Listening to Your Customers Helps You Build More Promoters and Fewer Detractors

Successful businesses strive to build a lot of things: impressive infrastructures, a strong marketing program, a good product or service. One thing the most successful companies build, however, is more net promoters among their customers.

Net Promoters are those who share their positive opinions about your products and services with others: colleagues, friends and social media contacts. It helps you understand how your customers feel about the products or services you provide. Like most things, the Net Promoter has an opposite, called the “Detractor.” This is the person who broadcasts your failures as a company loudly in blogs, videos on YouTube (News - Alert) or through social media. By taking steps to boost your Net Promoter score, you can reduce the number of detractors. (“Passives” are the people who neither promote nor detract.)

There is evidence that positive word-of-mouth on social media leads directly to increased revenue. Given this, it can be extrapolated that net detractors cause your company to lose business.

“Detractors are detrimental to a company,” wrote Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System in a recent article on LinkedIn (News - Alert). “They cost more to serve. They’re responsible for 80% of a company’s negative word of mouth, detailing their frustrations on Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) for the world to see. And negative referrals are often far more powerful than positive referrals. How many four- and five-star reviews do you need to see before you dismiss a one-star review on Yelp (News - Alert) or Amazon?”

Too many companies leave their customer experience to chance: they carry on with the same sub-par contact center practices that create detractors, or fail to turn passives into net promoters. Good management and good technology are some of the tools that can be used to boost quality of service and the customer experience, but smart companies engage in even more insurance, putting third-party monitoring services in place to help ferret out the bad customer experiences. From here, they can identify the root causes and change their practices.

Third-party remote call monitoring is carried on by a professional organization equipped with the right analytics tools to uncover hidden gemstones of intelligence from your telephone interactions. By identifying the behavior and practices that produce promoters and eliminating those that create detractors, companies can go a long way toward reproducing it to boost customer satisfaction even higher, and eliminate behavior that sends disgruntled customers flocking to Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter.

Edited by Blaise McNamee

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