All companies seek to grow and retain customers. Sustainable, organic growth occurs most often when customers love doing business with you and are openly willing to sing your praises to neighbours, friends, family and colleagues.
With each consumer brand competing to be front of mind, it takes something special to really stand out, especially for the ‘millennials’ and ‘digital natives’ of the younger generations. Feeling valued is very important to this community of customers. They don’t just tell you what they think, they need to know that their opinion is appreciated and that your business is going to listen to what they say.
Gathering customer feedback helps to address this challenge and a highly popular loyalty metric for companies to use is the Net Promoter Score (NPS®). With NPS, customers are asked on a scale of 0-10 how likely they are to recommend your product or services to others. Feedback is then categorised into detractors (negative), passives (neutral) and promoters (positive) then an overall score is calculated from -100 to 100, with a score of over 50 classed as excellent.
NPS is used by some of the world’s most popular global brands such as Amazon, Walt Disney and Apple, but why is it so useful and why will it help your business retain customers?
Valued
Asking your existing customers about their honest opinions on your business will instantly make them feel valued, especially if they are asked shortly after they encounter your products and services. Acquiring new customers can be costly but retaining existing customers is free, simple and easy when you effectively use NPS and demonstrate that you value their viewpoint. Effectively engaging with customers can often encourage them to recommend your business to others as well.
Rectify Issues
If a significant proportion of your existing customers turn out to be detractors (they have scored your business low, signalling that improvements need to be made) then you have the invaluable opportunity to proactively rectify these issues before it’s too late. Detractors can be transformed into your most powerful promoters if you effectively act on their feedback and place a tangible focus on customer satisfaction. As Bill Gates once said: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Deliver, Deliver, Deliver
Listening to customers is key to ensuring you are delivering the products and services that they most desire. With NPS, you can compare your score to others in the market and examine how competitors may be doing things better or worse than you. If you’re scoring lower than other brands in your field then you could examine the comments from your detractors to identify how to improve your offerings and deliver your customers exactly what they want. Every company wants to be better than its competitors and NPS lets you find out your market position and learn how best to progress.
Simplicity
Studies show that each additional question added to a survey can reduce the response rate by 12.5%, which makes NPS the perfect solution. Not only are NPS surveys short and straightforward for customers to complete but its simplicity also makes it easy for your marketing and management teams to monitor and track. Keep it short and sweet and a good proportion of existing customers won’t mind providing you with highly valuable NPS feedback.
So, whether your business uses NPS or an alternative method of gathering customer feedback, a key point to take away is that feedback is essential and the easier you can acquire it the better. To successfully grow, expand and adjust to trends you’ll need to listen to the voice of the consumer to ensure your business or venue stands the test of time and remains at the forefront of the market.
Take a look at our newly released NPS report and infographic below to find out how best to use the tool, the benefits it can bring to your business and how to achieve optimum success by implementing it.