The other day, I talked about how to calculate your net promoter score. This score allows you to see how many of your customers are promoters and how many are detractors. Once you are armed with this information; what can you do? How can you increase the amount of customers that are promoters?

One way is too avoid bad profits as I talked about in a previous post. However, this will only prevent detractors and will not necessarily create promoters.

At ReadyTalk, our focus is upon building advocates by allowing our customers to be heard and by providing exemplary customer support. We conduct usability testing with our customers before new product releases, we give them several avenues of real time feedback about their conference experience and we have dedicated account managers to each one of our accounts.

Our support is done in-house and is available 24/7. We even have an advocacy officer who is in charge of making sure programs and processes are in place to create promoters. Our CRM solution has a advocacy level indicator on each account and it is the responsibility of the account manager to move the needle.

While all of the above is great, the most important thing you can do is hire properly. Our hiring process is focused on employees that have customer service as a core value no matter their job function. If customer service is a core value you hold, you will be driven to help your customer’s succeed and will take it personally when you fail. Regardless of the programs you have in place, without customer service as a core value of your employees, an advocacy program may never succeed.

Yesterday, I talked about what it takes to build loyalty among your customers and I mentioned one of the things that can destroy loyalty was bad profits. Bad profits are profits that come at a customer expense. Bad profits come from unfair or misleading pricing. Bad profits arise when companies save money by delivering a lousy customer experience. Bad profits are about extracting value from customers, not creating value.

Banks and Airlines are two good examples of bad profits. Return check fees, ATM fees, check fees and deposit fees - these all leave the customer feeling like they are being taken advantage of. A banks main focus is on offering incentives to new customers because customers feel no loyalty to any one bank because of these bad profits. Airlines are similar with change fees, baggage fees and cancellation fees.

At ReadyTalk, we focus our efforts on good profits. Our pricing structure is always re-assessed to make sure it is fair to all customers. We don’t have any hidden fees nor do we charge overages. We realize that just as detractors have a bullhorn for spreading their negative word-of-mouth, promoters have one for spreading their positive word-of-mouth. Thus, the goal of any company should be to build relationships of such high quality that those relationships create promoters, generate good profits, and fuel growth.

How does a company know if they have more detractors than promoters? How do you know if your company is addicted to bad profits? Tomorrow, I will show you a simple way to find out the answers to these questions.

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