Net Promoter is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to fuel profitable growth in your

business. Developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld, the concept was first popularized through Reichheld's book The Ultimate Question, and has since been embraced by leading companies worldwide as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty. The Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a straightforward metric that holds companies and employees accountable for how they treat customers. It has gained popularity thanks to its simplicity and its linkage to profitable growth. Employees at all levels of the organization understand it, opening the door to customer- centric change and improved performance. Net Promoter programs are not traditional customer satisfaction programs, and simply measuring your NPS does not lead to success. Companies need to follow an associated discipline to actually drive improvements in customer loyalty and enable profitable growth. They must have leadership commitment, and the right business processes and systems in place to deliver real-time information to employees, so they can act on customer feedback and achieve results.

How to Calculate Your Score

NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company's customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By asking one simple question How likely is it that you would recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague? you can track these groups and get a clear measure of your company's performance through its customers' eyes. Customers respond on a 0-to-10 point rating scale and are categorized as follows:

Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.

Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.

To calculate your company's Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are Promoters and subtract the percentage who are Detractors.

GALLUP Gallup developed its Q12 benchmark specifically to correlate its measure of employee engagement to worker productivity, customer loyalty and sales growth

(see this Walker Information correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction). Gallup consultants sifted through hundreds of questions in hundreds of surveys before choosing the twelve questions with the highest correlations to external measures.

Topics covered include workplace expectations, supervisory relations, even working with a best friend. Each of the 12 questions is rated on a five-point scale and is one of the following four categories: Basic Needs two questions Management Support four questions Teamwork four questions Growth two questions

The ratings from all twelve of these questions are then combined into an index, which can be used to segment employees into three categories: Engaged employees work with passion. Because they feel a strong connection to the organization, they work hard to innovate and improve. Not-Engaged employees do the work expected of them, but do not put in extra effort. Actively Disengaged employees arent just unhappy, but are spreading their unhappiness to other staff.

Nationally, in 2005, engaged employees made up 28% of the work force globally, not-engaged employees made up 54%, and actively disengaged made up 17%. Contrast this with the Walker employee loyalty model. The Q12 database, with 5.4 million responses, is by far the largest employee benchmark available. Gallup clients can benchmark their organizations employeeengagement levels against research across 620,000 workgroups, 504 organizations, 16 major industries and 137 countries.

Gallup backs up its benchmarking with a full human-resource consulting program to help your organization use the results to improve your organizations employeeengagement levels. Best Buy, International Paper, Swisstel and B&Q are some of the notable subscribers to the Q12 benchmark.

Gallup is for the most part a well accepted benchmark. Some constructive criticisms:

1. It is unlikely that these twelve questions have equal value to every organization. For instance, one large government organization found that only five of the 12 questions differentiated the best workgroups (the top 10%) from the bottom 90%; other questions might have been more appropriate for them to examine. 2. Not all measures are actionable: for instance, the measure relating to having a best friend at work is not actionable, as there is little an organization can do to provide a best friend (buy every employee a company-owned dog?!). 3. Little research has been done outside Gallup to independently attest to the predictive validity of the measures used. A regular employee-pulse survey such as the Q12 is an important part of an overall employee satisfaction program and, for large organizations, should be fielded to a random sample of employees on a monthly or quarterly basis. Such surveys should be complemented with in-depth employee satisfaction research, offering every employee the chance to respond on a rotating basis at least once during the year.

12 Questions to Measure Employee Engagement

Do your opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important? Have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
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ive years ago, The Gallup Organization began creating a feedback system for employers that would identify and measure elements of worker engagement most tied to the bottom line-things such as sales growth, productivity and customer loyalty. After hundreds of focus groups and thousands of interviews with employees in a variety of industries, Gallup came up with the Q12, a 12-question survey that identifies strong feelings of employee engagement. Results from the survey show a strong correlation between high scores and superior job performance. Here are those 12 questions: Do you know what is expected of you at work? Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right? At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages your development? At work, do your opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?

Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work? Do you have a best friend at work? In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress? In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?