Apostle Model Best Practices and Survey Template

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If a recession is a good time to look at employee loyalty, it's an excellent time to look at customer loyalty.  Selling an existing customer those of your products and services that you aren't currently selling them is the most cost-effective approach.  Doing it well requires a strong understanding of what drives your customers' loyalty.

Segmenting the results of your customer satisfaction survey by the attitude and intended behavior of current customers can help you identify what separates those customers you are likely to lose from those that are loyal.  It's a great foundation for a successful plan of attack.  The Apostle Model is a good approach for such work.

As I've written before, the Apostle Model segments your customers into four groups:

• Loyalist/Apostle - high loyalty, high satisfaction - "staying and supportive"
• Mercenary - low to medium loyalty, high satisfaction - "coming and going; low commitment"
• Defector/Terrorist - low to medium loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "leaving or having left and unhappy"
• Hostage - high loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "unable to switch; trapped"

These segments are graphically represented as:

Here are the best practices for using the Apostle Model in your own research.

• Use a 1-10 or 0-10 scale, defining 10 as best.  This scale is easily understood by respondents and provides you greater dispersion of results than a shorter scale.  This greater dispersion  is helpful when you are trying to contrast loyal customers against at-risk customers.
• Use 9 and 10 to indicate high loyalty and high satisfaction. You want to understand the outliers who are exceptionally satisfied and exceptionally loyal.  Jones and Sasser reported in their original Harvard Business Review article that, for Xerox, completely satisfied customers (rating of 5 on a 5-point scale) were six times more likely to repurchase over the next year and a half than somewhat satisfied customers (ratings of 3-4).  Resist the urge to broaden the top box to ratings of 6 through 10.
• For each dimension, use an index (two to three questions) rather than a single question. Normally I preach that fewer questions are better, since shorter questionnaires certainly are better from a respondent's point of view.  That said, the advantage of using two to three questions is that by averaging them you have a more stable measure than a single question alone provides.  This reduces the volatility of your results.
• Conduct the analysis regularly, not just once. The most successful businesses thrive and grow by expanding their base of loyal customers. Don't do this analysis as a one-off project, but approach it as an ongoing benchmark to track your organization's performance.

Here are six questions that you could use in your Apostle Model:

1. Taking into account all of your experiences with [product], please rate your overall satisfaction with it. 
2. Think about all of your expectations for [product] before you purchased it. Please rate whether [product] falls short of your expectations, meets or exceeds your expectations.
3. Now consider your ideal [product category]. Please rate [product] on a 1 to 10 scale for how closely it comes to your ideal.
4. When you next purchase a [product category], how likely is that you will purchase from [vendor]?
5. Assuming you communicated your experiences with this [vendor] to others, how favorable would your comments be?
6. How likely is it that you would recommend [vendor] to a friend or colleague?

Use the first three for the Customer Satisfaction Loyalty index, and the bottom three for the Customer Loyalty Index.  These are simply suggestions. Depending on your industry and business model, other forms of these questions might be better for your organization.

Whatever the economy, those companies that focus on understanding customer loyalty will be the most successful, and the Apostle Model is a great method of achieving that understanding.

Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.