What is the measure of how good a company is? Is it how much revenue they generate? Is it their year over year growth? Perhaps it’s the stock price. While those may be valuable figures, there is one thing they all fail to capture: the perceived value to the customer base.
If a company provides a truly great product or service to its customers, the customers will see the value and stay with that company. Brand loyalists the world around prove this point as the years go on. The companies that do things well and do things right retain their customers, and retain them for the long haul.
Field’s number for customer retention is 97%. That means that for 25 years running, Field has retained 97% of its customer base. To put a finer point on it, here’s another figure: 14 years. The average customer relationship at Field is 14 years. Considering Field continues to grow at 20% year-over-year, and continues to build partnerships with new customers, having an average customer relationship that is more than half the age of the company is quite noteworthy. So what does this say about Field? Well, what do a person’s long-standing friendships and relationships say about her? They clearly indicate commitment and integrity; how else could a person retain long-standing relationships? The same holds true of a company. Long relationships indicate commitment and integrity—which happen to be two of Field’s core values.
So when we at Field measure ourselves, we use the best metrics to tell us how we’re doing. While sales and profitability are important, we really become passionate when we look at the metric that sets us apart: customer retention. After all, our mission statement is “to have everyone who interacts with us, love us”, and if our customers choose to stay with us year after year as we continue to grow—then mission accomplished. Some may argue that you can’t measure love, but at Field, we think that 97% customer retention goes a long way toward doing just that.
Author: Mike Sturm- Account Manager