Did you know that word of mouth marketing influences 92% of all B2B purchases? That’s why finding your happiest customers and turning them into advocates for your brand is a must if you want to generate social proof for your product or service.

But turning customers into advocates is no easy feat. Neither is identifying your brand’s biggest fans.

Thankfully, there are a few customer satisfaction metrics you use to find the customers who will gladly recommend your brand to others.

Popular customer satisfaction metrics explained

Marketing experts recommend using one or more of the metrics listed below to get a feeling for your brand’s overall customer experience and potential advocates.

1. CSAT: Customer satisfaction can be measured in a variety of ways and is considered a broad way to gauge the loyalty of a customer and their experience with your brand via many touchpoints. CSAT is often measured on a 5-point or 7-point scale of being very dissatisfied to very satisfied—with the goal being to attain an average score of 70% or more.
2. CES: Customer Effort Score is meant to determine the level of effort that a customer had to use in order to resolve an issue.  If you’ve ever been put on hold by a call centre, or had to jump through hoops to find the answer to your product or billing question, you know quick and easy customer service support is essential to your ongoing relationship with a brand. A lot of marketers like to use this metric to help move a dissatisfied or neutral customer into the satisfied to very satisfied CSAT range.
3. NPS: The Net Promoter Score is a popular metric for determining the loyalty of a customer, and it can help you identify whether a customer is a potential advocate. NPS is a simple, a one-question survey which asks customers to score the question “How likely would you be to  recommend this product or service to a friend or peer?” on a scale from one to ten. Many brands add a follow-up question to the survey asking why the score was given so they can attempt to turn the detractors (scores of 1 to 6) and passives (scores of 7 and 8) into promoters (scores of 9 and 10).

Once you’ve got a list of people who are happy with your brand, don’t start asking them to do things for you right away. Instead, invite them into an exclusive customer community where you can turn them into brand advocates. We call these advocate marketing programs.

Turning a good score into a great advocate

An advocate marketing program is exclusive, personalized online environment where you can nurture your new advocate relationships by regularly offering members valuable content, access to special perks, and professional development and networking opportunities.

Once you’ve got your advocates engaged in your program, you can turn them into a powerful marketing channel by offering them different ways to advocate for your brand. For example, you can ask them to write a review, refer a peer, or speak at an event on your behalf.  Once a member completes an act of advocacy, find an appropriate way to recognize them for helping you attract new business and reward them for their actions.

Your advocate marketing program is also fertile testing ground

These metrics can be used to not only identify advocates, but also to optimize your customer experience.

One of the biggest challenges with measuring CSAT, CES and NPS scores is to get people to actually respond to a telephone, email, online or direct mail survey. But your established community of advocates will be ready and willing to give you feedback. Advocates are also more likely to provide you with detailed and honest answers because they want to help you continue to improve your products and services. Your advocate community can be the best beta testers when launching a new product or service.

In many ways, an advocate marketing program is not only a great way to gather input to improve your overall customer experience; it can become an integral part of the customer experience. Advocate marketing programs make customers feel special and closely connected to your brand. If your program delivers value and opportunities for your advocates to grow, it will boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Happy customers are the key to a healthy, successful brand. After all, 70% of a buyer’s journey is already complete before they’ll even contact one of your sales reps. Why not make your dedicated brand advocates part of that early decision-making process? Use your customer satisfaction metrics to find your advocates and turn them a positive word of mouth marketing machine.