The eNPS love formula: Why your work culture is so important for customer service

One of YouScan’s strategic goals is “Make employees happy and productive,” because we believe that companies are made great by their motivated and energized teams. Twice a year, we measure eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) to make sure that we’re moving in the right direction. We’re very proud to say that we’ve continuously scored above 80. That’s a very high score: an eNPS above 60 is considered very good. A mediocre company scores below 10, and the really bad cases can even receive a negative score.

The happiness index

The eNPS employee satisfaction indicator is often called “the loyalty index” or even “the happiness index,” and it helps businesses understand whether employees would recommend their workplace to others, and how invested they are in playing their part in the growth of the company. This indicator can gauge whether a company is ready to grow and develop. The methodology for calculating this score developed out of the customer-facing NPS index, which was created as a measure of customer service. While NPS is a familiar indicator to many companies that are concerned with client retention and revenue growth, eNPS can be just as important.

The two scores are closely connected for a reason, which is why they’re both equally important to YouScan’s pursuit of strategic goals. Research shows that employees who are invested in both the company culture and its products, show significantly better results in their work, are ready to take on more responsibilities, and stay with the company for longer periods of time. Only a happy and productive team can create the best product of its kind and provide excellent customer service.

We try to set an example of open and honest communication within the team, where team members listen to each other carefully and are willing to address issues together. We’re infinitely grateful to see these principles used, in turn, by our sales and customer support teams in their work with business partners.

Who said that happiness can’t be measured?

Compared with other engagement indicators, eNPS is a very simple tool that allows you to gather and analyze responses quickly, in order to start putting these results into action. We conduct an online survey twice a year, where we ask 4 main questions, as well as a few additional questions that are pertinent at that moment.

Here are the 4 main questions:

1. On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend your company as a place to work? Where 10 indicates “would definitely recommend,” 1 – not at all. This is precisely the scale used to calculate eNPS. Employees who answered 9 and 10 are your promoters, 7 and 8 are skeptics, and those who’ve given scores lower than 6 are detractors. eNPS measures the difference between the number of promoters and the number of detractors.

2. What are the reasons for your score? These answers help understand what attracts promoters to the company, and what concerns the detractors.

3. What do you like most about this company? The answers to this question serve as sources of inspiration for us: it’s always good to know what we’re doing well and understand what we should keep doing in order to keep staff loyalty in the future. We also find ideas for building the company’s brand externally among responses to this question.

4. What can be changed or improved? Responses to this question form the basis of our action plan for the future.

Additional questions are usually related to present-day work processes. We try not to go over 8 questions, so employees don’t have to spend too long answering them. The survey format is casual, humorous, and picture-heavy – congruent with the general style of our internal communications. In our last survey, we left some space at the end of the survey to send a thank-you note or a shout-out to a friend in the company, which we then shared with everyone, to their delight. However, responses to the key questions are treated very seriously.

The results are in!

After collecting the responses, we first calculate the overall eNPS for the company, followed by eNPS indicators for each individual department. While our average company-wide score is over 80, specific department scores vary from 60 to 100. Major discrepancies in scores between the company and an individual department signal a need to pay special attention to that department.

We share all these results with our team: not just the total score, but also the number of responses, their distribution on the 10-point scale, and our methodologies for calculating the scores. We also share the most common responses about what we’re doing well as a team. These responses are shared in their raw format, without changing the responders’ original language.

All suggestions and issues are sorted, discussed by the executive team first, prioritized (which ones will be addressed first, which ones need additional research, which ones can be put off), and assigned as action items. We don’t make promises to fix everything at once – some issues are put off to a later date with an explanation of why this is the case.

After anonymizing the responses, we share them with the entire team, where anyone can share their thoughts on the issues. This can also be quite informative and fun!

Processing the responses takes a few days, but addressing the issues revealed by these responses takes a lot longer.

Besides company-wide changes, we also do a lot of work individually with select staff members, if they had individual concerns. We pay extra attention to the detractors and what we can do to improve their experience with the company.

Trust is key

Some companies believe that employee satisfaction surveys need to be conducted anonymously, so employees don’t inflate their scores and give more honest responses. Of course, it’s possible to take an average “temperature check” and stop at that, but that isn’t enough for us. We are a small team, where everyone is noticed and treated with respect. We understand that when it comes to people, it’s not enough to know where we stand at a given moment – we need to know where to go next and preserve trust, support and positivity in the meantime.

YouScan’s top company values are trust and transparency. Our employees’ willingness to give their responses under their own names is the first sign that these values are adopted by everyone in the company. Trust is the foundation of our company culture. We’re ready to hear both the praise and the constructive criticism. The team knows that we’re not expecting flattery, so people feel comfortable expressing their opinions. Transparency works in both direction, so the C-suite also shares all important decisions with the team.

We see anonymity as a sign of a hands-off approach. Anonymous responses can’t be used in the same way as responses from specific individuals. Feedback can be too short, too general or too vague to be interpreted in a single actionable way. For example, the last survey we conducted had a comment about “keeping the office in order.” But how can we know what the respondent means by “order” – is it cleanliness, silence, or something else? Do we need to change our custodial services or our office rules? In this case, since everyone filled out the surveys with their real names attached, we simply followed up with this particular respondent. “Keeping the office in order” turned into “our office is generally clean, but we need to clean up the windowsills in the Product department.” Keep in mind that this is a fairly simple example. In more complex questions of career growth, motivation, development, the “pie in the sky” approach doesn’t work at all.

Good habits

Regular eNPS surveys allow us to objectively evaluate the loyalty and satisfaction of our staff, and their willingness to contribute to the company’s long-term goals – which is directly related to business growth. The management team can rely on these surveys to make informed effective decisions, and mitigate situations they wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.

We believe in building our business on the foundation of strong internal corporate culture. At its core, internal work culture is a set of habits and patterns of an entire team. The thing with these habits is that they don’t just apply separately to “the workplace” or “the customers”, but become the default behavior in any situation. Good habits help people make good decisions, maintain good relationships within the team and with the customers, grow and improve; while bad habits slow down business growth, making further marketing and product development efforts futile.

Honesty, openness, the ability to listen and the willingness to change are our good habits. A happy and productive team that believes in the company and its products will always find a way to share these beliefs with the customers.

If everything you just read sounds too good to be true, then you must have had bad luck with employers or never been a YouScan client :)