One growing metric for measuring customer happiness is the Net Promoter Score, or NPS.
NPS works by asking your customers a simple question: On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend?
As you can see, the score provided puts customers into one of three categories:
- A customer who reports a six or below is called a detractor. These are unhappy customers and are likely to tell others that they are dissatisfied with your product.
- A customer who reports a 7 or an 8 is passive. They appreciate the service or product that you provide, but don’t feel the need to evangelize your brand.
- A customer who reports a 9 or a 10 is a promoter and extremely likely to recommend your brand to a friend.
This data gives companies powerful insights into their customers’ satisfaction, and because it’s a simple, one question survey, response rates are typically high.
So how does this score help you understand how you can improve the employee experience in your workplace?
By tweaking the question, and segmenting your answers, you can find gaps in your company culture where people might be liable to slip through the cracks. It’s easy to get started, and the results speak for themselves. Here’s how Human Resources fits into the equation.
Alter the Question
Since we’re talking about our employees now and not our customers, it’s important that we make the question relevant to the workforce.
Start by creating a survey asking your employees: “How likely are you to recommend [Company Name] to a friend?”
The rules still apply about who’s a detractor, a promoter, and who’s passive, but the answers become very valuable when you segment your responses.
Here’s an example:
| Segment | Net Promoter Score |
|---|---|
| Total Score | 7.9 |
| Remote Employees | 3.4 |
| Managers | 6.2 |
| Female Employees | 4.7 |
| Employees with >1 year tenure | 9.4 |
| Sales Department | 7.7 |
This fictional company seems like a pretty good place to work, unless you’re a) a remote worker or b) a female employee.
While this process does not fix the issues that may be deterring the experiences of this company’s female and remote employees, the HR director at this company now understands that there are issues, and can now begin investigating further.
Using an NPS survey and segmenting results is a simple way to understand where you can start correcting any issues in company culture.