For years, I’ve been counseling clients to use Net Promoter as the metric for measuring everything from overall brand health to the success of an event, customer satisfaction to online experiences. Undoubtedly, the likelihood of recommending a product or service to a friend is really important in the scheme of things but is it sufficient to make intelligent business decisions? Can one question alone even provide a clear picture of brand loyalty? After interviewing Calvin Vass, Senior Manager of Research at CDW, a company that has turned research into an insight-revealing, decision-enhancing, revenue-generating machine, my answers to the above questions in a word, is a contrite “No!” More importantly, my interview with Vass provides an exemplary questionnaire for any business looking to use research to reveal and leverage the “voice of the customer.”
Are you asking the right questions?
At the heart of any good research inquiry, of course, is the quality and ultimate value of the questions you ask. Over the last 11 years, CDW’s Vass has worked diligently to refine the questions his company asks, by listening to feedback from research professionals, his CDW coworkers and even the customers themselves. Rather than depend on one question, CDW’s loyalty index was modeled on a three question approach developed by Walker Information and Net Promoter‘s question, invented by Fred Reichheld. The questions explore, according to Vass, “different dimensions of the relationship; what the customer plans to purchase with us, if they are committed and what they would do if we went away.” Explained Vass, “Net Promoter is a one-dimensional kind of metric; one will often get better, more consistent results by asking more questions.”
Can you identify the questions that correlate strongest to your company’s sales?
The holy grail of any research program is to find the single barometer that has the strongest correlation to business health. For some companies, Net Promoter is this barometer. For CDW, it was the combination of their Customer Loyalty Index and a highly evolved loyalty program. Noted Vass, “we have a strong relationship between our loyalty program and our financial performance.” Through their loyalty research, CDW also discovered that, “Many of our customer problems are linked to the sales team,” reported Vass. Consequently, CDW built a system that feeds customer complaints right back to sales for prompt resolution.
Do you segment your studies?
While Net Promoter divides customers into two camps, Promoters and Detractors, this black and white segmentation may or may not be right for your business. CDW elected to segment its market surveys into two main categories, Active Customers and Less Active Customers. The first group is surveyed quarterly amounting to over 100,000 surveys per year. The second group is surveyed monthly with over 800,000 inquiries fielded annually. Vass explained the reason for the outreach to the second group, “we are always trying to bring them more deeply into the franchise.”
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