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The Only Way to Grow a Business

According to Andy Talyor, CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, "The

only way to grow a business is to get customers to come back for

more and tell their friends."

He seems to know what he is talking about. A recent Enterprise

press release notes that they are the largest car rental company

in North America and the fastest growing rental company in the

airport segment. They also happen to be number 16 on Forbes list

of largest privately held companies.

What is their secret? This is what Taylor says: "Our success in

growing our airport business can be attributed directly to the

highly personalized brand of customer service that we extend to

each renter." Just words? Apparently not. Over the last four

months Enterprise was ranked #1 by Market Metrix for customer

satisfaction in the car rental industry and JD Powers ranked

them highest in customer satisfaction among airport car rentals.

I hope it is obvious that it is not just a coincidence that

Enterprise keeps their customers happy and they have been

growing like crazy. Happy customers come back and they tell

their friends about their experience. So how happy are your

customers and do you know how to find out?

That is the question that Fred Reichheld (author of Loyalty

Rules) and his team at Bain Consulting set out to answer. Is

there one "customer satisfaction" type question that explains or

can predict growth for a company? You can listen to a summary of

their findings here

(http://resultsbrief.bain.com/videos/0402/main.html).

What they found is that there is one question that has a very

high correlation to growth across most industries. The question

is:

"How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend?"

Makes sense, doesn't it? If your customer is willing to put

their reputation on the line for you they must have had a pretty

good experience. So that should be the goal: give every customer

an experience so great that they would be willing to recommend

your business to their friends.

Now the question becomes, "how do you measure that?" There are

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probably lots of ways to do it, my bias is that PromoterZ(tm)

(http://promoterz.com) is probably the quickest and easiest way

to implement a measuring process. The PromoterZ(tm) feedback

survey is built around the "recommend us to a friend" question.

It also automatically calculates the net promoter score that

Reichheld and his team developed to predict company growth.

However you decide to measure and manage customer loyalty, don't

think of it as a "one time" event or a seasonal activity. Andy

Taylor, CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car can rank order his 5,000+

facilities based on customer scores every week. He also ties the

compensation of his employees to those scores. It is an integral

part of his organization's operating metrics. If you are serious

about growth, it should be a key part of yours as well.

About the author:

Dave Free is president of Zeryn, makers of PromoterZ(tm) (http://promoterz.com), a customer care

system for small business growth. Mr. Free received an MBA from

BYU and has worked as an Intel executive domestically and

internationally, at a Washington think tank, and entrepreneur.