By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Every business understands the importance of creating loyal customers.
However, they may not know how many loyal customers they actually have or why those customers are loyal in the first place.
Founded by Chad Keck and Ricardo Reyna, Promoter.io was created to help companies guage customer loyalty by measuring their “net promoter score” – a customer loyalty metric invented by Fred Reichheld and explained in his book “The Ultimate Question.”
The net promoter score is measured by a customer’s response to a single question: “How likely are you to refer our brand to a friend or colleague?” Customers answer on a scale of zero to ten, and then specify the most important reason for their response in an open ended format. Customers who select nine or ten are “promoters,” and customers who select zero to six are “detractors.” The final score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
The questionnaire is normally sent to customers by email and is used by Rackspace Hosting, Apple, USAA and Southwest Airlines. According to Bain and Company, companies with a high net promoter score tend to outperform industry competitors.
Promoter.io is working to make this metric accessible to smaller scale operations and startups in a less expensive way. The startup handles the email questionnaires for its clients and aggregates the resulting scores and feedback on a dashboard so businesses can know why they are gaining or losing loyal customers and make better decisions with their products or services.
Promoter.io has just finished its inital pilot program with ten companies in which they sent out more than half a million questionnaires. Some participants received response rates of 15 percent to 50 percent, well above the industry norm of around two percent.
Promoter.io will be releasing their beta to the public in the next couple weeks. The startup has already raised $184,000 in seed stage funding from a handful of San Antonio investors, the Geekdom fund, and personal contributions.
Promoter.io is currently looking a front end developer and designer.
