While these are some excellent business-level metrics, there are others that are equally important, though for your internal-customer rather than external. Knowing how your employees are doing and feeling is also imperative to the health of your company, after all: you wouldn’t be in business without them. Here are some metrics that are key to consider when thinking about internal employee health.

Agent well-being

While there isn’t a specific metric that makes up agent well-being, there are several ways to put numbers to it that can be useful when trying to determine where you stand. Here are a few things that you can consider for your agents:

• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
• Sentiment analysis: this new AI effectively takes anything written — blog posts, Facebook, Twitter, chat — and analyzes them for sentiment. It’s very useful for your customers, but also for your employees.
• Asking in one-on-ones about how they are feeling.
• Tracking usage and participation data: are they active in town halls? Are they using all the technologies that the other employees are? The more they engage, the better, according to CIO.

Because your support team can sometimes be the first people that your customers come into contact with, it’s imperative that they be happy and enthusiastic about their work. Monitoring them specifically and keeping track of their happiness is important because, in a way, it’s keeping track of the happiness of your customer as well. Agents take on the emotions of everyone that they talk to on a day to day basis, so make sure they’re emotionally prepared to do that by keeping them happy or at least giving them a safe space to talk about it if they aren’t.

eNPS

eNPS is short for Employee Net Promoter Score and, much like the “regular” NPS, is a method for measuring how willing employees are to recommend their workplace to friends and acquaintances. Like NPS, responses are broken out into three separate groups:

• Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep referring others, fueling your company’s growth.
• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic and may be vulnerable to competitive offerings for other jobs.
• Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy and may speak negatively about your brand and cause potential damage.

When you send out eNPS, you have the option to send through a qualitative question as well, that allows people to type out a bit more, if they’d like to provide insight beyond a numerical rating. This can be a useful way for you to gauge sentiment, but also get a bit more information about why people might be loving or hating working for your company. If possible, it’s good to ask for information to reach back out, just in case you want to have a further conversation or have additional questions about the employee’s constructive insights.

eNPS is mostly useful to track over time, so consider offering it on a quarterly basis, rather than just doing it once and never again. While the insights that you gain from doing it once may be helpful, they won’t be as helpful as tracking over time and seeing either growth or diminishment in your score.

Social media monitoring

For many people, as soon as something important or interesting happens, they go straight to social media. People like to share their experiences — both positive and negative — and smartphones make it easy to do so quickly and on the go. Because of that, social media can be one of the best ways to get a handle on how people are feeling about your brand and what they want to see change. While you might already have your support team monitoring social to take care of any support-related conversations that come through, having marketing or product monitoring it occasionally can be super helpful for getting deeper insights.

A few useful tools for this, just in case you don’t want to spend company time with multiple people trawling through Twitter:

• Google Alerts: Lets you know when your brand appears in a prominent position in results.
• Mention: A powerful freemium tool that gives you a heads up whenever someone mentions your brand on the web. It’s especially handy for social media tracking, which Google Alerts doesn’t really do.
• SocialMention: A free tool that analyzes social mentions of your brand across social media. It shows the likeliness of your brand being discussed, the ratio of positive to negative mentions, the likelihood of people mentioning your brand repeatedly and the range of influence.

If you automate away some of the manual searching for insights, reading what people have to say about your brand when they think you aren’t paying attention can give you some honest, constructive insights to better your product.

Things gone wrong

The Lean Six Sigma approach suggests also looking at the things that have gone wrong, rather than focusing on positive aspects of the business. This is also exactly what the premise of what the metrics of “things gone wrong” does. When looking at qualitative surveys that add options for people to share information about what has gone wrong, track how many constructive reports come out for every 100, 1000, or up to a 1,000,000 units of survey responses, units sold, or other.

The ultimate worst-case for this metric is that you score a one or higher, meaning that you get at least one complaint for every survey or individual product you sell. If that occurs to you, there are a few things you might want to consider:

• Should we have a better debugging process for our products?
• Do we release things too early with little process to our release?
• Where are most of the things going wrong, and how can we focus better on that?

Usually, the things gone wrong metric is related to an overarching issue in your product infrastructure, rather than something you can fix immediately. But, these questions will get you on the right track.