reputation wins
Issue 56 - October 29th, 2021
Your reputation is more important than ever in 2021, and companies (and people) who do not constantly focus on having a good reputation with customers are losing ground every day to their competitors who are hyper focused on customer promotion, loyalty, and organic growth.
All companies seek to grow. And growth—profitable, sustainable organic growth—occurs most often when customers and employees love doing business with a company and sing its praises to neighbors, friends and colleagues.
Most leaders want customers to be happy; the challenge is how to know what customers are feeling and how to establish accountability for the customer experience.
Conventional customer-satisfaction surveys often don’t work for this purpose, because the results don’t make it back to the front line in a timely and individualized manner to actually drive behavior change.
Net Promoter Score is a very well known metric in Silicon Valley circles, but I think this process and mentality should be applied to every forward thinking business in the world today.
Some years ago, a Bain consulting team launched a research project to determine whether a different approach would prove more fruitful. As it turned out, one question worked best for most mature, competitive industries:
What is the likelihood that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?
High scores on this question correlated strongly with repurchases, referrals and other actions that contribute to a company’s growth. True loyalty clearly affects profitability. While regular customers aren’t always profitable, their choice to stick with a product or service typically reduces a company’s customer acquisition costs. Loyalty also drives top-line growth. Obviously, no company can grow if its customer bucket is leaky, and loyalty helps eliminate this outflow. Indeed, loyal customers can raise the water level in the bucket: customers who are truly loyal tend to buy more over time, as their incomes grow or they devote a larger share of their wallets to a company they feel good about.
And loyal customers talk up a company to their friends, family, and colleagues. In fact, such a recommendation is one of the best indicators of loyalty because of the customer’s sacrifice, if you will, in making the recommendation.
When customers act as references, they do more than indicate that they’ve received good economic value from a company; they put their own reputations on the line. And they will risk their reputations only if they feel intense loyalty.
The tendency of loyal customers to bring in new customers is particularly beneficial as a company grows. In such a case, the tremendous marketing costs of acquiring each new customer through advertising and other promotions make it hard to grow profitably. In fact, the only path to profitable growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department.
Never forget to treat everyone you encounter with respect in a real estate transaction because in today’s world your reputation matters more than ever.
Newsworthy Links To Share
A deal has been revived for Austin-based Stratus Properties to sell its high-profile downtown Austin city block — home to the "Austin City Limits" music venue and the Austin W Hotel & Residences — to Nashville-based Ryman Hospitality Properties for $260 million, the companies said Tuesday. (Austin American Statesman)
INFOGRAPHIC: 240 companies in the real estate industry transforming today’s housing market. (ThomVest Blog)
Beyoncé and Jay-Z's mysterious New Orleans mansion now for sale… (Chron)
A major home builder is teaming with a Texas startup to create a community of 100 3-D printed homes near Austin, gearing up for what would be by far the biggest development of this type of housing in the U.S. (WSJ)
Philadelphia startup YieldEasy to launch real estate marketplace for small multifamily properties. (Phil INNO)
Why Co-Working Spaces Are Betting on the Suburbs: Start-ups are betting that the pandemic has spawned a new kind of worker who wants an office space closer to home, without the long commute. (NY Times)