A conceptual tool for customer satisfaction surveys

Those toiling over some customer satisfaction survey should get a reprieve from a recent HBR article indicating a simple yet good way to measure customer loyalty by asking one question rather than a battery of lengthy satisfaction surveys: "On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to your friends or colleagues?"

Next, the article comes up with the following classification:

• Promoters are defined as customers who give the company 9 or 10;
• Detractors are defined as customers who give the company anything between 0 and 6;
• Passively satisfied are customers who give the company either 7 or 8. These customers are not included in the final score.

In final analysis, "net promoter scores," the difference between the percentage of promoters and detractors, correlate closely with a company's revenue growth.