If you don’t listen you don’t learn.
Listening to your customers, whether face-to-face, by phone or by surveys is the essential first step in developing programs to build business and profits with and through them.
If you don’t listen to your customers you are likely to fall into the trap of providing products or services that you want to sell rather than those your customers want to buy. If you don’t know that a customer is dissatisfied then you are hardly able to correct the situation – 80% of customers who are dissatisfied, usually as a result of a service breakdown, don’t complain they just walk away - never to return.
There are all kinds of survey designs aimed at collecting customer information, some useful some not, one approach receiving much attention is The Net Promoter Score developed by Frederick Reicheld of Bain & Co. The beauty of this approach is that your customers are asked just one question – the “Ultimate Question”
“Would you happily recommend this company to your friends and associates?”
The assumption, of course, is that there can’t be any serious negatives about a company if you are prepared to recommend it to a friend.
The percentage of respondents who say they are unlikely to recommend the company is deducted from the percentage who say they are highly likely to recommend the company to arrive at the Net Promoter Score.
The NPS has been shown to be the most reliable indicator of a company’s future growth prospects.
So why the DOUBLE WINNER?
Research has shown that customers who have been surveyed are less than half as likely to defect and are more profitable than those who have not been surveyed.
This makes sense when you consider that most customers who defect say that they felt ignored by the company.
Comments