Customer loyalty and allegiance is critical for any company. In fact, it is the lifeblood that drives any brand’s success. The more loyal consumers you have, the more sustainable and profitable your brand will be. Customers are changing their preferences, making informed choices and moving towards brands that not only provide unique and innovative products but also offer superior customer service.

In today’s competitive business arena, corporates are trying to build their reputation around the feedback and positive reception they receive from their consumers. However, most organisations fail to measure customer loyalty effectively. How loyal are your consumers? Are they promoting your brand and providing an extremely valuable word-of-mouth endorsement? Is your brand’s image good or is it trusted enough by your consumers that they will recommend you to others? To answer these questions, companies need to adopt effective tools that help to accurately gauge the success or failure in creating customer loyalty.

Tracking the customers who will recommend you to others is the first step towards a consumer-driven culture and Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one such powerful tool to achieve this. It gives a clear view of the company’s performance according to the consumer’s perspective, helping them to move closer to their customers. The higher the NPS of a firm compared to the competition, the more its chances to outperform in the market. Hence, companies now are increasingly adopting the Net Promoter Score as their corporate metric to measure customer’s happiness. For example: Apple has been successfully using this tool to quantify and measure customer engagement since many years now.

Here’s how NPS can be valuable to your brand

A channel to communicate with the customer: It is very important to note what your consumers want from you and hence a strong two-way communication channel can be the essence to ensuring customer loyalty, focusing on the company’s vision and growth. NPS provides an indication of your customer’s sentiment towards the company and has become a new channel for communicating with them.

Tracking unhappy consumers: Loyal customers who are happy with the company’s business are the ones who help brands to sell their products and services in the best possible way. However, there are many more customers who are unhappy and account for negative word-of-mouth publicity. They are most likely to discourage others from purchasing the products or services of a particular brand. NPS survey helps in tracking these unhappy customers by getting their feedback and provides an opportunity of converting them into potential buyers

Product development tool: Net promoter score helps corporates to understand how well their products are designed and prepared to meet the consumer requirements. Along, with determining whether the consumer likes the service and user interface provided by the brand, it also acts as a reliable indicator of change accelerating product development. Using the consumer insights gained from the NPS survey, companies can revisit their products and serve them better

Creating customer advocates: The NPS survey provides a quick summary of how many of the company’s customers are advocates. It gives a clear picture to the corporates on whether they are creating more customer advocates or are losing them. A positive score of 50 per cent is considered to be good, where most of your consumers are considered to be advocates actively telling others about your product or service. Most of leaders today are leveraging customer advocates to stay ahead of the competition and spread referrals and positive word-of-mouth for their brand In simpler words, the aim of every consumer loyalty tool is to increase customer commitment, and tying them to the company and its products/ services from a long term perspective. Thus, maintaining and solidifying relations is of utmost importance. In today’s ever-changing and super-competitive market place, successful brands are the ones who are able to create a large customer base of loyal consumers that offer lifetime value to the brand.

MARZIN SHROFF, CEO - DIRECT SALES & SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT, EUREKA FORBES

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