When you are curious to know how well you have bonded with your customer. With so much of your efforts and money at stake, is your customer temporary? Is your product worth developing a relationship with your customer? Is your brand propagating with your current customer base? What are the chances that you’ll get the buyback from your customers?

Because they all are about your customer happiness. It feels proud to get appreciated from your customers. A happy customer satisfied with your product stays long with you. Then you start to build a firm and long lasting relationship with them by continuously serving them at your best. After few successful interactions, the customer tends to become loyal to the company.

For measuring the overall impact of your brand for a longer-term relationship with the customer, you can estimate it with Net Promoter Score. The NPS is not about the recent transactions. It is the percentage count of the promoters in the market. It is a single question that is meant to be asked as a rating on the scale of 0-10. The question to your customers is“how likely will you recommend the brand/product/service to your friends or family or colleagues?” Based on this scoring given your customer, they are categorised in 3 types – Promoters, Passives, Detractors.

Promoters are the customers who rate you 9 or 10, they are the live marketers of your brand in the market. They are the most loyal customers to your brand and they spread good word about your brand and gifts you with more loyal customers.

and therefore the more branding will bring you the more business.

Passives are the customers who are just satisfied with the brand, there wasn’t anything exceptional for them. They rate you 7 or 8 on the scale of 10 which means they are not likely to recommend your brand. In fact they might switch to your competitor’s services for the next buy.

Detractors are those customers who rates you from 0 to 6, and are not interested to buy again from your brand. In fact, they get disheartened and start discouraging your brand’s image in front of others and therefore

The NPS ranges from -100 to 100 as it is calculated as the percentage count of promoters minus percentage count of detractors. The passives are the neutral element of the campaigns.

Or to calculate your NPS score, you can use this simple formula: % of Promoters – % of Detractors

The promoters pull the score towards 100 and detractors drag it to -100 and the passives neutralise the effect by diluting the scores near to zero from both the sides. So, the aim is to increase the number of promoters that will help you with self-propagation of your brand and to decrease the demoters to minimum. If your NPS is positive then you have more number of promoters than detractors and it means you are providing an excellent service to your customers and they are happy to purchase from your brand.

Because a customer recommending your brand to the others will be loyal himself. This customer loyalty metric was introduced by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, in his article in Harvard Business Review in 2003.

It therefore helps you to estimate how good are you doing at the customer retention. NPS can be the best method to evaluate it. Customer relationship needs special attention and every interaction is made to pull the customer even closer to the brand.

NPS gives you enough opportunity to trace the stressed feedbacks and opens a short time opportunity for you to care for them. The NPS is about maintaining a long-term customer relationship. And your customer will become a stake holders only when you will connect them as a family and listen intently to their feedbacks.

NPS doesn’t give a broad picture about the experience of the customer across different parameters, for that you need to conduct a broader feedback campaign. So,

even a single mistake throughout the journey can discourage your customer and thence affect the customer experience. And so, does a positive step may present you the customer for life. What may urge your customer to recommend or not your brand could not be interpreted from NPS, but surely it is the quickest way to judge who is going to stay with you for long and who’ll not.

But the job is not done by just collecting the NPS, but what’s most important above all is that you need to act upon it. Not just on the indicated threats but also try to respond to the opportunities, to your promoters. The more you act towards increasing the score, the more brand ambassadors you will create, the more quality business you’ll get. When you hear appreciation from the customers, it is such an elated feeling. But think about when your customer recommends your brand to their contacts? That echo is simply magical.