source of truth, just siloed instincts and competing narratives.
The Mirage of the Partner-Led Model
Some firms push back on the need for institutionalized metrics, pointing to their partner-led model: a senior leader who owns the client relationship end-to-end. That leader is in every meeting, picks up on every cue, and uses their gut to steer outcomes. They own the entire account: sales, engagement management, and delivery.
It can work, at least in the short term.
But this model is:
- Expensive – viable only when clients are large enough to warrant a senior, partner-level executive.
- Inconsistent – success varies wildly depending on who’s assigned.
- Opaque – insight stays in the partner’s head, not the system.
- Unsustainable – it doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t last.
Accenture can afford this. Most firms can’t. And even if they could, it still leaves value on the table.
This is an Industry Problem
Since stepping out of 3Pillar, I’ve spoken with hundreds of leaders across professional services. I’ve learned that what we experienced was not unique.
- Over 90% still use some form of red-yellow-green spreadsheet.
- Over 60% rely on manual or episodic surveys like NPS or CSAT.
These are the primary tools leaders use to assess commercial health. And they all suffer from the same two flaws:
- They are anecdotal: Built on memory, opinion, or isolated data points, not on consistent behavioral signals.
- They are episodic: Triggered sporadically, at the convenience of teams, and not aligned with client dynamics.
Without a shared language, firms end up managing what’s loud, not what’s true.
A Better Way: Commercial Intelligence
To build healthy, scalable client relationships, you need more than color-coded spreadsheets and scattered surveys. You need institutionalized Commercial Intelligence—a systematic, real-time understanding of what’s actually happening across your client base and impacting the economics of your business.
CI institutionalizes a single source of truth. It brings together signals from sales, delivery, usage, sentiment, and operations into a single, clear, and coherent picture. It gives everyone, from executives to account managers and sales to delivery, a shared view of commercial health, grounded in objective data.
Why does that matter?
Because we manage what we measure. And if we want to improve client outcomes, we must first measure them with clarity, consistency, and context.
The Takeaway
We built Knownwell because we’ve lived the pain of stale metrics. We’ve seen firsthand how anecdotal, episodic tools break down at scale. They don’t just miss problems. They prevent alignment, obscure risks, and imperil growth.
If you’re still managing client health off of surveys and spreadsheets, or leaning on a few heroic individuals, ask yourself:
- What am I not seeing?
- How fast can my team act—together—when risk arises?
- Do we have a shared score, or are we each singing our own tune?
Then ask this: What’s it costing me not to know the answer?
