Acquiring new customers is not the end game. The fun starts once you have a captive audience. That is the most basic secret behind the Internet riches. At one point, the Internet became synonymous with the free or the cheap. Why? The logic goes like this: Once you have enough people using your products, a few will eventually pay for the value, and another few will even become evangelic promoters. They will run around the web recruiting and telling every other person about the wonderful service that you provide, for free!
The caveat, however, is: What do you do once you have an engaged audience?
This is the challenge that many Internet start-ups failed to address, which resulted in the loss of their customer equity, hence the demise of their business and the hopes of many investors. It is the same challenge that any business with two or two million existing customers faces every day. The answer, though, is simple: Sell them more!
How? Satisfied customers buy more, so provide an exceptional customer experience to engage and wow your customers. And that, my friend, has been the mantra for many companies for quite some time.
Many businesses jumped on the customer experience bandwagon. They started numerous initiatives to make customers happy. They established mechanisms—usually customer surveys—to measure the satisfaction levels of customers. They linked employee bonuses to the improvement of customer satisfaction. An independent organization, the American Customers Satisfaction Index (ACSI), even started collecting customer satisfaction data to provide a single benchmark indicator for 43 industries correlating macroeconomic indicators with the customer satisfaction index. They recommend that governments and businesses use the index to allocate their scarce resources effectively, hence growing their business profitably.
No doubt, keeping the customer satisfied is a must for all businesses. If the goal, however, is to sell more to existing customers, then knowing the overall satisfaction index is of limited value. You can use your good customer satisfaction rating to brag before an uninitiated audience—we are great, we got a five-star rating in the JD Power customer satisfaction survey—but this rating as-is has very little utility in deciding who to up-sell, what to up-sell, and how to up-sell.
But wait! We, the salespeople, know the value of qualifying questions, so why don’t we ask our satisfied customers: “How likely is it that you would recommend our offering to a friend or a colleague?” Customers who say “most likely I will” are also most likely to buy more. That’s a nice way to find actionable information and create targeted campaigns, isn’t it? That’s what we used to do until Mr. Fred Reichheld—noted author and leading authority on customer loyalty—suggested this question in his famous book The Ultimate Question that started the net promoter score (NPS) revolution.
Related:
- Table of Content
- Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
- The Billionaire Code
- Cracking the Code
- Implementation Plan