The best way to create a strong team culture is through open communication. Unfortunately, the nuanced feedback companies gather from practices like meetings, reviews, and surveys should be noticed.
Pulse surveys are a quick and effective method to engage employees, and they can be used to identify areas of improvement within your organization quickly. Using the right tool will make it easy for managers to create action plans.
Employee Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Employee engagement impacts customer experience directly, and it’s an essential metric for service leaders to track. After all, engaged employees are more likely to turn their job into a passion and create six positive customer experiences for every negative.
But eNPS can be misleading when used in isolation. Since it consists of just one question and is answered with a simple number, it’s easy to lose sight of the nuances behind the number. Understanding why your eNPS may rise, and fall can also be challenging. To get more value from eNPS, use it with open-ended questions or follow-up surveys that dig deeper into the reasons behind your score.
Many experts also discourage using a competitor’s score as a benchmark, as it is impossible to compare apples to apples. However, your eNPS should improve consistently over time, particularly after making organizational changes. It’s also important to ask staff why they gave their eNPS score, as this provides valuable insights. This helps to identify specific areas where further improvement is needed and shows that you care about the feedback you receive.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Like NPS or some customer experience measurements, CSAT is a straightforward customer experience metric allowing businesses to quickly understand their current performance and potential trends. It can be beneficial for pointing out areas where there’s an acute change that might need some tweaking or for identifying overall satisfaction levels. CSAT questions typically ask respondents to rate their satisfaction with a product, service, or experience on a very satisfied–dissatisfied scale. However, many CSAT surveys include open-ended short-answer questions to give businesses a more detailed picture of the customer experience.
Like NPS, CSAT can be a powerful tool when combined with other vital metrics. For example, pairing CSAT with CES can help businesses understand the impact of a particular product change or service improvement. Similarly, pairing CSAT with KPIs such as ticket volume and first contact resolution can provide context to the results and help explain why there might be changes in customer sentiment. A holistic approach to understanding customer experience helps teams drive better business outcomes.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures how easy customers find it to interact with a business. Companies often survey customers after a specific experience, such as receiving help from a customer support team, and ask them to rate the ease of that interaction using a scale of 1-5 or 1-7 or a happy/unhappy emoticon binary.
Many businesses use this metric as part of a more critical customer feedback strategy and pair it with other metrics like NPS or CES to identify specific areas for improvement, such as an inefficient phone support process. CES surveys are also helpful in supplementing product teams’ UI and UX testing.
The downside of CES is that it is peculiar and can only tell you how much effort customers are willing to expend with your company; it cannot tell you why they are spending so much time on your processes, which may be the result of something as simple as a bad call from a troublesome employee or more complicated factors such as a frustrating user interface or a difficult-to-use website.
Employee Satisfaction Score (ESS)
Employee satisfaction (ESS) measures the happiness and contentment an employee feels about their job and workplace. High levels of ESS are associated with higher productivity and work quality, which are, in turn, positively correlated to the company’s bottom line.
ESS surveys usually consist of multiple questions that ask employees how satisfied they are with different aspects of their jobs, such as career development opportunities, teamwork, communication, remuneration, recognition, and whether they trust the company’s leadership. They can also include a section where employees can share specific concerns or ideas about their work.
The most successful companies treat employee engagement (EE) seriously, aligning it with their customer experience (CX). Highly engaged employees are far more likely to be true brand advocates and help deliver positive customer experiences. The best way to achieve this is to implement a continuous listening strategy and survey your workforce at regular intervals. This will allow you to identify areas for improvement and measure the impact of any actions you take. A driver analysis can also help you understand what drives engagement in your organization and create strategies to improve it.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys are an excellent way to understand how much effort customers put into interacting with your business. You can ask a simple question like “How easy was it for you to get the information you needed?” using a Likert scale of 1-10, or you can use a more open-ended approach with questions asking about specific areas of your business like “how fast were you able to resolve an issue?”
If you measure CES frequently, you can identify and remove the most painful parts of your current customer journey, increasing your likelihood of converting and retaining long-term customers. However, it would help if you only used CES combined with NPS and CSAT to get a complete picture of your customer loyalty.
It is best to measure CES after a customer service interaction, such as completing a purchase or opening a ticket. It would help if you also surveyed CES after your sales and customer success teams conduct customer meetings or consultations to see how easy they are making it for customers to do business with you.
