Creating an army of loyal brand evangelists is no easy task, but by offering quality products and quality service in equal measures, your company can turn passive consumers into active promoters of your brand. In an article for Fast Co., Ravi Sawhney, founder and CEO of RKS Design, shared his thoughts on how quality products and services can foster a spirit of brand advocacy in your customers.

“To drive people to action and advocacy, expectations must often be shattered, not merely surpassed,” he writes.

Shattering expectations certainly falls into the category of “easier said than done,” but if your company focuses on learning what customers expect as well as what other companies are delivering in terms of services and products, you will be able to train your staff to meet, surpass and shatter expectations. Sawhney attributes this practice of researching customer’s expectations to Best Western’s success in creating advocates for its chain of hotels.

The question becomes: how do you measure your successes and shortcomings in this area? Many companies use a single metric known as the “Net Promoter” to determine how they are doing in creating brand loyalty.

You can calculate your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) by asking your customers to rate their likeliness of recommending your company’s product or service to a friend on a scale of 0-10. Take the percentage of respondents who answered 0-6 (these are known as the detractors) and subtract that from the percentage who answered 9-10 (known as promoters). That percentage is your NPS. A positive score is generally thought to be good while a score of 50+ percent is considered outstanding. Independent research into the relationship between relative competitive NPS and competitive growth rates confirms there is a positive correlation between the two. The better your NPS, the higher your competitive growth rate.

Creating brand evangelists requires a two-pronged approach. Quality service and quality products that not only exceed expectations but also shatter them are the best marketing tools you have available. By gauging customer relationships using the NPS metric and social media platforms, you can get an idea of where your company stands in customer’s minds and get to work on creating your loyal army of brand evangelists.

This has been a guest post, courtesy of  Sangram Kadam, Co-Founder of Ordoro. Ordoro is a software platform that helps ecommerce merchants manage everything they need to do after an order is placed in their shopping cart. The Ordoro web-app is used by online merchants to manage orders and to keep stock levels in sync between their webstores and marketplaces. Ordoro also offers shipping label printing, dropshipping and inventory management.