Have you ever surveyed your employees and customers - at the same time? Here is why you should.
In our series of articles exploring brand engagement (you can read the first in the series here), we stressed the importance of aligning your employer brand and your customer brand for business success.
Crucial to getting brand engagement strategy right is knowing exactly what your customers’ and employees’ experiences are currently, and identifying any misalignment.
Here we explore the power of conducting a customer survey concurrently with an employee engagement survey - and why the results are more powerful.
What is an engagement survey?
Engagement surveys measure how well a brand is faring in the eyes of your consumers or your employees.
Properly constructed, such a survey can give you valuable insight as to where you are on the Brand Engagement Pyramid, and how to address any misalignment that may exist between your customer brand, and your employee brand. You may well find that customers and employees are on different levels of the pyramid altogether.
Whilst there will be commonality of questions, engagement surveys will have a slightly different stance depending on whether they’re customer or employee focused.
Customer engagement surveys will gauge emotional connections to the brand, but will also understand propensity to buy, how you’re viewed versus your competitors and what they believe the brand stands for, and whether or not they would recommend or promote the brand (Net Promoter Score or NPS). These will give a very clear idea of where on the pyramid your customers sit.
Employee surveys will not only gauge employees' emotional connections to the brand, but also their understanding of what it stands for, how aligned it is to their own values, and whether they’re proud to work for the company. The importance of also conducting eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) surveys is becoming clear - this is similar to the NPS with which most marketers are familiar, but instead quickly measures and tracks how employees feel with one simple question:
“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s products and services to others?”
A follow up question could be “ Why do you give it that score?”
Says Jackie Gordon, Director at Dovetail, “It’s easy to understand the importance of these two aligning. If customers see the brand in a completely different way from employees, there is a problem. Conducting concurrent surveys will highlight any gaps, identify why they exist, and allow the business to quickly address them”.
As an example, let’s say that the customer NPS score is 6 (considered a detractor or lower on the pyramid) and customers cite poor service as a key reason.
And let’s say the eNPS score is a 7 (Passive), but employees cite lack of training as an issue. If those two scores are looked at simultaneously, it is clear that the customer experience could be impacted by the employee’s not getting enough training. A clear gap.
So if it’s so important, why don’t companies conduct simultaneous surveys?
“Most companies think that conducting concurrent surveys will be time consuming and expensive,” says Jackie. “In reality it’s the opposite - our methodologies, which incorporate technology for ease of response, mean that we could get results in as little as two weeks.”
There has also been the long held corporate territory structure of customer surveys being owned by Marketing, and employee issues owned by HR. This inevitably leads to Marketing engaging brand research houses, and HR engaging HR Consultants Melbourne, to conduct the research. Methodologies and structure would be completely different, the results are traditionally not integrated, and no gap analysis occurs because they are owned by separate departments and conducted at different times.
“Our approach is to unite these two critical surveys into one project, with one point of analysis and reporting,” says Marcus Gibbs, Director at Dovetail.
“Our approach is to unite these two critical surveys into one project, with one point of analysis and reporting”
CASE STUDY: PETstock - aligning customer and employee experience
With over 100 stores and an online offering, PETstock is a major player in this industry worth between 6 and 7 billion dollars.
“Helping pets inspire every person, every family, every day.”
Image copyright PETstock
The brand’s high NPS scores offer key insight into the growth of this business - growing from 11 to 100 stores in 12 years. One of the reasons for the high scores is the business delivering on its value proposition of “Engaging specialists who truly care”. The company knows that pet lovers want to deal with pet lovers.
Every customer gets assisted by people who genuinely care about animals, and who ask about theirs. Regular NPS tracking and sophisticated dashboards give staffers the ability to quickly act on any unhappy customer feedback, calling them immediately and addressing their issues.
The brand elements are communicated to staff via their “Kennel” portal, ensuring that staff understand and live the brand. The company has created a foundation called PETstock Assist, which helps rescue, rehabilitate and rehome pets - over 250 of their staff members voluntarily salary sacrifice to the cause.
Implications for the business of conducting simultaneous surveys?
The obvious implication is that Marketing and HR need to be aligned, and the business needs to identify who has project ownership. This can often lead to territory disputes, meaning that senior leadership needs to buy into the process in order to resolve issues.
Ideally, the business should commit to running these on a regular basis, at least annually, in order to proactively manage brand engagement.
The business needs to be committed and prepared to act on the gaps identified, and to do so quickly.
Engaging a specialist with experience in conducting concurrent surveys is the quickest (and most cost effective) path to success.
To read more of our Brand Engagement series as well as other brand related articles visit here.
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