Employee Success, NPS and becoming *the* company
Customer Success is when customers achieve their desired outcomes through their interactions with your company — Lincoln Murphy
Customer success is awesome. It brings back the human part of business relationships and, at the same time, gives you rapid growth. But customer success needs to be the company culture, not only a sales or product team motto.
Who is your customer?
The first thing you need to know is who your customer is. For Human Resources (HR) and managers, the employee is also a customer. But, what does that mean?
It means that you need to focus on your employee success, regardless of its relationship with the company. It may sound utopic, or even counterintuitive, but I’ll explain it.
Company roadmap x Personal career
We usually spend a lot, and I mean A LOT, of time planning company roadmaps. Where should we be in the next five years? What should our revenue be? How could we increase our market share in the next six months? And that is great. It brings transparency and alignment to the whole group on where we are going to and how we’ll achieve it. But when was the last time you asked someone from your team what their career plans are?
I’ve noticed that making a career plan, with each one of your team, matching the company’s strategy is the best outcome for both parts. The employee will be motivated, and the company will increase the odds of achieving its goals. It is a win-win relationship.
Therefore, being you a manager or not, help your team transform their jobs into meaningful work for the world and for themselves.
When it is time to say “see you soon”
You probably know that it will be impossible to match all of your company’s employees dreams with your roadmap. What now?!
If the difference in paths will only occur in the future, don’t panic. Help them achieve the seniority that they want, doing what they like until it reaches that route divergence. However, it isn’t only the product scopes that change. People have children, marry others, lose loved ones… All of those end up drastically changing the professional plan each one of us made. So let’s be agile and embrace those changes.
Now, if someone is at the end of the track, she wants to grow more and more, and you don’t have the position to give her, let her go. If you were agile and prepared her for the job, she will be grateful for the help and will have no problem finding the right place. And that is good! She will become a promoter for your company. The same way we account for NPS (net promoting score, aka likelihood to give a recommendation) with our customers, the people that pass through our companies carry “NPSs” with them for working at your organization. If that number is high, it brings more people to our interviews, and prepare us for losing someone someday.
Additionally, letting them go is not necessary a goodbye. It could be a “see you soon.” They can go to other companies, improve themselves, your company opens new positions and they come back. Or, you leave the company, they remember how well you worked with them in the past and may introduce you to the directors of the new business. Again, it is a win-win relationship between everyone.
What if I’m not a manager or HR person?
It doesn’t matter who you are and what is your role. Yes, the duty to do that is indubitably inherent to a “people management” role. However, you can help your peers achieve success and locally improve their relationship with your team.
As a Product Manager, I like to know people’s career roadmaps, since I grasp what the product future will be and I can help them see if it matches what they want or not.
Conclusion
Gather the “NPS” of your employees, work with their career path and turn your company from another one to the one.
