A post on Oracle’s CRM Product Marketing blog on customer advocacy says:
You need to ask to four key questions to measure customer advocacy: 1) Would you recommend this company to someone you know? 2) Did you recommend this company to someone you know? 3) Did they become a customer? 4) Are they a profitable customer?”
Those are the key questions to ask?
How about:
- WHY did you recommend this company?
- HOW OFTEN do you recommend this company?
- WHY didn’t you recommend this company?
- WHAT COULD WE DO to get you to recommend this company?
The guy who wrote the book on customer advocacy wanted to boil it all down to one question: How likely are you to recommend? I think (I’m not sure) that he’s retracted that assertion, and admits that you have to ask more than just the one question.
But it never ceases to amaze me how many people: 1) want to reduce the number of questions asked, and 2) don’t realize that measurement without the ability to act on it is a wasted effort.
The “four key questions” listed in the Oracle blog post aren’t actionable.
Ron Shevlin's Marketing Whims 
Ron,
Focusing on your additional questions, “WHY didn’t you recommend this company?” and “WHAT COULD WE DO to get you to recommend this company” are my favorite of your four. In prior jobs across multiple industries, these types of questions, research and analysis yielded the most actionable information. The kind of actionable information that led to more engaged customers, more profits, more referrals etc.
I find more and more people/companies only focusing on half.
@dmgerbino
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