What is more important than what your customers think of your company? In my opinion — not much. When your customers appreciate the services that you provide, your security guard company will be that much more successful. Have you heard the saying “It’s cheaper to retain a customer, than it is to acquire a new one?” Would you agree? If you don’t, you’d be in the minority. In fact, 70% of companies agree that acquiring a new customer can be as much as 7x more expensive than retaining a new customer. So with that being said, how satisfied are your customers with your security company’s services and how likely are they to remain your customers? Secondarily, how do you measure their satisfaction and loyalty?
How Do You Measure Your Customer Loyalty?
Have you seen this particular question popping up online or in emails from companies that provide you services?
How likely would you be to recommend our service / product to a friend or colleague?
That question is the cornerstone of a new customer loyalty/satisfaction measurement processes called Net Promoter Score (NPS). Let me start off by saying I absolutely love NPS. NPS allows you to distill everything that you need to know about how your customers view your business into one easily consumable number.
The way that NPS works is after you pose the question to your customers, you provide them with a scale from 0 – 10. 0 means that the customer is not at all likely to recommend you, while 10 means they are extremely likely to recommend you.
NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. This will give you a score between -100 ( means no Promoters) and 100 (means no Detractors). For example in OfficerReports.com’s most recent NPS survey, 64% of our customers who took they survey were Promoters while 13% were Detractors. Therefore our NPS score was 51 (64-13=51).
Is Your Security Company’s NPS Score Good or Bad?
NPS varies across industries, but generally speaking, an NPS that is higher than zero is generally considered good. An NPS of +50 is generally deemed excellent, and anything over +70 is exceptional. But to take the analysis one step further, you should benchmark your NPS against your industry’s average NPS. There are various NPS studies categorized by industry located across the internet, so make sure that you find one that applies to the security guard industry or an adjacent industry.
For example, when I look at the software industry I can see that the average score is 41 which means that OfficerReports.com’s score of 51 ranks in the 80th percentile of the software industry! We working hard over here.
Don’t Forget About Your Detractors
Like most of you reading this, we here at OfficerReports.com are constantly working on improving the services that we provide by introducing better features and better support to our customers. For a security guard company, providing better service might amount to implementing software like OfficerReports.com to provide your customers with more timely reporting and more officer accountability. Whatever aspect of your security company that you decide to focus on, make sure that you are learning from the customers that aren’t happy with your service. When your detractors, or any customer, takes the time to give you their feedback, make sure you do something with it. The companies that are best equipped to keep their customers are the ones that listen and take action.
As a security company, are you tracking your NPS score? If so, do you find NPS useful? If not how do you measure your customers’ satisfaction?
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By Courtney Sparkman
OfficerReports.com is a software company that provides security guard companies with an easy way to monitor their officers, better manage their operations, and win new business. Take a tour of our software to see how we combine Electronic Reporting, Real-Time GPS based Tour Tracking, and GPS based Clock In and Out into one easy-to-use platform.
