For most businesses word of mouth is the biggest and strongest form of marketing, and it doesn’t cost a cent! NPS or ‘Net Promoter Score’ measures how satisfied your customers are and gives you an idea of how likely they are to refer other people to your business.
Your most loyal customers are advocates for your business. These are the people who enjoyed their experience so much that they want to scream it from the rooftops… Well, more like tell all their friends and family how amazing you are at their Saturday afternoon BBQ. Word of mouth is such a powerful marketing tool, which weirdly goes under the radar in the heavy-spend digital marketing world of today. However, measuring your NPS will give you a clear idea of how you’re tracking and help you to bump up the number of customer advocates you have.
Once you’ve identified who your promoters are, you can (politely) ask them if they’d like to share a testimonial or refer your business to others. You can also ask them to rate or review your business on third-party review sites. People trust word-of-mouth referrals and when they are referred to a business by their friend or family member, they’re more likely to complete the purchase.
Online review websites are a great source of customer feedback for tourism businesses, however, we need to keep in mind that only between 2-5% of your customers will leave public online reviews. Which begs the question, what about the 95% of customers that haven’t reviewed you? What do they think? Yonder customer Glassbottom Boat Tours send out direct surveys and have a whopping 35% of their customers providing feedback to them (seriously!!) - that’s a wealth of insight into their customers’ thoughts and feelings.
If Covid has taught tourism businesses anything, it’s that they need to remain agile, adaptive and always listen to their customers. Businesses that were using NPS before covid have been able to adapt and monitor changes to their score. If your NPS score starts to drop then you know very quickly that something isn’t working, and that you need to make some changes pronto!
When you send out an NPS survey, it sends out a strong message that you care about your customers and value their opinion. It shows that customer satisfaction is important to you, emphasises the fact that you put your “customers-first” and that the voice of your customers’ matters to your business.
Very often travellers are asked to leave a review in an impersonal email at a time when people are craving personalisation. Where is the evidence that you care about your customers in that? NPS survey isn’t asking for them to help you but instead shows that you are listening to your customers. The completion rate for NPS emails reflects this with over a 30% completion rate.
If you know your NPS then you can benchmark yourself against industry standards and your competition. For tourism, the industry-standard internationally is only about 32-40 - so if you’re achieving anything over 50 then you’re knocking it out of the park! You can also take heart knowing that you are doing a great job and can use that social proof in your marketing to drive more sales - win-win!
You can also include the NPS survey at the start of a larger customer survey. Starting with NPS is a great way to ease the customer into the survey and show that you are listening to them right off the bat. By adding further questions after your NPS survey, you have an opportunity to increase your customer data so that you can get more insights and a more rounded view of your customers’ thoughts, what matters to them and what delights them.
Using NPS is a no brainer. Want to start tracking yours? Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Yonder here.
