There is a study that proves the value of customer love. NPS Prism, a unique customer experience benchmarking service, and Glassdoor, an American website where current and former employees anonymously review companies, draw a clear relationship between happy employees and happy customers. Before uncovering the implications of customer love for a company, let’s first define what customer love is, the aspects of it that it impacts, and where it is visible.
According to Bain & Company, customer love is an unmatched business strategy. Customers who enjoy a company’s service or product are more likely to become repeat consumers and buy more of it over time. Companies that treat their consumers like family grow faster and generate better financial returns. They are the firms you want to work for, invest in, buy from, and recommend to your friends.
If a company can create a strong brand and community, it will create ‘brand affinity,’ which is a strong emotional link between the brand values and the community of customers. Customers’ ‘brand loyalty’ stems from ‘brand affinity,’ which is essential for building a healthy and sustainable brand over time. The emotional bond produced by ‘brand affinity’ is so strong that customers want to share it not just with the brand but also with everyone around them, making them the ideal brand promoters.
“Customer Love” should be observable in:
- The customer acquisition channel mix, with an important number of new customers entering through unpaid channels, owing to word-of-mouth generated by customers-promoters, and a non-negligible fraction coming through referrals.
- The ‘Net Promoter Score’ is a standard benchmark used by companies around the world. Businesses use their net promoter score, or ‘NPS’, to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty to a brand, which is raised by extremely satisfied existing customers who are eager to support the brand.
Customer love impacts:
- The frequency of purchase should always be regarded in relation to the category (e.g., on average, consumers tend to eat food at a higher frequency than they travel by helicopter).
- The repeat rate: the best way to look at it is to create cohorts or a grouping of customers with a shared characteristic (looking at x number of consumers who made their first purchase in month m, how much they bought again in m+1, m+2, m+3, etc.).
- The evolution of basket size through time, which can also be examined using value cohorts or a grouping of customers in terms of value
- Customers’ engagement on social media, particularly Instagram, where they may not only express their love for the business but also tag their friends and family to recommend the product (or service) to them
Glassdoor and the NPS Prism Study
All of the above is proven by the data recently released from Glassdoor. Their data lists the best places to work in 2022. It was striking how many of the most successful large US employers are also customer satisfaction leaders.
Four supermarket companies, for example, made the Glassdoor top 100 based on current and former employee reviews. Trader Joe’s is ranked 32nd, H-E-B is ranked 33rd, Wegmans is ranked 80th, and Costco is ranked 93rd. All four have also developed incredibly strong consumer ties. They are also at the top of their market in terms of Net Promoter Score (NPS), according to benchmarking data from NPS Prism®. H-E-B has the highest customer NPS among supermarket retailers. Costco is No. 2, Wegmans is No. 3, and Trader Joe’s is No. 5. (Costco also has the best NPS among warehouse clubs.)
In other customer-facing businesses, a similar pattern emerged. For example, Delta Airlines, which Glassdoor ranks as the 18th greatest place to work, has an NPS that ranks near the top of the US airline industry. Southwest, ranked 30th on Glassdoor, has consistently ranked first or second in airline customer NPS (together with JetBlue).
Happy employees produce happy consumers, and vice versa.
Based on Figure 1, it is clear that a human touch can considerably boost a customer’s opinion. It is interesting to see the impact quantified. According to NPS Prism’s survey of more than 50,000 supermarket consumers on more than two dozen different customer journeys, interacting with informed staff can enhance a client’s NPS score by 87 points, bringing it from a negative to a positive NPS. A comparable increase occurs when a consumer encounters polite workers at the checkout.
While it may seem clear that happy staff make for happy consumers, it may be less noticeable that the reverse is also true. However, the research strongly supports the hypothesis that happy consumers produce happy staff. Eleven of the one hundred companies on the Glassdoor list are also tracked by NPS Prism, and of those, all except one have strong customer NPS scores, which means employee satisfaction and client loyalty reinforce each other. You can’t have one without the other.
In conclusion, the companies with the best customer satisfaction, which means a lot of customer love, have the most happy employees. Note that the said businesses are successful in their respective fields. Customers and employees, who are both satisfied, reinforce one another, producing a mutually beneficial relationship that benefits everyone.
Sources:
https://www.netpromotersystem.com/resources/customer-love/
https://www.bain.com/insights/love-love-me-do-new-data-proves-the-value-of-customer-love/
