5 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement with Net Promoter®
Net Promoter only generates value when employees engage with it — and they don't, by default. The CustomerGauge User Group surfaced five practical engagement plays that consistently work. Here they are: brand the program, give it local spin, share transparently, run "please contact me", and use NPS to break down cross-functional silos.
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Another of the great conversations at the recent CustomerGauge User Group meeting was around driving employee engagement. There were some very good ideas and best practices mentioned on the day and here are some of the best that we heard.
1. Brand the Process
To help embed the Net Promoter process and drive deep employee engagement you should look to brand the roll-out with a brand name. This serves as a hook to which you can attach information, communications, programs, etc and drive greater awareness across the company.
One of our Australian customers (Wolters Kluwer Asia Pacific) branded their program: Converse. They dedicated an intranet page and supporting information to it and even developed an excellent Net Promoter communications video.
Other organizations at the event had implemented similar approaches with excellent effect.
2. Give The Program A Local Spin
While it is easy (and less expensive) to completely standardize a Net Promoter roll-out program across the country or world you should consider allowing different regions or areas the ability to give it a local spin.
You should do this when cultural or organization elements mean that local customization will drive higher acceptance.
3. Share Information Transparently
I will shortly be releasing an entire post on the best practice of sharing information transparently but this also came up at the conference. The feedback from the organizations present was clear: share the customer feedback you receive as broadly and unedited as you can.
It seems like there are lots of impediments to share information in this way. In reality in most cases it is fear of something that either never occurs or occurs so infrequently that it can be managed.
CustomerGauge, the Net Promoter data collection system that we resell, has developed special big screen display options specifically to help organisations with this type of broad information sharing. Our experience is that once these large LCD panels are put up in call centres and executive suites you simply cannot take them down because staff value the transparent feedback so highly.
4. Please Contact Me
We recommend to our Net Promoter clients that they implement a “Please contact me about this response” tick-box question at the end of their surveys. We also recommend that they create a React service recovery process to manage the very low scores: 0-6. Essentially, we recommend that our clients call customers who provide very low scores.
While you would think calling the un-happiest of unhappy customers (0r scores) would be negative and draining but it turns out to be an uplifting and engaging experience for the staff member who does it as this quote from the video above indicates:
One of the best things of my day is hearing people’s genuine surprise when they realise that someone’s phoning them back to say that not only have we heard you, but we’re doing something to improve your experience.
Janine Scott, Regional Manager, Key Business Initiatives, Wolters Kluwer Asia Pacific
This is because most times customers are surprised to receive a call at all. Then, when the staff member is able to resolve the issue the customer is often grateful and the call ends on a high. Even if the issue cannot be resolved to the customer’s satisfaction, just having some call them lifts their perception of the company.
5. The NPS® Process Drives Cross-Functional Cooperation
This was perhaps the most exciting and unexpected element of driving employee engagement that came from the conference. One company related how the fact that staff were meeting in cross functional teams to review the Net Promoter data was driving up employee engagement.
For them, the catalyst for cross-functional cooperation was the staff coming together to work as a team, understand and act on the Net Promoter data.
In essence, this is exactly the reverse of what we normally hear. We expect that we need to drive staff engagement in order to drive Net Promter engagement. However, here is a company that is driving employee engagement through the Net Promoter process.
