Gauging Your Clients' Brand Loyalty
Ask the one question that matters
Terry Fine
Let’s face it, most customer surveys aren’t very useful in yielding a substantial amount of responses or producing significant data that can be leveraged by your business. Even when surveys do generate responses from your customer base, are the responses substantial enough to draw correlations between your brand and the client? So how do you use the data you receive from traditional surveys to your advantage?
Conventional surveys are often long-winded and require far more time and effort than the average client is willing to devote. You may have experienced firsthand the minimal returns that surveys often generate, leaving you feeling frustrated and lost as to how to receive more responses from your customer base. But what if that survey was comprised of just one simple question that could tell your company everything you needed to know about your customers and how they interact with your brand?
An overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that brand loyalty dictates far more than your customer’s purchasing decisions. The Net Promoter Score®, or NPS®, measures the customer’s overall experience with your product or service, and has shown to effectively predict the level of loyalty a customer has toward your brand. Businesses can easily determine their customers’ level of brand loyalty by asking one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend our products and services to your friends or colleagues?” Based on the responses, your company can accurately gauge where you fall on the Net Promoter Score index. To calculate your final Net Promoter Score, simply subtract the percentage of customers that would recommend your company or product from the percentage of customers who are unlikely to recommend your company or product. While brand loyalty isn’t the only important measurable statistic, the likelihood of your customer recommending your product or service to a colleague is certainly a strong indicator of business growth.
Clients as Advocates
When customers recommend your product to their friends and colleagues, they run the risk of sacrificing their own reputation. Extremely loyal customers are as much salespeople as they are consumers. When customers strongly believe in the products and services your business offers, there is a significant chance that they will tell others, increasing the likelihood that new customers will give your products a try. Therefore, word-of-mouth marketing from a loyal customer base is essential to the long-term growth and success of your brand. It is important, however, to understand that customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are not one and the same.
Often, companies will wrongly measure overall customer satisfaction, which lacks any correlation between the growth of your company, the habits of the customer, and the customer’s level of brand loyalty. It is also important to note that repeat purchases are not always directly indicative of customer loyalty. There are many variables which may cause clients to purchase from your brand, such as the availability of the product within the market you serve, the product cost in comparison to your competitors, or just sheer indifference with whom they do business. After analyzing countless variables that arise from conventional surveys, the usefulness and validity of a company’s NPS begins to become more apparent. The simple, yet effective one-question NPS survey can generate a wider variety of responses, shedding light on what’s working for your company as well as highlighting the products and services that could use improvement.
