Loyalty & Word of Mouth

It costs five times more to attract a new customer than to retain a current one. Customer loyalty research has always been about minimizing attrition, “plugging the leaky bucket”, and it is still that today. However, it has also grown to encompass the best behaviors that your brand loyalists possess: the capacity and desire to promote your brand. These customers have been called brand evangelists, advocates, or more simply “brand promoters”, and understanding what turns them on has become a critical challenge facing progressive thinking businesses. Brand promoters are not merely more loyal (i.e. more likely to stay with you), they speak your praises in the marketplace and become a primary source of new business through the spread of positive word-of-mouth. Your brand promoters help retention and promotion efforts.

Indeed, maximizing your “net promoter” score has been established as a goal in many organizations following Reicheld’s (2002) suggestion of tracking likelihood to recommend as the “one number you need to grow”. The immediate question for any manager who has been given this task is: How?

Sentient loyalty and word-of-mouth research provides clear consulting on how to maximize your brand promoters and keep the customers you’ve worked so hard to win.

Sentient loyalty and word-of-mouth methods include:

• Behavioral modeling to identify which products and services have the greatest impact on loyalty and word-of-mouth.
• Customer interviews to identify the pinnacle pleasure points that drive positive word-of-mouth.
• Attitudinal profiling to identify the types of customers you delight the most, why, and how to keep them as brand loyalists for the long-term.
• Attrition modeling to determine which customers are abandoning your brand and why.
• Reward program assessment to determine what works, why and what to offer moving forward.