To understand the needs of your customers, you need accurate data. Bridge the gap between your brand and your customers through NPS surveys.
When you ask the typical person about a personal transformation in their life, the overwhelming sense you get is positive. However, if you ask that same person about a transformation in their job, the underlying emotion is usually fear or negativity. Why is that?
How can people feel invigorated by their personal goals yet fail to see the positivity in organizational change? Maybe it has more to do with a sense of empowerment on one end of the spectrum and loss of control on the other.
How can businesses address necessary changes for the betterment of their customers without alienating their employees?
That’s the question that companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and many others ask themselves with each new venture. As a result, many companies are now turning to metrics to satisfy their customers and valued employees.
The result: is a smoother, more customer-centric, and employee-focused approach to change management leadership.
What is Change Management Leadership?
The idea of change management leadership comes from John P. Kotter. A Professor of Leadership from Harvard Business School, he invented an eight-step process that businesses use to effectively lead change in their organizations.
These eight steps form the three phases of the change management process.
Phase 1: Creating a Climate of Change
In the first phase, organizations build urgency for change based on a compelling goal or initiative. The point of this phase is to create an organization-held shared vision.
Phase 2: Engaging and Enabling the Organization
In phase two, organizations communicate the vision and design organizational goals that can produce early wins. The point of this phase is to increase organizational buy-in.
Phase 3: Implementing and Sustaining for Change
In the final phase, organizations create processes that make the change stick. By establishing processes and procedures around new organizational goals, they now become an institutional habit.
How NPS Surveys Can Help Support the Change Management Process
The top five tech companies in the world dedicate considerable attention to the happiness quotient of their staff and customers.
Intelligent brands use NPS surveys to help understand their customers and analyze the data they provide in order to adapt and ensure they have more happy customers. However, their need for analysis doesn’t stop there. These same brands utilize TeamNPS (employee NPS) surveys to assess their staff’s happiness quotient.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the companies committed to metrics about happiness have more loyal customers and happier employees.
Feedback from constituents can play a vital role in the change management leadership process. The information they provide allows organizations to become laser-focused about how to meet customer demands.
Organizations can create surveys that:
- Foster cross-departmental goals
- Develop a customer-centric strategy
- Provide opportunities for small teams to act
- Implement systems and processes to internalize new changes
When organizations use customer feedback to drive company-wide missions, they create a sense of purpose that is customer-centric and employee-driven, leading to a culture focused on a common goal.
Perhaps Apple’s famed CEO, Steve Jobs, said it best when he stated:
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”
Here are some strategies to get the most out of your NPS experience:
Consider Shorter Surveys
If you’re looking to get the most out of your customer’s feedback, go for shorter surveys. Research indicates that surveys with 2-6 questions have a better response rate which correlates with a higher net promoter score and increased retention rate.
Engaged customers tend to be happier customers. Direct feedback from loyal brand enthusiasts can be the simplest way to provide transparency and solidify trust in your brand.
Collecting feedback also demonstrates that you care about what your customers want, motivating them to share helpful information for your business’s future growth.
Consider Sending More Surveys
While relational surveys are a great way to get feedback about your company as a whole, transactional surveys offer a different perspective on your systems and processes, which could improve customer satisfaction.
Consider sending one relational survey each quarter and transactional surveys during different customer touchpoints. By varying your surveys and making them tailored to your customer’s experience, you’re likely to get better results.
Close The Loop
Feedback in any form is valuable, but recording data about customer and employee satisfaction does no good if you don’t act. Surveys draw attention to situations where you may need to Close The Loop before they lead to bigger problems.
Here are five ways to use your NPS and TeamNPS data to empower everyone in your organization.
Five Ways Organizational Changes Can Empower Everyone
Great organizations have a few things in common.
- They value their employees from top to bottom
- They also foster creativity and change
- They have a cohesive vision centered around their brand.
Great organizations grow and change often, yet their shared vision and goal as a company remain the same. One example is Apple’s “Think different.”
When Apple began in a Los Altos garage, they had a singular purpose — to revolutionize the home computer market. Decades later, Apple has shown its ability to think differently, change, and adapt to disrupt the market. They have gone from an innovative computer company to a tech company with its hands in the music industry, smartphones, on-demand television, and more.
From the iPod to the iPhone to AppleTV, they are constantly looking for new ways to evolve, grow, and change to remain relevant.
Great organizations have five strategic imperatives that boil down to one common idea: putting people first.
1. Inspire Through Purpose
Most changes in an organization are the result of operational or financial goals. It can be empowering and energizing for leaders of an organization, but not for average workers.
Great organizations empower and energize their employees by connecting goals to a powerful sense of purpose.
Take Lego, for instance, a company that has grown way past their generic blocks that we all played with as children.
Now, there are sets for everything you can think of, from Star Wars to Harry Potter. The choices are endless. Today, we even have Legoland. A popular tourist attraction designated to the brand.
They have undoubtedly gone through a series of transformations as an organization and a global brand. Yet through it all, one powerful purpose has remained constant.
“Inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.”
Such a simple concept, yet so powerful, is similar to Apple’s motto. Great organizations empower their employees by first inspiring them through purpose.
2. Go All In
Great organizations, inspired by their larger vision, attack their organizational transformations like runners attack their goal of finishing a marathon. They go all in.
Excellent change management starts with the purpose of going all in. Companies may have to work harder, longer, and for a far-off reward to create lasting change. Organizations may have to become leaner to remain competitive, similar to a runner shedding weight. Nonetheless, to win, you have to be willing to go all in.
To win, you must think about initiatives that drive growth, changes that streamline operational systems, and investments in both leadership and talent to push transformation further.
It is a deeper purpose and a shared vision that will encourage employees to go all in.
3. Enable People to Succeed
To energize employees, organizations must empower workers with the tools, skills, and strategies they need to succeed during the transformation and beyond.
Like working on personal goals, there are moments of becoming along the journey. It is analogous to companies looking to grow and change in our global economy.
To fundamentally grow, we need to change. Change takes place when teams learn new tools and acquire new skills. It takes recruitment, development, and investment in all employees to find the success that’s waiting on the other side.
4. Instill a Culture of Continuous Learning
When organizations create a culture of continuous learning, they foster a culture of growth.
Learning requires people to buy-in. To really learn, you must be all-in. To be all in, you must have some greater purpose that drives you. One is a domino that affects another and creates a culture of continuous growth.
When someone learns, they form new neural pathways in their brain. In some ways, you can say, they are forever changed. They look at and understand the world in a different way than they did the day before.
Companies willing to empower their employees through education empower their whole organization.
5. Inclusive Leadership
For organizations to empower their employees from top to bottom, leaders must embrace cooperation to put people first.
In order to transform an organization, there needs to be a clear vision from leadership, a roadmap to get there, and an engagement to start working and building as a team.
Surveys such as NPS and TeamNPS offer vital feedback to create initiatives.
When leadership puts people first, employees and customers feel valued enough to share their ideas to add to the vision, creating lasting change and transformation in the process.
What Can NPS and TeamNPS Do for Your Brand?
Are you ready to take your brand to the next level? WebPunch offers a whole host of brand experience services as well as NPS solutions for businesses.
Whether you’re looking to boost your online presence through customer feedback, online reviews, higher rankings on review sites, or improved star rankings — we can help!
For more information or to schedule a demo, please contact us today.
Brian Joyce
Brian is a content writer, copywriter, and author. When he’s not busy writing, you can find him whistling a punk tune while performing chores, playing with his two boys, or enjoying his wife’s company. He lives in Providence with his wife, two children, and a cat with no depth perception that likes to take miscalculated jumps.
