Willingness to recommend

Purpose

Although sales or market share can indicate how well a firm is performing currently, satisfaction is perhaps the best indicator of how likely it is that the firm’s customers will make further purchases in the future. Willingness to recommend is a key metric relating to customer satisfaction.

Construction

Willingness to recommend is calculated as the percentage of surveyed customers who indicate that they would recommend a brand to friends, or as the average strength of their willingness if the survey allows for a range of degrees of willingness.

The usual measures of willingness to recommend involve a survey with a set of statements using a Likert Technique or scale. The customer is asked to indicate how willing they are to make a recommendation (of a brand, service, etc.) to others. Their willingness is generally measured on a five-point scale.

Both the wording of the question and the wording of the scale item responses may vary widely among surveyors. Willingness data can also be collected on a 7-point or 10-point scale.

Methodologies

Perhaps the best known measure of willingness to recommend is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) first introduced by Fred Reichheld.{{Cite journal

No willingness to recommend methodology has been independently audited by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) according to MMAP (Marketing Metric Audit Protocol).

References

References

1. Farris, Paul W.; Neil T. Bendle; Phillip E. Pfeifer; David J. Reibstein (2010). ''Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance.'' Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc. {{ISBN. 0137058292. The [[Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB)]] endorses the definitions, purposes, and constructs of classes of measures that appear in ''Marketing Metrics'' as part of its ongoing [http://www.commonlanguage.wikispaces.net/ Common Language in Marketing Project].