I was just reading a post on CustomCrossRoads Blog about Customer Loyality.  At my company we’re really looking at this closely. 

In fact, we’ve been looking at Reichheld’s research about the most important question ot ask if you want to know how loyal your customers are.

First popularized by Frederick Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, the method is relatively simple:

1. Ask your customers "would you recommend us/this product to a friend?"
2. Subtract the number of strong positive responses from the number of Negative plus neutral responses
3. The resulting number is the "net promoter" score

If you don’t have a positive number, you have work to do.

I like the posting because it explains the Reichheld’s paper very well in a couple of paragraphs.

One of the things that Damon does not really acknowledge in the article is that this one question does not solve all your problems.  If you want to know why the number is low (or why it is high), you will actually have to ask a lot more questions.  And the companies that are cited as examples, such as GE, do a LOT of other kinds of customer research.

Nothing is perfect - so if you figure out how many loyal customers you have - you’ll still have to figure out why you don’t have more of them.