How Does Client Sense Help You Track Engagement

In this article:

• Short answer
• Why it matters
• What this looks like in practice
• How to do it in Client Sense
• Turning the output into action
• Common pitfalls
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Short answer

Engagement is the record of how much contact your firm is having with a person, a company or a group, and how that contact is changing over time. Client Sense tracks this data automatically from email and calendar activity, so you can see whether a relationship is deepening, holding steady or slipping without asking anyone to report on it.

Why it matters

Most firms can say who their key clients are. Far fewer can say whether those relationships are stronger than they were a year ago. The difference matters because client loss is rarely sudden. Contact narrows, the number of people involved in a client relationship shrinks, and the account is gone before anyone noticed these signals.

The current obstacle at most firms is that this information exists only in aggregate. No individual can see it, because each person sees their own correspondence and nobody sees the whole. Remote and multi-office working has made this worse, removing the incidental conversations through which firms used to piece the picture together.

What this looks like in practice

FRP Advisory, a national business advisory firm with more than 27 offices across the UK and Cyprus, describe exactly that problem. With a diverse team spread across many locations and working with one another remotely, the organic conversations about client interactions had become far less common. They wanted a broad picture of how client relationships were tracking across offices, available in real time.

Their Partner and Business Development Director describes the result of using Client Sense to track engagement as being able to run a health check on the firm’s relationships and bring more science to the question. The point is not to replace what partners know about their clients, but to give the question a factual basis. Read the full account in the FRP Advisory case study.

A worked example: take the twenty clients that make up most of your revenue and look at each one’s engagement over twenty-four months. In most firms two or three will show a clear downward pattern that nobody had flagged, and at least one will turn out to be a relationship where the main contact has changed roles.

How to do it in Client Sense

Engagement can be viewed for a single company, a single person, or any group you assemble. Full steps for all three are in How to view the level of Engagement your firm is having with Key Individuals and Companies.

What the view measures

The engagement chart covers:

• Emails, the volume of email between your firm and the contact
• Meetings and Online Meetings, separated by whether the location was physical or a platform such as Teams or Zoom
• Phone calls, drawn from a telephone integration where one exists, otherwise from calendar entries containing Phone or Call in the subject
• Coffee, from calendar entries containing that word, which is a surprisingly good proxy for relationship building
• Contacts, Departments and Offices, being how many people, practice groups and firm locations are involved
• Events, a count of firm events the person or company has attended
• Fees, for companies only and where a financial system is integrated

Firms can add their own activity types, such as client review meetings, pitches, webinars or training, and these appear in the view alongside the standard measures.

For a company or an individual

1. Search for the company with Organizations selected, or the person with Individuals selected.
2. Open the Contact Card.
3. Click Engagement icon.

For a group

Build a favorite list, then right click the tab and choose the Engagement icon to see contact across everyone on it. This works for a client’s whole board, a set of contacts at one referrer, or a list of event attendees. Lists can be shared, which is covered in Sharing a Favorite (Favourite) List.

For an event

Events have their own engagement view comparing the period before and after. Open Events (Beta) from the menu under your name, open the event, mark who came using Set Attendance, then click the Engagement icon. The default window is 90 days either side of the event and can be changed, an engagement summary highlights the metrics that moved most, and the chart can be exported as an image for a report. See Assessing Event ROI and Tracking and Managing Events.

Turning the output into action

Engagement data is only useful if something happens as a result of reading it.

• Set a review rhythm. Quarterly across your top accounts, tied to a meeting that already exists.
• Sort into three groups. Deepening, steady, and slipping. Only the third needs a decision this quarter.
• Ask before you act. Take the pattern to the relationship partner rather than to the management meeting. They usually know why.
• Compare events against each other. An event with no post-event change is not automatically a failure, but an event that never produces change across several runs is worth reconsidering.
• Show the picture, not the numbers. The chart exports as an image. Use that graphic to engage partners in a discussion.

Common pitfalls

• Judging a single point rather than a trend. One quiet quarter after a matter closes is normal. Three is a pattern.
• Treating fees as the only outcome. Fees lag by months or years. Contact, meetings and breadth move first, which is what makes them useful.
• Expecting an event to show results immediately. Three to six months is typical, and some events exist to say thank you rather than to generate work.
• Sharing raw engagement data widely. It invites misreading. Interpret it with the people who hold the relationships before it travels.
• Forgetting custom activities exist. If your firm runs client review meetings or pitches as tracked activities, they belong in the view. Without them the picture is incomplete.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the difference between engagement and a heat map?

A heat map is a snapshot of who is connected to whom at one moment, laid out as a grid. Engagement is the same relationship viewed over time. Use the heat map to see coverage and gaps, and engagement to see direction.

What actually counts as engagement?

Emails, meetings, online meetings, phone calls, coffees and events, plus the number of people, departments and offices involved, and fees where a financial system is connected. Firms can add their own activity types on top of these.

How far back can we look?

As far back as the historical data your firm holds in Client Sense. This matters when assessing a past event, since you can add an earlier event into the system and view the engagement that followed it, provided the underlying data covers that period.

Our fees are not integrated. Is the view still useful?

Yes. Fees are one measure among many and the lagging one. Breadth across departments and offices, meeting counts and contact numbers all move earlier and tell you more about where a relationship is heading.

How long after an event should we expect to see a change?

Around three to six months in most cases. The intended buyer may also not be the attendee but someone they know or a colleague, which is another reason immediate results are rare.

Can we use this data to prioritize events?

Yes. Showing which events consistently move engagement helps direct spend, and it demonstrates that the team cares about the outcome rather than the logistics. Some events are meant to thank people rather than generate work, and should be judged accordingly.

Should partners see this data directly?

Usually it is shared with event hosts and the people holding the relationships rather than published widely. Engagement data is easy to misread without the context of what was happening on the account.