What does an excellent NPS require from the work community?

12 Jun 2024 • People & Culture

Six years ago, I wrote about the pivotal role a positive employee experience plays in ensuring a successful customer experience. To this day, I stand by every word. Happy employees create excellent customer experiences, a principle that we live by at Sofokus. In this blog, I’ll dive deeper into how we’ve managed to achieve an exceptionally high level of customer satisfaction.

Customer interviews and staff debrief sessions provide valuable learning opportunities

Since 2019, we’ve systematically measured customer satisfaction using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric. Beyond the numbers, we regularly engage with our customers, gathering feedback on our successes and areas for improvement. Over the past year, we’ve intensified our efforts to collect valuable insights from our clients at critical junctures, such as the end of a project or the beginning of a new phase. These insights are then discussed in debrief sessions with our staff, fostering a culture of continuous learning.

These sessions are highly valued by our team, offering a space for honest feedback and objective reflection—something easily overlooked amidst the demands of specialist work. Personally conducting these interviews, and seeing our Slack group’s feedback channel brimming with positive comments, I suspected our team had done exceptionally well. I decided to confirm this with unbiased data and took a closer look at Sofokus’ NPS…

…and it turns out, Sofokus achieved an incredible NPS of 95 last year!

NPS as a measure of customer satisfaction

For those unfamiliar with NPS, here’s a brief overview. The Net Promoter Score gauges customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking, “How likely are you to recommend this company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” Responses range from 0 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely).

Respondents fall into three categories:

Promoters (9-10 points): Loyal enthusiasts who drive growth through referrals.
Passives (7-8 points): Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are neutral in their recommendations.
Detractors (0-6 points): Unhappy customers who may damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth.

NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, yielding a score between -100 and +100. Generally, a score above 0 indicates good customer satisfaction and loyalty, with 0-30 considered good, 30-70 very good, and 70-100 excellent.

But we need to recognise our limits and know when to say no

A key contributor to our high NPS is our ability to understand and acknowledge our strengths and limitations. This self-awareness helps us identify the right clients and projects, ensuring we can deliver the best possible results. We’re not afraid to say ‘no’ when:

A client’s business conflicts with our values.
A client’s expectations (e.g., budget or timeline) are unrealistic.
Another service provider is better suited to solve a client’s problem.

We have also developed a clear profile of our ideal customer, which helps us focus our efforts where they are most effective.

The symbiotic relationship between employee and customer experience

As I mentioned earlier, and wrote six years ago, the employee experience significantly impacts the customer experience. At Sofokus, we measure employee experience using the Quality of Work Life (QWL) metric, which currently stands at an excellent 82.6% (compared to the average of 60%). Happy employees indeed create happy customers.

When we consider our traditional business metrics alongside these scores for the current financial year (our fiscal year ends in June), it feels great to be part of Sofokus. We’re heading into the summer with a sense of pride and satisfaction.

Wishing everyone a happy summer—especially our fantastic customers and talented team!