In the second blog in this Q&A series, I talked about internal culture and word-of-mouth. It is my hope that people now understand more about how to manage employees to create better customer experiences. This post will explore how new organizations can establish a great culture and why NPS is highly linked to growth.

Question: How does one go about building a great culture when starting out as a new company?

Building culture in a new organisation starts at the recruitment level. The single, most efficient way of doing this is by looking at what the candidate’s values are and checking if they fit with the organisation’s values. Whether it is quality or customer focus or innovation, if the candidate’s values align with that of the organisation, there is a much higher probability of a cultural fit. An easy way to gauge this is to ask what the candidate has done in the past to actually live this value.

A value match is a great way to sift through the sand, but if you’re looking to make magic happen, then there has to be a strong match between individual purpose and the organisation’s purpose. Jetts Fitness in Australia is a great example of purpose alignment. While this fitness franchise is definitely customer focused, what sets it apart is that the staff at Jetts are genuinely invested in helping its customers lead better lives by becoming fit.

This is the reason why people love working at Jetts. No wonder Jetts ranks high in both eNPS and NPS, effectively proving that happy staff results in happier customers.

Question: As you said, research on NPS indicates that loyalty leaders grow faster than the category average, but they also enjoy lower operational costs. What is the reason for this?

Actually, there are a few reasons. Firstly, if you do NPS properly, and listen to customer feedback and take action, you iron out bugs in the system for a smoother customer experience and get fewer customer complaints.

Another reason is that loyalty leaders have to spend less in terms of sales and marketing, because their staff and employees are much more likely to make recommendations to other people.

The third aspect is that typically loyalty leaders have lower staff churn, or you could say that their staff retention is higher. That is a massively hidden cost that does not show up on any balance sheets clearly. When you lose a staff member, it takes at least six months for a new staff member to become as productive as the last. In addition to this there are other costs to recruitment, which are typically quite high at around $20,000.

How do purpose and values factor into the modern organization? What is the real value of a customer? Stay tuned for our next part in this Q&A series!