No customer satisfaction driving growth? Then your business is a House of Cards with a Leaking Bucket

September 29, 2017 10:35 am Published by 2 Comments

You invest quite a good amount to attract new customers, but how can you keep them, satisfy them and have them recommend their friends and colleagues to head over as well?

Are you asking yourself what makes your existing customer ever even consider to leave you?

Lost in the Highway

Relationships, good services, customer satisfaction and sales reps are the lifeblood of a small business. You need to do everything possible to protect and foster the relationship with your own customers and the relations your employees forge. Customers keep coming and going but there is always a reason behind them leaving:

  • If your customers have a good experience with you, they might tell 1, 2 or 3 other about you, but if they experience bad moments, then the whole world will know about it.
  • Between 5-10% of your customers will formally contact you to complain or ask for support or help. The rest believe that it is too hard to contact you.
  • Very poor response to customers who HAVE made an effort to contact you for help.
  • No follow up with your customers
  • Customers don’t sit and logically compare two businesses or products and make a logic decision about where they want to do business. Your advertisement, business appearance and information you provide will make the customer choose you, stay with you or just leave you.
  • There are tons of reasons that could lead to your customers irritation. It could be your support system, your website layout, your online purchases or even the system you are selling.

Let’s Talk Figures…

Here is an example to think through the impact of any client cutting ties with you or your company during a given time:

Let’s say that today you have a monthly revenue of 75,000, and every month you add another 10.000 to that. However, you have noticed you got a churn rate of 3%. If all of that persists for the next five years, you will end up generating 13,4 million. Not bad at all.

However, let’s say you’re able to decrease the amount of customers who leaves you by 10%, to a churn-rate of 2.7%. That gives you almost 2/3 of an extra Million in revenue. If you’re able to reduce your churn by 30%, that’s even better. Your revenue would go up to 15,5 million or a total of 16% higher! So reducing your rate of lost customers dramatically accelerates your revenue growth. This is not bad at all, and it doesn’t even account for the fact that happier clients likely also will help you get more happy clients. But how do you do it?

Tracking the churn is tantamount to success. And your success is contingent upon your customers’ satisfaction and attitude.

That is why it becomes critical to know exactly what your customers think about you. What are their plans when it comes to your products and services? Do they want to stay with you, or is there anything that may make them want to terminate their contracts ? Such questions are easy to neglect, but they matter way more than you think.

How to Collect your Customers’ Feedback?

For instance, what does the average customer think about your prices? Would they rate them too high? suitable? Or just right? Another example is how is your staff doing on customer service? Are they picking up all the calls? Are they following up with all the e-mails? Are they helpful enough?

That is why at least starting by asking the “Would you recommend”-question to find out your Net Promoter Score (NPS) would be your ultimate metric, and it’s not strange it should be one of your top 3 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) together with your profitability and client acquisition cost. It gives you an insight on what you need to do as improvements within your business; Then customer satisfaction driving growth is really within your grasp.

How to Run an NPS Survey:

First of all, you need to just find out who are your biggest critics, and who are your greatest ambassadors (or as it’s called in NPS lingo: Detractors for Critics and Promoters for Ambassadors).

Many will just focus on the score itself, and of course this is very useful, too, as you need to devise a strategy for becoming better. Then you need to have a clear pitch, specific goals and a clear marketing strategy in order to know what your primary reason for the score is. Net Promoter Score is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to fuel profitable growth. The purpose behind it is to track the three different types of  your customers (Promoters, Detractors and Passives). Customers are asked one key loyalty question: How likely is it that you would recommend [Company X or Brand X] to a friend or a colleague?

Individual responses to the question are captured and segmented based on the predefined criteria categorized below:


Source: Macquarie Telecom

Understanding your NPS Score:

As you can see below, the segmentation of the individual responses (Promoters, Detractors, Passives) leads us to the NPS score by subtracting the percentage of detractors from that of the promoters. The score eventually ranges from  -100 (which doesn’t sound too good) to +100 (means your customers are all brand promoters)

 


Source: Macquarie Telecom

BUT here is the Thing:

You should make sure that when getting your NPS score you need to do it in a way so you aren’t only getting the customers’ feedback, but you get even to know your customers’ pain points; the persons behind each answer; and you have a clearer image of  what type of product or service they purchased from you, what they have been complaining about recently so you can validate new feature requests and refine the product or service roadmap. Even without them knowing, you will be working on how to strengthen your weaknesses and reinforce your customers’ satisfaction.

Strategies Driving to Success Using NPS

NPS and your Marketing Strategy

When it comes to marketing, NPS will judge the potential for customers to recommend you to others. Let us put it differently, your marketing manager runs a campaign and he is aware of the client acquisition cost (CAC) and your customer life-time value (CLV). These two metrics are the key roles in calculating the profitability and return on ads spent on any marketing campaign. With NPS, it will be easier to measure the effectiveness of sales, marketing, short term-return and latest ad from your customers both during and after.  And so you will always have a finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction as well as produce lasting benefits for your employers.

NPS and your Sales Strategy

This is not all! The NPS score is also useful for your sales team since it gives you a clear insight and indication of what is sold most, what attracts new customers and drives repeated purchases. Over time, your sales rep need to focus on raising NPS because it is necessary to transform Detractors into Promoters. Remember, a detractor is passionate although being negative. Once a customer becomes a Promoter, they are most likely to introduce your sales rep to their social contacts or leave good reviews.

On the other hand, your sales rep need to be sharp in their mind, knowledgeable about the customers’ business and able to explain each product / service and the value it brings to your customer. In other words, your sales reps should act professionally and have to nail the three Ts as we mentioned in our previous blog post on challenger sales: teach, tailor and take control. You know very well the importance of word of mouth in business. This is how you can start to control it and by  focusing on turning what’s negative into positive, you’ll be definitely unlocking some pretty outstanding RoI.

Raising NPS score with better referrals (Would great online reviews, positive referrals and testimonials help your business?)

Many assume that a terrific customer service and great products will generate referrals by default. No not so!

When you go through your NPS results and filter your promoters, use survey logic to redirect  your promoters on a landing page where you will explain to them your referral program with simple words like: thanks for your rating, we would love for you to share your experience with us to your friends and the rest of the world. Give customers direct links and ask them to share their satisfaction on social media. All it takes is a simple follow-up to every promoter which can be easily automated. Your promoters will then generate positive word of mouth. You can even take it further and develop an in-depth customer success story and adapt it to a short text or video testimonial.

Moving Beyond NPS: Leading to your Customer Satisfaction

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Once you run the net promoter score campaign, the collected data give you access to quickly react to any negative feedback. And the score from NPS will help you set up internal performance benchmarks as well as external benchmarks to compare your competitors in the market. Besides, the combination of NPS data with your tracking system (where it shows all your users demographics and behavioral data) give key insights into your target customer segment and you will easily detect why your customers love or hate you. You will also know who to target with what messages and incentives.

Repeat the survey periodically to see whether your scores move in the right direction, and be sure to capture the feedback from your detractors that will help you become better. When you use external benchmarks, you’ll set up smarter, more measurable goals.

Tracking your progress is important, and doing the test is not tough, but analyzing the data and devise your strategy to become better requires more time and effort.

 

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This post was written by Fleur

2 Comments

  • NPS is indeed an important metric to take into account in order to improve the performance of the business. As stated in this post, it gives the insight into the product/service success and the performance of the sales or customer service reps. Initially as you mentioned poor response and no follow up can create detractors. Metrics like this can be helpful to bring solutions like a targeted training programme or improving the selling or customer service process.

  • fleur says:

    Definitely!

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