Mature organizations that value customer service and measure customer satisfaction, have multiple ways to achieve it. Teams within teams are created to manage customer expectations across a broad spectrum and the purchasing experience. There are multiple touchpoints that a customer liaisons with a brand, right from the point of sale to retail channels. Customers also indulge with a brand through mobile apps, call centers, delivery modules as well as social media. So the connection between a customer and a brand is humungous.
A common method that brands use to gauge customer satisfaction is the NPS score. Customer satisfaction numbers are derived from collecting the NPS across a broad spectrum of an organizational touchpoint with a customer. The number of promoters and detractors derive the brand’s real estate value with an existing and potential customer base. It is then obvious that Bain & Co., the pioneers of the NPS score state that the leader in any industry has more than double the NPS score than of their competitors.
Using online communities is now the preferred method to conduct market research. Brands are increasingly creating communities to collect insights from their “promoters”. But it is wrong to look at customers as they’re line items in the order book – they are more than that. It’s an experience for a customer and they want to be highly engaged with your brand. That counts for something so treat them with that courtesy while collecting insights from them. Brands have started to realize that it is important to co-create with their top customers because these individuals can impact everything from product to acquisition and retention which directly impact sales and the bottom line. It is important to realize that these individuals can help you create an ecosystem of success and growth because they are perfectly poised to fill in blanks in your brand that you didn’t even know existed.
Creating a promoter community and the key questions they answer
QuestionPro Communities is perfectly poised to help brands co-create with customers. It isn’t complicated to create a promoter community. But the recruitment to this community has to be spot on. Promoters who have answered accordingly across the broad spectrum of various touchpoints with the brand can and should be onboarded to this community. This will identify the personnel that are most relevant to the community.
As previously mentioned, the promoter community can be widely used to tap into the most active promoters for the brand. These promoters will also help create an ecosystem of feedback and co-creation for the organization to leverage. This community comprises of the people that have the most clout with the success of the brand as well as the ones that are emotionally vested with the brand. The best way to identify such customers is to onboard the customers that offer the most feedback, those that indulge with the brand, are high paying customers, etc. But using the NPS to recruit these members is the most simple but effective method.
Where NPS stops, the promoter community continues and allows brands to co-create with customers on a deeper level. We’ll get to the tools that are at your disposal with the promoter community but first let’s take a look at the key business questions that are more thoroughly answered with such a community.
Key questions the promoter community help answer are:
- Does my brand meet my customer’s expectations? The promoter community best helps answer the question about what customers really want and need. This helps the brand to be relevant as well as stay ahead of the competition.
- Can the insights I have help make business decisions? Another major benefit of the promoter community is that it helps derive deep level actionable insights that help make day-to-day as well as long term business decisions. The right insights can help fortify the brand value in the mind of existing and potential customers.
- Can I wow my customers? The core objective of a business is to satisfy a need or want of a customer. The promoter community helps collect in-depth insights about products or services that are important to a customer.
The promoter community helps a brand stay relevant in the market, be trusted by customers and most importantly, be profitable. Insights collected from this tighter but loyal group of people are easier to manage and easier to monitor instead of a wider audience that includes multiple qualitative and quantitative studies.
How can I best manage the promoter community?
You have seen the benefits of the promoter community and the role that it plays towards a business being profitable, preferred and relevant. QuestionPro Communities makes it simple to even manage so you are left with worry only about recruiting your Promoters. We can help do the rest. The platform is set up in a way to offer you multiple options such as:
- Surveys & Polls: Collect quick quantifiable insights with the use of surveys and polls. Leverage the deep level integration with the survey platform to collect insights on one-time or an ongoing basis. This can help to quickly make product or service tweaks or even collect ongoing feedback.
- IdeaBoard: The IdeaBoard is one of the handiest tools of the community platform that help with the crowdsourcing and co-creation of ideas from the relevant audience. Collect feedback in the form of text as well as rich media and allow members to interact with the ideas with upvoting them, etc. to validate the relevance of the idea.
- Topics & Discussions: These tools also allow members to interact and ideate with the brand, the community manager and well as community members. You can be assured that these insights are relevant and no underlying thoughts slip through the cracks.
- Rewards: Plain and simple, incentivize the most active promoter community members so that they offer relevant but continual feedback to the brand. Use the in-built gamification module to engage the audience into engaging with the brand and the community.
The bottom line is that the NPS score is the cornerstone of customer satisfaction but incentivizing the promoters from the NPS is important and increasingly relevant to the brand. The promoter community not just helps ideate but co-create to a deep level with your most important customers and help the brand be profitable and relevant.
