Every business thrives on referrals, big or small—and your customer survey is the key tool that gives you the information you need to build up your base of happy, referring customers.
Referrals matter. It’s been reported that 88 per cent of consumers trust recommendations from their friends and families—a statistic that directly translates into a stronger bottom line for businesses that know how to make their customers not only come back to them next time, but also rave about their experience to their loved ones.
But when it comes to actually getting referrals, it probably feels easier said than done. Understanding your word of mouth is the first step—but where to start? A good place to begin is seeing what customers are say about your business online and on social media, along with any reviews of your products and services.
The second way to know what your customers think about you is to use customer satisfaction surveys. An customer experience measurement such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) can provide you with valuable feedback to help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your business and respond to issues your customers experience before negative word of mouth spreads too far.
Read more: Fuelling the CX Flywheel
Why is word of mouth so important?
A staggering 88 per cent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know over any other form of marketing messaging and considering that 97 per cent of businesses in New Zealand are small businesses, this emphasises the point even further.
4 ways to get referrals with Net Promoter Score
1. Knowing your customers
Customer surveys aren't just about gathering dry data points to fill up a report with. They exist to let you get to know your customers better—to learn what motivates them to do business with you, and the potential reasons for how to get them to refer you to their friends as well.
An example: through the Net Promoter Score℠ methodology, you can determine which of your customers are positive about your products or services (“Promoters”) and which are negative (“Detractors”). You’ll get an insight into what they think about you and what you need to change.
Naturally, you don’t only want to stop doing what turns people off, but also to understand what your customers like about you so much that they are raving about your business.
2. Fast resolutions
Knowing your strengths is good; knowing your weaknesses is better. The reality is that no matter how great an experience you offer to a customer at first, a single poor touchpoint can destroy that relationship. In fact, it takes 12 good experiences to make up for just a single poor one.
Customer surveys, such as an NPS survey, help identify the pain points for your customers. Your survey will give you the insights into what went wrong in the customer experience before negative word of mouth spreads from an unhappy customer.
Further, you these surveys help you find out where you are going wrong, meaning you can fix any issues your customers are experiencing so that your customers are happy for longer and willing to recommend you to others.
3. Right timing
If you’re aiming for referrals specifically, the best time to ask for it (consequently not necessarily the best time to get authentic feedback, though) is when your customer is at the peak of their enthusiasm, so when they're in their most positive mind frame. This might be just after a purchase or even better, asking your fans (Promoters) to leave a testimonial, in a survey.
This way, you’re making it easy for them and because they’re a Promoter they’ve already said they will promote you. By integrating an easy social sharing function into your survey automatically (which is something us here at Customer Monitor do for our clients) meaning they’ll share the good word via social with the click of a button – job done.
The easier you make it for your customers, the quicker you'll see more referrals leading to increased sales.
Read more: 6 ways to increase your survey response rates
4. Leveraging your fans
Fans, promoters, happy customers or even ambassadors—call them what you like but if they are happy to promote you, you should leverage this straight away. When someone scores you a 9 or 10 in your NPS survey, you would be wise to jump to capitalise on getting a testimonial and ask them to share on social media.
Clever online customer experience platforms, (such as the one we’ve developed for Customer Monitor) can automatically do this for you. Thank your valued customers for their feedback and offer them a snippet of content that you’ve pre-written for them so that they can easily share on their social channels.
1. Bain & Co
