According to Andy Talyor, CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, "The only way to grow a business is to get customers to come back for more and tell their friends."

He seems to know what he is talking about. A recent Enterprise press release notes that they are the largest car rental company in North America and the fastest growing rental company in the airport segment. They also happen to be number 16 on Forbes list of largest privately held companies.

What is their secret? This is what Taylor says: "Our success in growing our airport business can be attributed directly to the highly personalized brand of customer service that we extend to each renter." Just words? Apparently not. Over the last four months Enterprise was ranked #1 by Market Metrix for customer satisfaction in the car rental industry and JD Powers ranked them highest in customer satisfaction among airport car rentals.

I hope it is obvious that it is not just a coincidence that Enterprise keeps their customers happy and they have been growing like crazy. Happy customers come back and they tell their friends about their experience. So how happy are your customers and do you know how to find out?

That is the question that Fred Reichheld (author of Loyalty Rules) and his team at Bain Consulting set out to answer. Is there one "customer satisfaction" type question that explains or can predict growth for a company? You can listen to a summary of their findings here (http://resultsbrief.bain.com/videos/0402/main.html).

What they found is that there is one question that has a very high correlation to growth across most industries. The question is:

"How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend?"

Makes sense, doesn't it? If your customer is willing to put their reputation on the line for you they must have had a pretty good experience. So that should be the goal: give every customer an experience so great that they would be willing to recommend your business to their friends.

Now the question becomes, "how do you measure that?" There are probably lots of ways to do it, my bias is that PromoterZ(tm) (http://promoterz.com) is probably the quickest and easiest way to implement a measuring process. The PromoterZ(tm) feedback survey is built around the "recommend us to a friend" question. It also automatically calculates the net promoter score that Reichheld and his team developed to predict company growth.

However you decide to measure and manage customer loyalty, don't think of it as a "one time" event or a seasonal activity. Andy Taylor, CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car can rank order his 5,000+ facilities based on customer scores every week. He also ties the compensation of his employees to those scores. It is an integral part of his organization's operating metrics. If you are serious about growth, it should be a key part of yours as well.

About the author:

Dave Free is president of Zeryn, makers of PromoterZ(tm) (http://promoterz.com), a customer care system for small business growth. Mr. Free received an MBA from BYU and has worked as an Intel executive domestically and internationally, at a Washington think tank, and entrepreneur.