Customer marketing – getting customer feedback
Customer marketing > Customer feedback for competitive advantage
Getting customer feedback in the age of social media is much more straightforward. However harvesting your feedback in a usable and actionable format is still a challenge. Approaches like NetPromoter, Customer satisfaction tracking & Customer Effort Score can help – and you can save time, effort (and money) working out what to use and how by tapping into relevant skills and experience.
NetPromoter is a business operating discipline based on gathering personal and detailed feedback from your customers. First seen in a discussion paper published through the Harvard Business Review in 2003, the thinking expressed by author Fred Reichheld of Bain Consulting attracted immediate interest from business. 
By 2006 Fred built on his original thinking to propose an operating system with his best selling
book ‘The Ultimate Question”. By 2010 hundreds of major brands had picked up on the simple logic – that good NetPromoter scores directly correlate with good business performance.
The NetPromoter score – or NPS for short – works partly because it’s so simple. By asking your customers whether they’d recommend you to their friends and family, you can understand how they feel about you. One question, usually asked alongside several other quick questions, but one question that can tell you a lot about your business.
Customers are usually invited to give a score from 0 (bad) to 10 (very good), then to explain their score but in their own words. The ‘verbatim’ text replies explaining the scores can tell you what’s working and what’s not. What to do more of, and what to fix.
The heart of NetPromoter is customer feedback – but the power of NetPromoter comes from how you act on it. Businesses using the discipline well build it into how they operate. Firstly by ‘closing the loop’ to contact customers in response to their feedback. Secondly by taking actions quickly in response to the voice of the customer. And thirdly by using NetPromoter to force a culture change to make the customer a more central part of your business.
We’ve worked with NetPromoter in three very different markets – utilities at British Gas, travel at Hertz Europe and pay-TV broadcasting at Viasat. Including introducing NetPromoter at Viasat, now operating across eight markets and touching over a million customers.
Important steps in planning this type of programme include building the business case for gathering customer feedback to convince your senior management to commit to your programme. Then connecting with proven vendors of feedback systems, offering a quality product at a good price. Then designing and launching a programme which maximises the positive effects – quickly.
Click here for an example of business performance improvement through harvesting customer feedback.
Click here to browse through a selection of FREE marketing case studies showcasing big differences in Customer Marketing & CRM.
