Fred Reichheld, Pioneer in Customer Loyalty, Comes to ZingTrain
(Photo by Kim Payne)
It was an event a long time in the making—and on Wednesday, October 7, it finally came to fruition when Fred Reichheld, a Bain Fellow and senior advisory partner at Bain & Company, visited ZingTrain for a breakfast talk on “The Power of Referrals.”
Reichheld, the best-selling author of books including The Loyalty Effect and The Ultimate Question, is renowned for creating the widely used Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer loyalty (“On a 0–10 scale, how likely would you be to recommend us to a friend?”). Here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, we’ve adapted NPS into ZXI, or the Zingerman’s Experience Indicator, to gather our guests’—and our colleagues’—crucial feedback.
Attendees filled the conference room at ZingTrain for Reichheld’s in-depth presentation, which was followed by a Q and A session moderated by Zingerman’s Co-Founding Partner Ari Weinzweig. The morning’s focus was the immense business value to be gained through referrals by loyal customers—also the subject of Reichheld’s latest article in the Harvard Business Review, “Don’t Underestimate the Power of Customer Referrals.”
(Photo by Kim Payne)
“The real governing forces behind profitable growth are linked to this idea of enriching lives so remarkably that people are inspired to tell their friends for their friends’ benefit,” Reichheld explained. “That’s how great businesses grow.”
One compelling real-world illustration of this concept showed how a customer named Sally, who spent just $112 on products from Bloom & Wild, the European online gift and flower platform, eventually resulted in $8,793 of revenue through an ever-widening chain of organic personal referrals.
“If you can create a Sally, that’s growth,” Reichheld said.
With its emphasis on providing great service and going the extra mile for customers, Zingerman’s takes pride in having created countless Sallies over the course of four-plus decades, as Ari pointed out.
“NPS helped give us a metric for what we were already intuitively doing,” Ari said. “I’ve never taken a customer for granted in 45 years, and it’s our work every single day to go re-earn their trust. The person buying a cup of coffee right now can turn into a million-dollar client over 20 years, and if we treat them that way, the odds go up that that belief will become real.”
ZingTrain was a more than fitting host for the event, as it offers an array of in-person seminars and virtual workshops designed to help leaders and businesses enhance their customer service and reach other key organizational goals.
“Over time, I came to the point of view that the reason a business exists is to make customers’ lives better,” Reichheld said near the close of the Q and A. “So the job of a leader is to put their team in situations where they can make a meaningful contribution toward winning with customers.”
Sounds a lot like what we do here at Zingerman’s—and why our mission includes “enrich[ing] as many lives as we possibly can.” As Reichheld emphasized during his visit, when you give guests a truly exceptional experience, the potential for positive reverberations is limitless.
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