In 2002, Fred Reichheld re-defined marketing and customer loyalty by quantifying the scope of business through referrals with the Net Promoter Score (NPS). In 2021, Reichheld introduced an upgrade to NPS in his latest book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers. Here he also introduced a new approach he refers to as Customer Capitalism that could alter the principle of business as we know it.
In this guide, we encapsulate the ideas and principles Reichheld showcases in Winning on Purpose and provide a practical roadmap on how to effectively adopt a Customer Capitalism approach in your business and marketing strategy.
The need for NPS 3.0
Reichheld’s book concurs that, although the global acceptance of the original NPS framework is phenomenal, the implementation is disappointing. Many NPS practitioners are corrupting the system by making the score a target rather than a measure that inspires learning and growth. Reichheld suspects more than 90% of the NPS scores reported today result from unmasked self-administered surveys triggered by specific transactions, which may be very useful for internal management purposes but have little relevance to competitive relationship benchmark scores.
Contrary to popular belief, the central component of the original NPS isn’t just a specific metric based on survey questions that inquire about the likelihood to recommend. Originally, Reichheld considered the name ‘Net Lives Enriched’ for the popular framework because NPS is essentially a philosophy built on the idea that our success should be measured by our impact on customers.
In Winning on Purpose, Reichheld revives and reinvents the old NPS framework with NPS 3.0. and provides an NPS 3.0 checklist (page 285) that enables businesses to focus on enriching and elevating the lives of their customers. He also provides a list of barriers (page 174) that business leaders need to overcome to unleash the power of the golden rule.
Customer Capitalism—the way of the future
Reichheld believes the golden rule of ‘love thy neighbors as thyself’ should not be limited to interpersonal relationships but must also be extended to business transactions. With the golden rule as the foundation, Reichheld introduces the concept of Customer Capitalism. Using empirical evidence depicting the decline of financial capitalism, Customer Capitalism is the way of the future.
“Great companies help people lead great lives—they are a force for good. Great leaders build and sustain such communities. They inspire team members to forge lives of meaning and purpose through service to others—service not merely satisfactory but so thoughtful, creative, and caring that it delights customers and enriches their lives.
– Fred Reichheld on the Customer Capitalism Manifesto”
Customer Capitalists focus on the vital role of kindness, generosity and love in dealing with customers as well as employees. It holds business leaders and their teams accountable. Customer Capitalism dictates that the primary mission of every organization striving for greatness should be to build a community whose purpose is to sustainably enrich the lives of customers and where all members are treated in accordance with (and are held accountable to) the golden rule. This ideology emphasizes that, although great organizations are built on great principles, these principles don’t effectively govern daily decisions. Customer Capitalists clearly comprehend the natural currents pushing their teams downstream, so they can develop practical systems that help make it easy for teams to do the right thing and hard for them to do the wrong thing.
Brands to model
The book shares how great businesses—like Apple, Southwest Airlines, Chewy and Marriott among others—are successfully harnessing the power of Customer Capitalism. Reichheld has been monitoring Customer Capitalists and NPS leaders for many years. Their companies live by the F.R.E.D. credo—Foster, Recommendation, Eliminate and Detraction. To showcase the results of this investment strategy, he even created the F.R.E.D. Stock Index (FREDSI) which reiterates the fact and provides persuasive evidence that putting customers first doesn’t come at the expense of the investors but actually works in their favor.
He also lays the groundwork principles and provides a checklist for companies seeking to shift from financial capitalism to Customer Capitalism. Reichheld proposes that the new strategy of any organization should be grounded in Customer Capitalism. He suggests when financial metrics like profits and TSR fail to correctly identify the success of a company, we must rely on the new metric of Customer Capitalism, since companies that put customer interests first have the best chance of achieving sustainable greatness.
Customer Earned Growth Rate
In his quest to create reliable audit-worthy data for companies of all sizes, verticals, and geography, Reichheld devised the Customer Earned Growth Rate metric. Customer Earned Growth Rate is a complementary sister metric to NPS that relieves the pressure to make a survey-based score into a target, which corrupts its accuracy and effectiveness. It’s a simple, yet effective metric that gauges the health of the company’s growth engine. Earned Growth Rate measures the underlying revenue growth generated by existing customers coming back for more and bringing friends. It’s the ratio of earned growth to total growth.
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/fb3a0657-fcca-4e67-ba1c-c2beaf946b66.jpeg)
In order to calculate their Earned Growth Rate, most companies will need to upgrade their basic accounting capabilities, something that’s already in practice at firms like Amazon, Costco and Chewy. The two components of Earned Growth are:
-
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)—The key driver of SaaS valuations
-
Earned New Customer Revenue (ENCR)—Quantifies revenues from the subset of new customers earned through recommendations and referrals from existing customers
Reichheld proposes every company should get started by tracking these basic statistics:
-
Customer onboarding date
-
Primary reason for joining
-
Purchase frequency
-
Purchase volumes
-
Pricing
-
Cost of products/services
-
Changes in the above items over time
-
Date customer becomes inactive or leaves
This data will enable you to compute Earned Growth. With customer-based accounting facts to inform ongoing investment and budgeting decisions, and support reporting to investors, this new focus on accountability will enable executives to upgrade from outdated accounting metrics and work proactively towards fostering customer love. He also suggests investors and board members insist on reviewing customer-based accounting results.
The simplest way to calculate Earned Growth Rate is to quantify revenue for the current period from customers who have purchased from you previously and divide by total revenues (all customers) from the previous period. This will estimate your Net Revenue Retention (NRR). Then add your best estimate of earned new revenue (as a percentage of total current period revenues) to derive your Earned Growth factor, and Earned Growth Rate, which is simply the factor minus 100%.
For a detailed explanation of the calculation refer to page 295 of Winning on Purpose.
Hierarchy of customer love
Loving your customer is a natural consequence when you have a customer-centric approach and Customer Capitalist mindset. In the book, Reichheld emphasizes Costco’s Founder and Former CEO Jim Sinegal’s Hierarchy of Constituencies:
Make sure you’re always on the right side of the law, which means you’re not knowingly hurting your community or environment. This involves three core principles:
-
Take care of your customers
-
Take care of your employees
-
Take care of your shareholders
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/3f3d423a-45b3-4a01-85f5-a6b979330905.jpeg)
Reichheld explains that for customers to feel the love, companies need to inspire their teams. Customer Capitalists and NPS leaders show love to their companies’ frontline workers and executive teams. The leader’s first responsibility is to help team members embrace and achieve this inherently inspiring mission—safely and sustainably. The very best team leaders make sure their team members receive standing ovations from their customers. Experiencing that signal of love and affirmation is the secret ingredient that great leaders use to inspire their teams and provides the essential fuel for winning on purpose. Consequently, the interests of your investors and stakeholders must also be taken care of.
Customer Capitalism is far from mainstream
Although Reichheld has given a detailed account of how NPS leaders and Customer Capitalists have emerged winners in various verticals, the unanimous acceptance of the fact that ‘loving your customers is beneficial’ in the long run remains mediocre at best. A 2020 article by Fortune Magazine cited only 10% of business leaders believe the primary purpose of their firm is to maximize value for customers, while many companies still operate on the old-school financial capitalist mindset of maximizing shareholder value. Although many businesses today want to be more customer-centric, they aren’t willing to elevate customer happiness to become their primary purpose, impeding meaningful progress.
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/b329ae9b-8bbc-498e-8d33-bfd754b8cfa9.jpeg)
Another concern raised by FirstService CEO Charlie Chase is that promoters can accelerate growth faster than companies can handle. In response to Reichheld’s theory, Chase states, “Your book hits on the themes we live every day. Be humble, empower people to live the Golden Rule, and lead them in ways that inspire. But you should be aware that this creates a real problem. We earn more customers than we can handle. Living the golden rule creates promoters who grow your business faster than anyone thought possible. Staffing up to meet the demand presents a difficult situation.”
Loyalty enables Customer Capitalism
Winning on Purpose focuses on loving your customers and providing the best possible experience but, in order to love your customers, you need to know them, understand their shopping patterns, and identify factors that drive their purchases. The first and primary step to loving your customers is to know them and first-party data enables you to do so effectively and accurately.
While Reichheld doesn’t once talk about loyalty programs as a means to create customer loyalty, and ultimately Customer Capitalism, a loyalty strategy provides the ideal foundation for brands to evolve to a Customer Capitalism mindset and can help them achieve a higher Earned Growth Rate faster. Loyalty programs enable you to gather first-party data directly from your customers, significantly increase customer engagement across the entire customer journey and improve your retention rate. Loyalty programs provide a mutual value exchange that involves a conscious commitment from both the brand and the customer.
For their continued association, brands reward customers, which lays the foundation for a long-lasting customer-brand relationship, and also cultivates your most valuable assets—brand advocates and promoters. Loyalty marketing can help you create individualized experiences that show your customers you’re listening and you care. With the help of Annex Cloud, a global provider of loyalty SaaS technology, you can collect first-party data at scale and push it across your tech stack, enabling you to create truly omnichannel experiences for your customers and even overcome supply chain issues. To take a concrete first step towards Customer Capitalism and improve customer loyalty, contact us.
How to win customers and influence people
The key message of Reichheld’s Winning on Purpose boils down to optimizing your customers’ experiences. Customer Capitalism emphasizes that, to truly love your customers, you must create meaning in their lives. As Reichheld defines it, “Love is the state of caring so much for a person that most of your own happiness from the relationship derives from increasing that person’s happiness and well-being.”
The power of emotional loyalty
Customers who feel loved in this way by your brand naturally demonstrate emotional loyalty. In contrast to rational loyalty where customers keep purchasing from you because it makes economic sense, and behavioral loyalty where customers keep purchasing out of habit, inertia or convenience, emotional loyalty is achieved when customers consciously maintain or grow their relationship with you because they actually feel a personal attachment to and investment in your brand.
“Research has shown that the extent to which customers feel personal attachment to a brand is the biggest driver of positive word of mouth—more so than even customer satisfaction.”
– Marc Steiner, Partner, Cyrca Strategy
Emotional loyalty is critical for three reasons:
-
It’s the primary driver of word-of-mouth and customer referrals. Research has shown the extent to which customers feel a personal attachment to a brand has far greater impact than even customer satisfaction on positive word-of-mouth.
-
It builds customer equity that can insulate the relationship from imperfect experiences. Customers are less likely to switch brands if something goes wrong, just as we’re more likely to forgive those we’re close to than strangers.
-
It’s a natural outgrowth and the best measure of whether your brand is creating meaning in the lives of your customers. Everything you do—from product and services to messaging and customer experience—should revolve around the question, “Will this grow our customer’s emotional connection to our brand?”, to ensure every decision is made in a way that naturally generates loyalty above and beyond transactional benefits.
Fostering emotional loyalty
Understanding what fosters emotional loyalty is critical to identifying how to grow it. Cyrca Strategy suggests three bases of emotional loyalty brands should consider:
Personal identity—Your brand reflects who the customer sees themselves as being in the here and now—their personal tastes, sense of humor, socio-economic status, vocation, interests, etc. REI & Cabela’s are both outdoors retailers yet appeal to very different segments. Part of this is due to their product selection and which outdoor activities they choose to focus on, for example, Cabela’s carries fishing gear and REI carries climbing equipment. But their brands also reflect differences in how their customers see themselves as outdoors enthusiasts.
Personal aspirations—Your brand helps customers represent to the world who they aspire to be. Nike has built its brand on their customers’ desire to excel in sports, regardless of the fact the average customer isn’t a world-class athlete.
Personal values—Your brand embodies and represents your customers’ personal values and ideals as they extend to the role your brand plays in their lives.
This last dimension is perhaps the most important. The extent to which a consumer believes a brand shares their personal values accounts for nearly two-thirds of their overall emotional loyalty to a brand, and almost 75% of their engagement with a brand.
Value-based loyalty leads to advocacy
Fostering value-based loyalty is a natural outcome of embracing Customer Capitalism’s principle of ‘Love Your Customers’. This requires understanding how your brand relates to not only your customer’s identity and who they aspire to be, but also the part of themselves that most deeply reflects their sense of meaning.
“Our research shows that emotional loyalty to a brand is driven by the degree to which customers see their patronage as an extension of themselves—their individual identity, their style, and their personal and social values. Grounding your loyalty strategy and program design in why your best customers are proud to be your brand ambassadors is the key to effective advocacy marketing.”
– Amanda Piro, Partner, Cyrca Strategy
Value-based loyalty is especially powerful because customers naturally view themselves as not just individuals but as part of a group of brand fans. Sports fans see themselves as part of a larger community whose shared passion is inherently believed to contribute to a team’s success. Fans of a brand see themselves as part of a broader community that makes their spending choices consistent with, and ideally helping to advance, the future they hope to create. By choosing which brands to patronize, they support and espouse the fundamental values they see the brand advocating. Believing in your brand’s values provides a reason to talk about and share love for your brand beyond just being a fan of your products, services or experiences.
Loyalty builds emotional loyalty
Loyalty programs play a critical role in helping foster emotional loyalty. They create a two-way relationship with members that allows for the collection of zero- and first-party data to better understand your customers’ aspirations and ideals, as well as the means to reflect that understanding through personalized offers and communications. They also help create a sense of identity within a larger group of individuals who share their love of your brand because they share a common set of values. This creates a virtuous circle of feeling like evangelizing your brand helps elevate and propagate their own values, which brings more customers, which increases the impact and relevance of engaging with and purchasing from you. Loyalty programs that successfully integrate social and community features help boost the sense of being part of something larger shared by your best customers.
While Reichheld includes examples to demonstrate how valuable and powerful your best customers can be, some pressing questions remain unanswered.
-
How does a brand identify its best customers?
-
How does a brand know who their customers are referring?
-
How does a brand encourage customers to become active brand promoters?
To close the loop and help you leverage the power of your best, most loyal customers, we recommend these three powerful strategies.
Social interactions—We all know the best place to meet customers is in their preferred habitat—and today you’ll find them mainly on social media platforms. Customers interact with brands, influencers and, most importantly, other customers.
By incentivizing social interactions, you can significantly expand your brand reach and awareness. Harris Poll for Sprout Social surveyed U.S. consumers in 2021 and reported that social media interactions have a direct and strong impact on sales and revenue. Not only this, according to a report by Lyfe Marketing, customers begin to trust and recommend brands they have interacted with on social media. Your social media feed, your comments, every mention and tag play an important role in creating a strong brand identity and building customer loyalty.
With the help of loyalty partners like Annex Cloud, you can monitor social comments, and empower customers to engage with other customers as well as your brand to form a strong foundation for a meaningful and profitable customer-brand relationship.
Loyalty strategy—Loyalty strategies are a great way to improve retention rate, understand your consumers better and identify your best customers. Rewards and incentive programs not only encourage repeat purchases but also give you access to rich data and customer insights. With the help of this data, you can create personalized programs and customer experiences. Individualized loyalty strategies have high engagement and customer satisfaction rates.
Annex Cloud can design loyalty strategies that resonate with your brand’s identity and marketing guidelines and yield maximum ROI while improving customer experience.
Advocacy marketing—The best way to encourage promoters to actively and organically endorse your brand is through deliberate advocacy asks or referral programs. This is perhaps the easiest and most efficient way of identifying your active promoters. You can easily track your best customers and design personalized strategies to further encourage them to promote your brand. Referral programs also have a strong impact on passive customers, giving them an incentive to promote the brand within their circle.
Annex Cloud’s Refer a Friend helps you create a quick, simple and efficient system to reward and incentivize referrals for your brand. Contact us to learn more about advocacy strategies.
Advocacy strategies in action
Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these three strategies, how you can leverage them and how you can track your customer behaviors to make Earned Growth Rate your top KPI.
Social interactions
An average person spends approximately 2.5 hours on social media every day, some a lot more. During these sessions, the user is either sharing information or collecting it. The content could be anything from entertainment to education and everything in between. Most of the time, users are talking about things they like and enjoy—be it music, movies, products, services or even innovative marketing campaigns and ads. A little motivation, in the form of rewards and incentives, can encourage users to talk about your brands and services. It’s really that simple.
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/5f232ed3-9663-45f8-a10b-ea43fb0a3680.jpg)
71% of customers that are satisfied with the brand they purchased from are likely to recommend it to others on social media.
(Oberlo)
According to a study by Oberlo, 71% of customers that are satisfied with the brand they purchased from are likely to recommend it to others on social media. Paid content on social media also has a tremendous reach. Sprout Social attributes a 29% success rate to social media marketing, second only to marketing through search engine optimization. This organic promotion from satisfied customers is priceless.
When you leverage your loyalty program and reward this behavior, you’ll be surprised at how quickly your reach, awareness and even new customer acquisition multiply. Loyalty builds emotional customer-to-brand bonds. The Digital Transformation Institute reports 62% of emotionally engaged customers will advocate for a brand on social networks.
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/058b5c62-e73b-485a-8f47-e46f65b4ff88.jpg)
62% of emotionally engaged customers will advocate for a brand on social networks.
(Digital Transformation Institute)
So, how do you encourage your customers to organically promote your brand and products on social media? Depending on your brand identity, guidelines and target group preference, you can recognize and reward a wide range of actions to incentivize your customer, including:
-
Mentioning your brand or posting about you from personal accounts
-
Creating original content in the form of pictures, audio and video, specifically about your brand
-
Sharing content created by your brand
-
Sharing referral and/or promotional links
-
Tagging friends on your brand page
The options for social media campaigns are only limited by your imagination. The more innovative the idea, the better the reach. To gauge the impact of your social interactions and campaigns, it’s crucial to have a working knowledge of certain metrics. You can keep track of shares and posts through specifically designed hashtags, but you need the expertise and experience of a loyalty partner like Annex Cloud to amplify your social media reach, measure campaign efficiency, keep track of your referrals and have plenty of ways to reward your customers.
Loyalty strategy
Reichheld first introduced the term ‘promoters’ in 2003 with the Net Promoter Score metric. Promoters are basically happy customers that organically promote the brand within their network. In Winning on Purpose, Reichheld elaborates how happy customers and promoters have the potential to take a small startup to inexplicable heights and why prominent businesses like Amazon and Apple go out of their way to create promoters. But how exactly do you create promoters? The easiest and most effective strategies to create promoters are through loyalty and referral programs.
86% of loyal consumers will recommend a brand to friends and family.
(KPMG)
In the past decade, loyalty programs have emerged as the most efficient, ethical and legal means of collecting first-party data at scale, which is essential to creating meaningful personalized experiences. With the looming phaseout of third-party cookies from Google, and with Amazon and Apple following suit, accumulating first-party data has become critical for business success.
Loyalty programs encourage customers to share their information with a brand they trust in exchange for that brand using their information to deliver a personalized experience uniquely relevant to them. This includes timely and relevant rewards, incentives and other benefits. This data can be used in various ways to improve business and marketing strategies, know your audience better and, most importantly, create value-based experiences. When a brand goes out of its way to create individualized experiences for its customers, the results speak for themselves in the form of increased retention rates, customer lifetime value, customer satisfaction, even customer acquisition rate.
First-party data is more accurate, provides better insights, has higher conversion rates, and is a priority for maintaining customer relationships.
(Forbes)
Rewards can be a great way to recognize customers for promoting your brand. A referral program ensures a customer earns points or incentives for every referral. Every reward further encourages customers to bring in more customers to reach higher tiers with bigger, maybe even exclusive, benefits. With loyalty programs, you can create active brand promoters that organically promote your brand and help bring in new customers.
Advocacy marketing
According to a Qualtrics 2022 study, 93% of consumers admitted online reviews and recommendations influence their purchase decision. Now, more than ever, consumers trust genuine recommendations from other customers or people they know and trust over paid advertisements and commercials. Word-of-mouth marketing brings in five times more sales than paid media, which includes online reviews and recommendations. 82% of new-age customers—the Gen Zs—trust their friends and family for genuine product recommendations and advice. According to Forbes, Millennials (with a spending power of $2.5 trillion) are two times more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth marketing.
Word-of-mouth recommendations play a crucial part in 80% of all B2B and B2C deals.
(Harvard Business Review)
So, how can you truly harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing, and encourage customers to actively spread the good word about your business? The answer is simple—advocacy marketing. Today, investing in advocacy marketing is not just a smart move, but a necessity if you want to expand your brand reach, as well as consistently improve retention and acquisition rates.
Customers who get referred by a friend or other customers have a 16% higher lifetime value compared to non-referred customers.
(Harvard Business Review)
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/97606d1e-e969-4e40-a9f9-d2796bd8e5a1.jpg)
The merits of advocacy marketing
Leveraging the power of trust
One of the prime reasons why advocacy marketing and referral strategies work is because of the trust factor. Recommendations and referrals are a transfer of trust from the referrer to the brand. For example, if a dear friend whom you trust strongly recommends a product or service to you, you automatically trust the recommendation. Chances are you’ll buy the product without thinking twice, solely because you trust the person who recommended the brand to you. Advocacy marketing helps you leverage this trust as well as create a community of trusted brand followers, accelerating growth.
84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues and friends about products and services—making these the highest-ranked source for trustworthiness.
(Nielsen)
Increased engagement
Today, engagement is everything. With a massive influx of emerging brands, engagement can give you a strong competitive edge, help you stand out and build lasting emotional bonds with customers. Exciting rewards and incentives keep current customers engaged and referring others, as well as engaging new customers. Referral and loyalty program participants are more open to receiving communications, recommendations and offers from your brand, and more willing to try other products within your brand’s product catalog. Referral programs foster two-way communication and build a strong customer-brand relationship.
Organic brand promotion
Through word-of-mouth, a referral program encourages customers to actively promote your brand across their network of friends and family. Even without rewards and incentives, if the emotional bonds are strong enough, customers go out of their way to promote your brand, including on various social media platforms. Think of all the times you’ve been excited about a purchase and shared it with your friends and family. Asking friends to fill out a survey, click on a referral link, or share content they’re promoting is especially common among Gen Zs and Millennials.
Boost in acquisition rate
Advocacy marketing and referral programs have a direct impact on your customer acquisition rate. Referral programs give existing customers an incentive to bring in new customers. Not only do these programs expand your brand’s reach in a very cost-effective way, referees are more likely to immediately trust and purchase from your brand.
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/ef7e9f09-e1c4-4d61-bc79-d92e6c5781d0.jpg)
When a friend or family member makes a recommendation, it’s 50X more likely to trigger a purchase.
(McKinsey & Company)
Improved retention rate
Not only does a good referral program bring in new customers, it also helps retain existing customers and increases their customer lifetime value. Customers that actively refer and promote your products and services are also strong and loyal consumers of your offerings. They tend to stick with the brand they’re recommending and become loyal brand advocates in the process.
Fostering brand loyalty
Lastly, increased retention and trust in the brand helps foster brand loyalty. Referral programs can be a great way to build emotional connections that drive customer loyalty. Prolonged association and engagement with your brand, personalized experiences and rewards all help create a strong community of loyal customers that bring profit and increased customer lifetime value to your brand.
Enriching your customers’ lives = enhancing customer experience
Ultimately, building a growth engine by leveraging advocacy is all about keeping your customers happy by enhancing their experience with your brand. But growth is an illusion if it can’t be measured. This is why you need CXM tools to help you track customer behavior and gauge your progress.
![](https://content.audienceplus.com/annexcloud-loyaltylounge/f7c3ea16-2211-4f15-9060-1c07c085950a.jpg)
Fortunately, there are plenty of good options available when it comes to CX, CRM software and tools to manage workflow and map customer journeys. To better understand the role of these tools, we’ve segmented customer experience into five broad categories.
1. Behavioral analytics
To gauge the market, read customer sentiment, and understand your audience better before they become your customers, you need behavioral analytics tools. These give you a cumulative reading of customer expectations and repeat purchase patterns. Software like Hootsuite and Social Searcher can help you monitor the pulse of your audience, perform comprehensive customer sentiment analysis, and even help with authentication and sensory device tracking.
2. Predictive intelligence
After behavioral and customer sentiment analysis, you need software that aids with predictive forecasting and helps you create customer acquisition, customer segmentation, and customer lifetime value models, as well as develop metrics to gauge customer propensity. Well-known tools to help you in these areas include SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle’s Crystal Ball and IBM Watson Analytics.
3. Workflow automation
CX tools and software help with customer service as well as assist in automating several functions to increase efficiency. From creating customer service portals to workflow automation, these tools can help you deliver faster, more efficient and more cost-effective service to your customers. Medallia and Qualtrics are among the popular choices to help you with much more than just workflow automation.
4. Feedback mechanism
One of the most important things you can do to elevate your customer experience is to map your customer’s journey, as well as design a mechanism to generate feedback and close the feedback loop. Software like Qualaroo, Suite CX and ZenDesk can help you create a feedback mechanism as well as gauge customer satisfaction through surveys, as well as CSAT and NPS scores. These tools can help you create a customer experience dashboard and assist with data privacy management.
5. Loyalty programs
Loyalty programs have become an integral part of customer experience in the last decade. They help keep customers engaged with your brand, build lasting emotional bonds and, most importantly, help build trust. By incentivizing and rewarding desired actions through loyalty strategies you can improve customer satisfaction as well as overall brand value. Annex Cloud’s Loyalty Experience Platform™ enables businesses to design, execute, and manage effective loyalty marketing strategies.
Annex Cloud delivers loyalty, advocacy and more
Loyalty strategy
When it comes to loyalty strategy, there is no one-size-fits-all. Every brand and business has a distinct identity, guidelines and marketing requirements. Annex Cloud uses a proven success process to design the optimum loyalty strategy that yields the maximum ROI while elevating your customer experience and building lasting customer relationships.
Social interactions
Annex Cloud helps you maximize your reach and expand awareness through social sharing. With services like influencer management and visual commerce, you can create a strong brand presence and increase reach while staying relevant. Annex Cloud also enables you to monitor social comments, empower customers to engage with other customers as well as boost your brand’s SEO value through engaged audiences.
Advocacy marketing
Annex Cloud enables businesses to leverage the power of advocacy marketing. By rewarding customers for actively promoting your brand through referral marketing, you’ll improve customer satisfaction, retention and acquisition.
Access to zero- and first-party data
Annex Cloud’s Loyalty Experience Platform enables you to collect vital zero- and first-party data and pushes this data across your tech stack to help elevate your customer experience at every touchpoint across their journey. With the phase-out of third-party cookies from Google, moving to a data-led organization will help you better understand your customers and design relevant, value-based strategies that help you maximize your returns.
Ready to embrace Customer Capitalism?
Contact Annex Cloud today to explore how loyalty and advocacy can elevate your customers’ experiences, improve acquisition and accelerate growth.