Find Your Promoters

One way is to start thinking of your existing customers as an extension of your marketing team. Within your customer base is a group of customers who enthusiastically promote you and your company. Who these customers are and how likely they are to promote you can be measured easily and effectively via a simple customer satisfaction survey.

In the past, customer satisfaction surveys were long and expensive, and gave ambiguous data. Recent studies have shown that, in some industries, there is no longer a need to utilize this type of survey vehicle if you’re focusing on growth. In fact, research has shown that a single survey question can serve as a useful predictor of growth. Surprisingly, the one question asked isn’t about customer satisfaction or even loyalty. Rather, it’s about asking your customer his or her willingness to recommend your company to someone else.

Tie Survey Results to Actual Growth

The beauty of this concept is that you can now tie the results of this question directly to your company’s growth over time. The simplicity, however, is somewhat counterintuitive. “Shouldn’t I know more about what products and services they like?” you ask? No, growth is not about what products or services customers like or whether your website is state-of-the-art. Growth is about minimizing the leaky customer bucket, which many companies experience, by obtaining loyal customers – customers that would recommend your company to friends, family members and colleagues.

While there are other factors that play a role in driving your company’s growth, asking the “would recommend” question has certainly proven a key indicator in determining evangelistic loyalty, which is clearly one of the most important drivers of growth. Couple this with the fact that the results of the would-recommend question can be directly measured against a company’s growth rate over time, and you have a winning combination that is very easy to administer and tabulate.

Ask the Right Question

Since you’re focusing on one question to ask, it’s important to consider exactly how to ask that question so that you get the most data for your efforts. Getting “Yes” or “No” answers to the would-recommend question will not give you any valuable data. However, adding more data points to that question will divide your customers into more practical groupings, deserving different attention and organizational responses.

The question that proved most effective across multiple industries is: How likely is it that you would recommend [your company here] to a friend or colleague?

The measurement that proved to be the most beneficial for grouping customers was a 10-point scale, for which 10 meant “extremely likely,” and 0 meant “not likely at all.” Survey results showed the following:

9-10 scores: Actively satisfied customers who will promote your company

7-8 scores: Passively satisfied customers

0-6 scores: Customer detractors

Survey Often

The Internet is a powerful tool you can use to administer your new “operating management tool” to your customer base. How often you survey depends on your unique situation. Keeping the pulse on your customer base may require frequent surveying based on recently completed transactions your customers had with your company, or may require only periodic touches if their transactions were less frequent. Keep in mind that you’re striving to convert your customer base into promoters, and timely information is an important step in accomplishing that goal.

Get the Whole Company Involved

For any type of measurement to be effective, your entire company must own and accept the results of this new tool. In addition, it’s important that your employees know for which customers they are responsible, so that armed with this support, they will feel that the path to achieving growth is less fuzzy and really quite simple.

Use this survey method for turning your customers into promoters, and you’ll have a cost effective way of making them an integral part of your growth.
 

About the Author

Marylou Chaput is founder of Telegenik Communications.