Strategic Discipline Blog

Measuring customer loyalty is a required best business practice to grow and maintain your customer base.  Our recommended tool for our customers is Net Promoter Score discussed in What’s Your Customer Satisfaction Measurement and The Ultimate Question – Customer Advocacy.

Customer and employee feedback is critical to the success of your weekly meetings.   Bain & Company introduced a similar application for Employee Loyalty.  You can read a short synopsis of the practice at Employee Net Promoter System℠.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been extended and used internally for companies to measure employee engagement and satisfaction too. Similar to client-facing NPS, eNPS is a simple, one-question approach and is being applied by companies worldwide. Companies like Lowe’s, Apple and Charles Schwab have already adapted the methodology and are measuring their employee engagement through this one question method.  When considering your balanced metrics, using eNPS as a KPI should be considered.

The Bain & Company article notes that the eNPS score is an emerging science.  In some cases Bain & Company has found that a second question might provide an even more accurate gauge of the health of the employee relationship.  The first question is: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it you would recommend this

Company as a place to work?”

The second question is: “How likely would you be to recommend this company’s products or services to a friend or colleague?”

Depending on your business you may wish to alter the second question to include only appropriate friends or colleagues who might be qualified to busy such a product or service.

The point of this exercise is simplicity.  Just a Net Promoter Score simplified the customer satisfaction and loyalty proposition, eNPS is attempting to do the same thing with Employee Engagement.

In my work with clients we’ve used Gallup’s Q12 to get real feedback to discover significant employee engagement information that is actionable.  The data provides defined steps to take to improve your communication and expectations with employees.  We’ve seen increased engagement simply by mining the data and actively using the results to focus on specific improvements by management.

Can one question replace Gallup’s 12? 
It depends I believe on what you’re setting out to achieve.  Certainly the eNPS score is a valuable Key Performance Indicator.  Discovering how likely it is that your employees would recommend your business as an employment opportunity is valuable.  (The Bain & Company article notes that eNPS scores can often be substantially lower than customer NPS scores, due to employees holding your business to a higher standard than do customers.)

One score simplifies discovering employee feedback.  Too many KPI’s can paralyze a company.  It may be that you use eNPS once a year (such as an employee’s anniversary of employment).  For a more in-depth actionable process to providing your management team with specific steps to improve employee engagement you might choose Gallup’s Q12 at a six month interval.

Employee engagement is a critical indicator of productivity and efficiency in your business.  If you’ve not started measuring it, then now is a good time to begin, and the eNPS score is a simple method to start.

The comment section of eNPS should provide a wealth of feedback to provide actionable steps to take. 

One of my clients recently began having his sales people ask the NPS question to one customer per week.  While the scoring alone provides a key performance indicator, the comments they’ve received is been far more valuable.  It’s given them a rich pool of customer information on their sales process, people, and more importantly steps to improve their customer services and sales efforts.  The Vice President of Sales thanked me for pressing them to take this action.  His only regret is that he didn’t start the NPS effort sooner.

Customer service begins with your employees. 
Raising your employee satisfaction results in improved customer service.

eNPS may become a similar standard that the customer Net Promoter Score is.   Consider establishing it now to find out where your employee engagement level is and to begin improving the level of customer service your company provides.