Are You Overlooking the Value of Employee Net Promoter Score?

C-suite executives, from CEOs to CFOs to CMOs included, are increasingly harnessing the power of the Net Promoter Score to gauge customer satisfaction.

Developed by Bain & Company’s Fred Reichheld, NPS is a deceptively simple yet highly effective way to measure a company’s performance with customers. With NPS, a company asks its customers what Reichheld terms “the ultimate question”: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend?

Anyone who answers 9 or 10 to the question is a “promoter.” A 7 or an 8 is a “passive,” and a 6 or below is a “detractor.” Many companies monitor their customer NPS regularly to keep a close eye on how they’re performing with customers and what they can to do improve their rating. Many C-suite executives have witnessed a close tie between NPS score and bottom-line performance.

NPS is an extremely versatile tool. It can be used to measure the mindset of every audience a business has from customers to employees. Specifically, workplace beverages supplier Mars Drinks, in a study it recently completed in partnership with LinkedIn, used Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS, to understand how likely employees are to recommend their company as a place to work.

The study conducted by Mars Drinks in partnership with LinkedIn – The Workforce Voice powered by LinkedIn™ — resulted in insightful findings. Specifically, the research examines how Mars Drinks’ concept of Workplace Vitality™ relates to eNPS through responses from more than 1,000 professionals surveyed by LinkedIn.

With its Workplace Vitality framework, Mars Drinks makes the case that four pillars impact employees and their attitudes toward their work: Engagement, Well-Being, Productivity and Collaboration. In the survey, Mars Drinks discovered that positive employee Engagement was most closely tied to employees found by eNPS to be promoters.

“While all the pillars are important and interrelated with each other, and with eNPS, Engagement was the most influential followed by Well-Being, Productivity, and Collaboration,” says Dr. Tracy Brower, Global Vice President of Workplace Vitality for Mars Drinks. The question in the survey that produced the largest delta (45 percentage points) between promoters and detractors was, “My job provides me with the opportunity for on-going learning.”

There are many takeaways here for C-suite executives. The eNPS metric is a strong measure of the health of a company’s culture – or its Workplace Vitality, and each of these can be predictive of talent acquisition, retention, and positive customer relationships.

The concepts of eNPS and Workplace Vitality can be particularly useful for the CMO. In today’s world, a company’s brand isn’t what the company says it is, it’s what customers and prospects say it is. And the brand perception of customers and prospects are highly influenced by their encounters with a company’s employees: on customer service phone calls, via email and social media, and in person. It’s clear that a strong eNPS can be an indicator for the CMO that a company’s employees tend to be strong representatives of the brand. 

NPS is a powerful metric. For a deeper dive into marketing metrics, download the new guide, The Sophisticated Marketer's Crash Course in Metrics and Analytics today.