𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐇𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐍𝐎𝐁𝐎𝐃𝐘 𝐌𝐀𝐊𝐄𝐒

Your promoters are a sales pipeline, not a pat on the back.

A customer fills in your survey, scores you a nine out of ten, and that is where it ends. Someone smiles at the dashboard. Meanwhile, the customer who scored you a four gets a call within the week.

That call-back is what we mean by Closing the Loop: doing something with the feedback a customer has just handed you. There is a small, or Tactical Loop, when you go back to the individual who answered, and ask them whether you can improve their experience specifically. And there is the Strategic Loop, where you draw conclusions from all the answers together, and establish long-term projects that require bigger change for all customers. Both loops get aimed almost exclusively at the unhappy customers, the Detractors in Net Promoter language.

That is understandable. It is also a waste, because your happy customers are one of the best sources of additional business you can ever get.

One of our clients was a German distributor of building materials. When we started their NPS programme, their sales team was openly sceptical about surveying anyone. As usual, the salespeople were convinced they already knew what their customers found important. Their Head of Sales saw the negative feedback, took it as a sales potential, and backed the programme fully.

The unexpected win, though, came from the happy customers. In this industry, a contractor buys from two or three suppliers at once, so that whatever material a building site needs is always available somewhere. Every customer relationship therefore has a Share of Wallet attached to it. So, we put the two numbers side by side: the NPS score and the Share of Wallet. Wherever a customer sat in the Promoter range but gave us less than half of their spend, the sales phoned them and asked flat out, why they were not getting the majority of their business.

Almost nobody took offence. Quite a few said something close to “you are right, I should be giving you more”. This one action, run in southern Germany alone, generated millions of euros in additional annual sales.

So stop saving your loop closing for the people who are angry with you. Phone the ones who like you and ask why they are not buying more. Sometimes the only reason is that nobody ever asked.

𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐬𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬?