Word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways for growing your business. Don’t take our word for it; Nielsen found that 84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about products and services – making these recommendations the highest ranked source for trustworthiness. And if you’re in the B2B realm, a whopping 91% of B2B buyers are influenced by word-of-mouth when making their buying decision (USM). Therefore, knowing whether your customers are happy with your brand and recommending you to their colleagues and friends is essential for fast growth. But how can you find out this information?
Enter Net Promoter Score (NPS). It’s a great measure to help you understand your customers’ loyalty level. Simply send out a quick survey asking ‘On a scale of 0 (poor) to 10 (excellent), how likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend or colleague?’, and you can quickly gauge not just whether your customers like you, but how likely they are to tell their friends and colleagues about you.
On paper, this doesn’t sound difficult, but getting a reasonable cross-section of their customer base to respond to a survey remains a challenge for many companies. Traditional survey methods are either too expensive or result in very low response rates. We know how important the NPS is to companies, and we know the power of SMS (98% of messages are opened), so when we were creating our new SMS Survey tool, we included an NPS function.
Before we created the SMS Survey tool, we delivered NPS via email, which as a medium traditionally has only a 22% open rate. Further to this, the people actually completing our survey dropped to around 5%. As I’m sure you can agree, this isn’t a very representative sample. However, since we started using SMS Surveys to gather NPS data, we’ve seen the response rate jump up to 20-25%. That’s a fifth of all of our customers giving us feedback, which is a much more useful figure. We can be more confident in reporting and acting on these figures, and we can quickly assess if there is a problem. We’ve expanded the traditional NPS survey to include three questions: on our products, services and whether our customers would recommend us. This way we can quickly distinguish where we need to focus our energies or celebrate our achievements. Luckily for us, we’re scoring well in our customers’ eyes.
To find out how you can start looking into your NPS via SMS Surveys, call us on 1300 764 946.
