“I wish there was more comprehensive data about my consumer base, G.” (source: rollingstone.com)
The wise man pitctured aboce once told us to “chiggity check yourself before you wreck yourself.” Sage advice from a dude named after frozen water. And yet, for some reason many business do not check themselves. Is the problem that they do not know they’re going to wreck themselves?
Our friends at Forbes think that might be part of the issue when it comes to bad customer service (note: I say “our friends at Forbes” in the same way I might say “my friend Mick’s band is on a 50th anniversary tour”), and they’re also pointing out a solution:
You’ve probably seen this survey question before, as loads of big companies use it: “How likely would you be to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” You’re asked to rate that likelihood on a 1-10 score …The magic comes in how you evaluate and follow up on the scores you get.
You can use this single question to derive a figure known as your Net Promoter Score, a concept developed by Satmetrix, loyalty expert Fred Reichheld, and consulting firm Bain & Company.
I was surprised to see that this kind of tool is so easily accessible to small business owners, so you might be, too. Even without the resources of a huge, Golitahan service team (yes, Goliathan is a word, I just looked it up), it’s easy to find out exactly how psyched or de-psyched (I’ll admit this one is not a word) your customers are about your brand.
David vs. Goliathan (source: siliconangle.com)
[The] 1-10 scale is broken out into three categories — customers who responded with a 1-6 are considered detractors of your brand who will actively trash you to their friends, while 7-8 responders are considered passive or neutral. Only 9 and 10 scores are considered “promoters.”
To find out how you rate in customer service, you subtract the number of detractors from the number of promoters. The result is your Net Promoter Score.
I know, I know. All this talk of subtraction and the numbers 1 through 10 is pretty math heavy. Let’s make it simple: in layman’s terms, the product of the equation is a comprehensive numerical representation of your company’s satisfaction ratio.
Wait, I think I did that backwards. Moving on.
For small businesses, many owners get feedback from customers one on one when they start out. But as the customer base grows, it becomes harder to have those personal conversations.
From there, often customer service devolves into a fire-fighting activity, where most energy is put toward dealing with angry customers and service disasters. Instead, focusing on improving your Net Promoter Score puts the focus on creating a better customer-service culture for the future that will eliminate the need for fire-fighting.
Think about how many more resources you can put towards improving your business if you’re not constantly dealing with angry customers. That’s not to say the act of gathering information about customer satisfaction will solve problems all by itself, but it certainly could shed light on where your going wrong. From there, you can improve loyalty, which will in turn improve your culture and your profitability.
Even if you’re not interested in having your employees (or maybe your extremely cool automated phone system) gather this specific information in this specific way, you should be thinking about ways you can mine your customers for information. If you can find a good one, you might even end up with more devoted consumers than my friend Mick.
Data! (source: askmen.com
Very Bad Business Bureau 
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