When we talk about driving business growth, a number of factors come into our mind. Be it a high quality product, superior quality of services you offer to your customers, an engaging customer interaction or anything that helps in enhancing Customer Satisfaction to maximize your sales and profits.
All these factors are centered on building a great customer relationship to increase the number of your loyal customers. As we all know, the most important and determining factor of a successful business is a group of loyal customers who not only prefer to choose their products and services, but also promote them through their word of mouth.
Let’s say you are doing everything to satisfy the customers and make a strong and loyal customer relationship but how do you know your efforts are working? In order to know about number of your the loyal customers and how much satisfied and loyal they are, one of the most commonly used metric by the companies nowadays is Net Promoter Score.
Over the last decade, it has emerged not only as a strong metrics to measure Customer Experience, but also a powerful tool to drive business growth. NPS can be find out by taking an NPS Survey and analyzing the results thereof. Let’s learn something more about it and how you can actually utilize this metric to drive growth of your company.
What is Net Promoter Score?
NPS or Net Promoter Score is a popular metrics used to gather Customer Feedback by measuring Customer Loyalty towards your brand and organization. The process of finding NPS is based on a survey asking a common question to all the customers.
On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely will you recommend our brand to your family, friends and known ones? (1 being “Not at all likely to recommend” and 10 being “Most likely to recommend”)
The respondents are divided into three categories on the basis of the scores they have given.
- Promoters (9-10) – Customers who come in this category are the most loyal customers who will not only keep buying your products,but will also recommend your products and services to their known ones.
- Passives (7-8) – This category consists of customers who are moderately satisfied with your products and services. They will neither promote your products, nor spread a bad word of mouth about them. They can also switch to other brands.
- Detractors (0-6) – Detractors are basically unsatisfied customers which will never prefer to buy your products and services again. Not only this, they can actually harm the reputation of your brand through a bad word of mouth.
Let’s see how your final NPS figure is found out.
Calculating NPS
When you get the number of detractors and promoters, you can easily calculate your NPS. All you need to do is just subtract the percentage of detractors from that of promoters. The result you thus obtain which may range from -100 to 100 is the Net Promoter Score of your business.
For instance, if your Promoters’ are 60% and detractors are 20%, your NPS would be 60%-20% i.e. 40. Let’s learn how you can use NPS to drive your business growth.
How to Drive Business Growth Using NPS
- Seek Detractors to improve their experience
- Make improvements in your products and services
- Leverage your promoters to improve brand awareness
- Offer incentives to promoters to generate sales referrals
- Engage with Passives to serve them better
Let’s explore these steps which will help you to use your Net Promoter Score to drive business growth.
1. Seek Detractors to improve their experience
Detractors are the unhappy customers who give poor ratings to your product, services and brand when asked for feedback. Your detractors are only a result of their bad Customer Experience with your brand.
Imagine yourself having a pathetic experience with a product or service of an organization. Would you any day recommend those products to your known ones? Never, unless you consider them as enemies! In fact, if somebody among your friends is going to buy the same product, you would try to stop them from doing so through your feedback. This is how customers become detractors.
Therefore, you need to focus on Customer Experience to run a business successfully. Bad experience leads to churning of customers which you must try to prevent because customer retention is also very essential to keep your business running smoothly and successfully.
5% increase in retention can grow profit by 75%. – Bain & Co.
To retain the customers, you should follow up with detractors, apologize for their poor experience and address their issues by asking them what went wrong. This will help you know real customer insights which will eventually enable you to know major issues of your business. This will enable you to work on it to improve their experience.
2. Make improvements in your products and services
There is no use of a feedback survey unless it gets heard or taken action upon. Would you ever like to spend your precious time in filling surveys when you know that the organization taking the survey would not do anything about it? Of course, not! And as soon as possible you would try to switch to another brand, isn’t it? Same is with the customers.
So you have to act on the Customer Feedback given by the detractors and the other customers in order to improve their experience. For this, you need to make necessary improvements in your products and services and inform your customers about it.
This will not only help in preventing customer’s churn but also covert your detractors into promoters. You can test this yourself by taking another NPS survey after making the improvements and then comparing the results thereof.
3. Leverage your promoters to improve brand awareness
Loyal customers are one of the biggest asset of an organization. With the help of NPS survey, you get to know your most loyal customers i.e. your Promoters and promoters are the best source of creating brand awareness.
For this, you should leverage them by approaching them and requesting them to share a review on social media and other platforms so that people come to know about their great customer experiences. This will increase your goodwill in the market and help in driving business growth.
4. Offer incentives to promoters to generate sales referrals
Who doesn’t like something extra and something free? I guess everybody! And if you get freebies by just conveying the truth, why won’t you do that! You can use this psychology to motivate your loyal customers to attract more customers.
You can run programs like “Refer & Earn” to motivate your happy customers to recommend your products and services to their known ones. You can offer discounts and other small incentives to your promoters on a sale referred by them. This will help you generate more sales through your promoters and this is also a nice way to reward your promoters.
There are other benefits also by having customer who have been referred by someone else. Usually such customers stay longer with a brand and trust more on it when referred by their known ones.
According to Extole.com, referred customers’ lifetime value is 16% higher than the non-referred customers. Moreover their churn rate 18% lower as compared to other customers.
5. Engage with Passives to serve them better
Passives have a potential to switch to another brand as they are not the highly satisfied customer like promoters. You must focus on enhancing their Customer Satisfaction and thus retaining them. Keep connecting with your passives regularly and keep gathering their feedback to know what they like about your product and what they dislike.
In this way, you can foster continuous improvement in your products and services and serve your passives in a better way and move them towards the category of promoters.
In these ways, you can use Net Promoter Score to drive growth of your business.
