The customer journey has become increasingly important to every organization across every industry. I have in a previous blog post “Hate tweets that destroys brands – How to avoid them“ talked about how social media gives your customer a powerful voice and is important to the perception and strength of your organization. Now let’s take a look at how the customer journey influences brand advocacy and loyalty.
Understanding Customer Loyalty
Extensive research proves that your organization’s Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) is a leading indicator of growth. If you are not familiar with NPS, it is a simple, one-question survey that measures customer loyalty by asking the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend [your organization’s name] to a friend or colleague?” The customer provides a numerical answer ranging from 0-10. Respondents are categorized based on their answer:
1. Detractors (score 0-6, unhappy customers actively talking negatively about your brand to others)
2. Passives (score 7-8, satisfied but indifferent customers often vulnerable to competition)
3. Promoters (score 9-10, loyal brand enthusiasts that fuel growth)
While almost 65% of the top 200 global companies utilize NPS, few are doing it right.
Acquiring a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining existing customers. But did you know that a 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%? Most organizations review customer feedback data on a quarterly basis, leaving little opportunity to prioritize customer journey investments that can retain customers and raise your NPS score.
Great Journeys and Experiences Drives Loyalty
Understanding your customer journey is one of the most impactful things you can do to inspire customers to stay longer, purchase more, refer friends – and effectively drive down the cost to serve them by increasing their loyalty.
Real-time customer input is the best way to make sure your customer journey is working. I explored this topic in a previous post; “You’re getting the wrong feedback and too late“.
Integrating real-time data into your customer journey raises your level of awareness and agility in the customer journey. Gathering NPS style feedback as your customer leaves the environment gives you an instant and specific understanding of what is working – and what needs to change – making the data more useful than if you were only assessing it on a quarterly basis.
Capturing Real-time Customer Feedback
A feedback device placed at the counter of your establishment or in the palm of your workforce effectively captures feedback from your customers quickly and with little effort on the part of the customer. It is a valuable source of accumulated business intelligence, clarity to help tailor immediate follow up with customers, patients or citizens, and an indication that you care about the experience you’re providing to individuals in your environment. Having store panels and dashboards on-site allows employees to understand what happens “here and now”.
No matter what industry you belong to, understanding the perceived quality of your customer journey is vital to growth. Healthcare facilities are measured on patient satisfaction, banks are seeing less and less foot traffic, and public organizations like the DMV suffer from a history of negative public sentiments.
Staying attentive to the quality of your customer experience and responding to the intelligence their feedback generates is your best opportunity to cultivate a high NPS – a group of loyal brand enthusiasts that fuels growth.
Images by Qmatic
Great post! NPS Is a simple yet powerful metric. A lot of the time people can get hung up on the score alone but as you said reacting to the intelligence customer feedback generates is where the real value lies.
It’s important to follow up with the customer to understand the reasoning behind the score and look at ways to improve their expereince. This system can be an extremely predictive way of helping to increase retention and drive growth within a company.