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By asking customers one simple question, "How likely are you to recommend (Company X) to a friend or colleague?" on a 0 to 10 scale, companies can track their Net Promoter Score® (NPS), the single most reliable indicator of a company's ability to grow.
Net Promoter, and more specifically, "the ultimate question" noted above, as set forth in The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld, is a breakthrough opportunity for customer reference professionals to make not only a significant marketing contribution, but also elevate their role within the company by introducing NPS to the executive team. Net Promoter Score Is Becoming a Board Room Metric This is uniquely possible because the Net Promoter Score is becoming a Board Room metric. It's not "just" a marketing or customer support exercise. It's something that executives need to start paying attention to and implementing. What are the proof points? Microsoft, General Electric, Fireman's Fund, and Allianz, to name a few. These companies are rolling out the Net Promoter discipline.
And not only that, some of these companies are reporting their NPS in earnings releases and talks with financial analysts. (See the discussion forum topic, Companies Using NPS, in the "Who Is Using Net Promoter?" discussion forum to read about how these companies and more are reporting their own score and those of their competitors to financial analysts). Further Engage Your Sales Team with NPS For this reason, it's an excellent opportunity for the reference leader within a company to execute a Net Promoter program. On the sales front, "the ultimate question" is a way of further engaging sales and management in reference work. These key constituents are quite interested in hearing customer responses to "the ultimate question." Further, the best account managers use "the ultimate question" as a mechanism to better serve their customers, asking the reference person to follow up with the customer to find out what is required to move, for example, from a 9 to a 10. NPS Serves as Aggregate Customer Reference Metric On the marketing front, the NPS serves as the aggregate indicator of how satisfied your customer base is. Assuming your company has a high score, this is a fabulous metric to tout. We envision companies advertising a high NPS on their websites, in print copy, television ads, etc. Additionally, as it's an aggregate customer reference number, NPS helps with the known challenge of reference work - a certain percentage of customers (more than 30% of the Fortune 100) simply don't do public facing reference work owing to corporate policies.
NPS doesn't get us away from the heavy lifting of reference work - working with customers to publicly support product launches, share their stories in written documents, participate in lead generation events, and (much) more. However, it's a customer reference metric of corporate wide, and in particular, executive interest. Customer reference professionals within an organization have a unique opportunity to elevate their role by making the connection between their work (implementing an NPS program) and introducing the next Board Room metric to the executive team. Do you have questions on the above? If so, contact us. Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld. Read the Red-Spark case study on Satmetrix, the co-developer of Net Promoter. |
