Customer Support

How to run nps and csat surveys as Small Law and Accounting Practices

Customer SupportFor Small Law and Accounting Practices2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your firm sends surveys the same way it sends everything else — manually, inconsistently, and too late. A client closes a matter and nobody follows up for two weeks because the paralegal is buried in deadline prep. When you do send a satisfaction check, it's a copied email from three years ago that lands in the client's spam. Responses trickle into a personal inbox, never get tallied, and the partner who opened the matter never sees the feedback. Clio and MyCase track billable time; they don't tell you whether Mrs. Kessler would refer you to her business partner. You have no systematic read on client sentiment, and the only signal you get is a negative Google review.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Customer SupportFor Small Law and Accounting Practices2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated NPS and CSAT survey workflow that triggers from matter-close events in your Outlook inbox or calendar, sends a short survey, and logs every response without manual data entry

A living dashboard that shows your rolling NPS score, CSAT by practice area, and flags any detractor responses so you can follow up before they leave a review

A follow-up sequence that routes promoter responses toward a referral ask and detractor responses toward a partner call — all drafted automatically, reviewed by you before sending

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Outlook data on a schedule — messages, contacts, and calendar events — so the trigger knows when a matter has closed and who the client contact is. Your CRM in Starch holds the matter-to-client mapping so surveys go to the right person. Survey responses come back as inbound emails that Starch reads and logs automatically. QuickBooks is connected via Starch's scheduled sync so practice-area tagging can cross-reference billing codes when slicing CSAT by service line. Any survey tool with a web portal (like SurveyMonkey or Typeform) can be automated through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a matter-close NPS workflow: when I mark a matter closed in my Outlook, wait 48 hours and send a 2-question email survey — NPS score and one open-text comment — to the client contact on that matter. Log every response to a dashboard that shows my rolling 90-day NPS score and flags any score under 7 for immediate review.

Build me a CSAT dashboard broken out by practice area — litigation, estate planning, and tax advisory. Pull survey responses from the matter-close emails, show average score per practice area per quarter, and surface the three most recent verbatim comments for each.

Set up a follow-up automation: if an NPS response is 9 or 10, draft a referral-ask email I can review and send in one click. If the score is 6 or below, draft a partner check-in email and put it in my review queue for the same day.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Outlook to Starch — Starch syncs your messages, contacts, and calendar on a schedule. This is where matter-close signals and client contact details live.

2 Connect QuickBooks via Starch's scheduled sync. Invoice and billing-code data lets you slice CSAT scores by practice area (litigation vs. estate planning vs. tax) without manual tagging.

3 Start with the CRM app from the Starch App Store. Tell Starch: 'Add a Matter Status field with values Active, Closed, and On Hold, and a Client Contact field that links to the person who received the final invoice.' This becomes your survey trigger list.

4 Build the survey trigger automation: 'When a matter's status changes to Closed in the CRM, wait 48 hours, then send a two-question email to the linked client contact — NPS score 0-10 and one open text field for comments. Log the response back to the matter record.'

5 Build the CSAT dashboard: 'Show me a dashboard with rolling 90-day NPS, average CSAT score per practice area pulled from QuickBooks billing codes, and a table of every response in the last 30 days sorted by score ascending so I see detractors first.'

6 Set the detractor alert: 'If any NPS response comes in below 7, send me a Slack message immediately with the client name, matter name, score, and verbatim comment.' Starch connects to Slack from its integration catalog and the agent queries it live when the alert fires.

7 Build the promoter follow-up: 'If an NPS response is 9 or 10, draft a referral-ask email referencing the specific matter we worked on together, and put it in my Outlook drafts for me to review before sending.'

8 Build the detractor follow-up: 'If an NPS response is 6 or below, draft a partner check-in email acknowledging we'd like to hear more, and flag it in my task manager as urgent — due same day.'

9 Test the full loop on a recently closed matter: manually trigger the survey send, submit a test response, confirm the dashboard updates, confirm the Slack alert fires, and confirm the draft email appears in your Outlook queue.

10 Review the first 30 days of live data. Tell Starch: 'Show me which practice areas have the lowest NPS and what the three most common complaint themes are in open-text responses.' Use this to decide where to invest in service improvements.

11 At each quarter-end, tell Starch: 'Generate an NPS and CSAT summary for Q1 2026 — overall score, score by practice area, response rate, and top three verbatim quotes — formatted as a one-page PDF I can share at the partner meeting.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Hargrove & Lim LLP — Q1 2026 NPS Rollout (4-attorney estate planning and tax practice)

Sample numbers from a real run

Matters closed in Q1 2026	34
Survey emails sent (auto-triggered, 48hr delay)	34
Responses received	22
Response rate	65
NPS score (promoters minus detractors)	54
Detractor alerts fired (score under 7)	3
Partner follow-up calls completed within 24hr	3
Referral-ask emails sent to promoters	14
New matter inquiries attributed to referral emails	2

Hargrove & Lim closed 34 matters in Q1 — a mix of estate plans, trust amendments, and small-business tax filings. Before Starch, nobody sent satisfaction surveys. After setting up the matter-close trigger, all 34 clients got a short two-question email 48 hours after their final invoice cleared in QuickBooks. Twenty-two responded — a 65% response rate that would have been zero before. NPS came in at 54 overall, but the dashboard immediately surfaced a gap: estate planning scored 67 while tax filing scored 31. Three detractor responses (scores of 4, 5, and 6) triggered same-day Slack alerts. Partner Janet Lim called all three clients within 24 hours; one had a billing confusion that took five minutes to resolve and ended with the client agreeing to refer a colleague. The 14 promoter referral-ask emails led to two new matter inquiries in April — both from clients who said the follow-up email reminded them to recommend the firm to a family member. The partner meeting in April was the first time the practice had ever looked at client satisfaction data in aggregate.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Rolling 90-day NPS score by practice area (estate planning, litigation, tax advisory)

Survey response rate as a percentage of matters closed

Detractor response rate and time-to-partner-follow-up (target: same business day)

Referral conversion rate from promoter follow-up emails

CSAT trend quarter-over-quarter, used in partner reviews

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Clio Manage built-in client portal

Clio tracks matter progress and documents, but has no native NPS or CSAT survey capability — you'd need a separate tool and manual reconciliation.

SurveyMonkey or Typeform standalone

Good survey tools on their own, but you'd manually export responses, paste them into a spreadsheet, and update your matter records by hand — the automation loop doesn't close without Starch.

Karbon or TaxDome (for accounting practices)

Strong workflow tools for tax and accounting teams, but client satisfaction measurement isn't a core feature — you'd still need to bolt on a survey product and build your own reporting view.

Lawmatics (legal marketing CRM)

Has email automation features aimed at intake, but is built for pre-engagement marketing, not post-matter satisfaction measurement and partner escalation workflows.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually read incoming survey responses from email, or do I have to copy them somewhere?

Starch syncs your Outlook inbox on a schedule and reads incoming messages — so when a client replies to the survey email with their score, Starch picks it up and logs it to the matter record automatically. You don't paste anything. The 90-day NPS dashboard updates without manual entry. One honest note: Gmail message sync is capped at 30 messages per page to avoid errors on long HTML threads, which is fine for survey responses but worth knowing if you have unusually long email chains.

We use QuickBooks for billing — can Starch actually tell which matters are litigation versus estate planning when slicing CSAT scores?

Yes. Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, billing codes, and matter references — and can use that to tag survey responses by service line. You'd tell Starch something like: 'Use the QuickBooks service item on each invoice to categorize responses as estate planning, tax, or litigation.' If your billing codes don't map cleanly, you can add a practice-area field to the CRM and set it manually for the first batch, then automate from there.

What if we use Clio or MyCase as our matter management system — can Starch connect to those?

Clio and MyCase are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, so the agent can query them live when an app or automation needs that data. For the matter-close trigger, you could also use Outlook calendar events or a manual status update in Starch's CRM as the signal — some small practices find that simpler to maintain than a live Clio connection.

Is this HIPAA or legal-ethics compliant? We have confidentiality obligations to clients.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified, which is worth knowing before you route sensitive client data through it. The survey workflow itself — name, matter type, score, open comment — is lower-sensitivity than case documents, but you should review your bar association's guidance on client communication tools and your firm's data handling policy before going live. Many small practices use Starch for operational and business-development workflows and keep confidential matter documents in Clio or a dedicated DMS.

How long does it take to set this up?

The core loop — matter-close trigger, survey send, response logging, dashboard — can be described and built in a single session. Plan on 30–60 minutes to connect Outlook and QuickBooks, describe the workflow in plain language, and test it on a real closed matter. The follow-up automations (detractor alert, promoter referral-ask) add another 20 minutes. You're not configuring fields in a drag-and-drop interface; you're describing what you want and Starch builds the surface.

What happens if a client doesn't respond to the survey email?

You can tell Starch to send one follow-up after seven days: 'If a matter-close survey email hasn't received a response after 7 days, send a single short follow-up to the same client contact, then stop.' The matter record in the CRM will show the response status — replied, no response — so you can see your response rate over time and decide whether a phone follow-up is worth it for high-value matters.