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How To Improve Customer Loyalty And Your Net Promoter Score

The best leaders recognize the importance of excellent customer experience. They conduct their due diligence to design the experience and carry it out.

If you’ve ever put your trust into a business by making a purchase from it, you likely know what it feels like to go through a poor customer service experience. In just the blink of an eye, you go from excited and hopeful, to frustrated and angry. With experiences like these being so commonplace today, there’s a prime opportunity for businesses to create a “wow” experience as their differentiator.

The best leaders recognize the importance of excellent customer experience. They conduct their due diligence to design the experience and carry it out. At my company, we add meaning to our customer experience by maintaining our Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is an active, fluid way to measure customer loyalty.

The Dollar Shave Club is a prime example of a company with an above-average NPS score that has contributed greatly to its value. With a consistent commitment to enhancing their core customer experience, it recently sold to Unilever for $1 billion.

Here are three ways you can add value to your own customer experience and start building an above-average NPS of your own:

 

Empower employees to navigate customer challenges

Most businesses provide tools and education to help their employees boost knowledge and emotional intelligence, but they often leave out a key skillset that sets the stage for the best customer experience: personal control (i.e. the control quotient, or CQ). This is the ability to stay calm when things are challenging — not just once — but when handling every challenge.

 

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The key to increasing your employee’s CQ is to create the right environment. The Effortless Experience, a method for building stronger customer loyalty, defines three things employees need to increase their CQ. They include: the need to feel trusted to make the right choices, the need to feel connected to the company’s bigger mission, and a strong peer network for support. Businesses that provide support and education around these three factors create a positive environment where customer experience can thrive.

 

Don’t aim for satisfaction, aim for customer loyalty

If you want a NPS that indicates customers feel great about their experience, you have to go beyond meeting their needs. After all, customer satisfaction is only one part of the customer experience. If you ignore how the customer feels throughout their experience, customer loyalty is much harder to achieve.

 

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Reduce the amount of effort required on your customer’s end to get the experience they expect. Customer experience requires proactive thinking to identify and prevent the next issue before it happens. This can be attained through client feedback, and the discovery of pain points and goals.

 

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Another way businesses can ensure a proactive experience is to create tutorials, guides and information that answers questions customers are likely to ask. This way, solutions are easy to find. Again, it’s about consistently learning about and understanding your customers; and nurturing the relationship continuously.

 

Take care of your employees

Happy employees take care of customers. Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, once said: “If you want the people in the stores to take care of customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores.”

If you truly want to serve your customers and offer them the best solutions, you must adopt an employee-centric management strategy. When employees aren’t treated well, they’re too frustrated to provide a good customer experience. Richard Branson said it best: “If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile.”

Employees also give customers clues into what your company really stands for. If your customers see employees being mistreated and undervalued, it speaks volumes far beyond what any marketing campaign or product solution could repair.

 

In order to achieve the highest Net Promoter Score, business owners need to prioritize employees first, customers second and shareholders third. When you follow this model, all three stakeholders get exactly what they were looking for out of your brand.

 

Simon Casuto is the co-founder and president of eLearning Mind, an interactive creative agency focused on designing education and corporate learning by leveraging ultra-modern design principles combined with science-back neurolearning principles to deliver smart, beautiful and engaging experiences that also deliver results.

 

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