Understanding customer loyalty via SMS

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. And while it’s obvious that you have to acquire new customers to achieve growth, keeping existing customers is just as important. Loyal, repeat customers are extremely valuable to a business and can be the difference between growth and stagnation.

If you are looking to build true customer loyalty, creating a wonderful customer experience is the place to start. Modern customers are savvy and have the power to choose between competing businesses based on their experience. In fact, research by White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 80% of U.S. consumers would pay more for a product or service to ensure their customer experience was positive.

When you provide this, it becomes easier to improve your sales and grow your business. This begs the question; how do you know whether your customers are satisfied?

Measure your customer experience using the Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS is a measure of customer loyalty and is used to monitor the health of a company’s customer experience. The system allows you to gain insight into the quality of your service as well as gauge your customers’ willingness to recommend your business to others.

Why is NPS important to your business

The net promoter score makes it easy to gain actionable feedback from your customers. From their responses, you are able to determine whether you’re taking the right steps to provide a gratifying customer experience.

Here is why the system is critical to your business.

1. The NPS gives a common language in which to classify customers

The NPS categorises customers into three groups based on their score;

Promoters (score 9-10) - Loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and recommend you to others, fueling growth.
Passives (score 7-8) - Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be wooed by competitors.
Detractors (score 0-6) - Unhappy customers who can ruin the reputation of your brand through negative word-of-mouth.

When you know who your customers are, you can invest more in creating targeted strategies to turn passives and detractors into promoters.

2. The NPS system is correlated with increased business growth

The NPS isn’t just a great measure of customer loyalty. Leveraging the system and improving your scores can lead to business growth. While it’s true that a high score by itself won’t guarantee success, strong customer relationships are vital for sustained profitable growth.

Numerous studies, including one conducted by the Harvard Business Review, have found that there is a strong link between high NPS and sales. A positive customer experience can greatly reduce your customer churn as well as give you a competitive advantage in the market.

3. With the NPS system, benchmarking is a snap

The Net Promoter Score is a standardized measurement used by companies worldwide. This makes it easy for businesses to benchmark their scores and see where they stand against their competitors.

How to calculate NPS

Determining your NPS is quite simple and can be calculated by sending a quick survey to your customers with as little as one question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?”

NPS utilises a scale of 1-10. As you move up the scoring scale, from 0 to 10, customer experience and satisfaction improves.

To enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your NPS surveys, you should;

Keep the question(s) and survey short.
Analyze NPS results by context and customer type
Personalize your messages to customers

Calculating your NPS using a Two-Way SMS Service

SMS is the perfect tool for calculating your NPS. Nearly everyone has a mobile phone and therefore access to the platform almost 24hours a day. This is one of the reasons SMS boasts a whopping 98% open rate, while email sits at only 20-25%.

SMS is also often much more convenient for customers, as opposed to other platforms, making it much more likely for them to get involved. After all, when was the last time you participated in a phone survey while you were at work, or worse, at 7pm when you’ve just arrived home after a long day?

Calculating NPS using mobile is a simple process that can be broken down into xx easy steps:

1.) Determine the question/s you would like to include in your survey.

2.) Using two-way-sms, send the survey to your customers asking them to respond via SMS. Alternatively, if you have created an in-app survey, simply use SMS to send them the link.

3.) After receiving customer feedback, input the data into a spreadsheet for easy tabulation.

4.) To obtain the net promoter score, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

And there you have it!

Conclusion

NPS makes it easy to identify problems that may be affecting your customer experience, which is critical to the ongoing success of your business. It can also act as a great leading indicator for future growth or decline. With a two-way SMS service, it’s a simple process and one well-worth taking a few moments to conduct.