That question may be the most important question you can ask — and the business innovation of the decade. It comes from Fred Reichheld‘s Net Promoter Score concept and his book The Ultimate Question. You should read the book and start using it immediately.
Of course, I love it because it’s a word of mouth question. Measuring your success in terms of working for the referral takes a lot of complicated business goals and boils it down to one simple idea — is the customer so happy that they will refer us?
It’s a question that works for every department. The CEO knows that referrals are important, but so does the delivery guy. Each employee can succeed by defining their job in terms of the did I earn the referral today? objective.
You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to start asking this question and how quickly it aligns your company around what really matters: customers that love you so much that they sing your praises to their friends.
Here’s a great email I got from Rackspace:
“How likely are you to recommend?” is a powerful question. If your customers ARE willing to recommend you, you’re obviously doing something right. If not, what are you doing wrong?
Getting feedback from your customers, especially when they’re dissatisfied, not only helps to identify areas of operational improvement, but if done right, can save customers and even make them incredibly loyal… as taught by David Neeleman and Niels Anderson here.
Hi Andy,
I have been a fan of the Net Promoter Score approach for a while now. It’s a really simple way of gauging and promoting word of mouth. However, the challenge for some companies is to let go of their hang ups about boiling down their survey process to only one or two questions.
Adrian