Empathy Expansion Kit: Metrics for Measuring Empathy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. In this short empathy expansion kit episode, we are covering the topic of empathy-based metrics. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa. Hey, Tullio.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:31)
Hey, this one's going to be a lot of fun.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:33)
Yeah, I think so too. Empathy, so when done right, it correlates with business success, right? We've done a lot of podcasts just talking about all kinds of different metrics and the ROI of these just different empathy-based tactics. So whether it's your customer acquisition costs or your profit margins or retention or any sort of, there's so many empathy-based stats along with this that ultimately, in one way or another, it just majorly impacts your bottom line. And we've seen even like the studies with the S&P 500 companies compared to these conscious capitalist companies, where over a 15-year time span, the conscious capitalist companies outperformed them by something like 1600% to 117% during that time. So it's definitely, there's all kinds of metrics that get into the bottom line. And we love all the bottom line metrics. But what about, Tullio, those empathy or love-based metrics that kind of tally some of these other areas of the business?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:40)
Well, you know, everybody's familiar with net promoter scores for client metrics. But there's one metric that can be put into place that's not often practiced by a lot of businesses. And we'll talk about the correlation between this one and actual net promoter scores with clients later. But I'm talking about the employee satisfaction and engagement score.
Most companies will hear this and be like, what? So think of the same way you do a net promoter score for customers, do that for employee satisfaction. It's how you gauge how the employees feel about leadership and the empathy in the organization and the culture of the company. And this is an opportunity to really give employees a chance to be heard, to feel value and to be supported. But it's also very telling about the quality of your leadership. Because how do you know whether a leader is actually doing a job really well? Well, how people feel about them will say a lot.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:41)
Yeah. So that's one of these employee-based metrics. We're going to talk a little about the employee-based ones, and then we're going to go into the customer-based one. So another employee-based metric that I think about a lot is the turnover and retention rates.
If you've got high turnover rates, something's going on in your company that really needs to be figured out. You're grinding your employees. They aren't satisfied. There's maybe the job's a bit soulless. We've got to find your soul for you. But there's, look at those retention rates. And this will tell you a story. And compare them to maybe, you could compare them to your peers if you want to, but why aren't you at 95 percent or something? Or why aren't you at a super high rate? Try and figure out that. Put things in place and then watch those retention rates over time and see how some of the different policies, different things you're doing, if it's improve those retention rates.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:49)
The other one is also peer recognition and internal communication.
So having programs to do that, so introducing the use of peer recognition programs like kudos, boards or other internal communications to track positive interaction and acknowledgement between employees. This reflects a culture of empathy as well. And there's correlation between all these things and customer satisfaction and revenue. We'll go into that a little bit, but there's a lot of connection to these internal efforts that impact the bottom line. For those who think, we can't measure that in the ROI, yes, you can.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:31)
Yeah, I think we use for peer-to-peer giving assembly, but you can go in there and you can see just all the details of who's giving how much to who. So there are metrics with that peer-to-peer giving that we call these bliss metrics. So there's a bunch of them in there that are just related to, it's not specific bottom line KPI. We just know it's going to help all these other bottom line metrics. There's tools out there for that. Let's switch gears a little bit now to the more customer focused empathy metrics. Obviously, you've got employee retention, you've also got customer retention and loyalty. So this is a big one, we're going to discuss how you can improve those by changing things like how you're dealing with your employees, we talked about, or your customers, we talked about the customer satisfaction empathy a few episodes ago. These are things that can help with that retention and that loyalty. If they come to you with a problem, how are you dealing with that problem? Are you making that emotional connection? Then you can look over time, is this customer, we're doing repeat purchases, we're renewing our subscriptions, are we in a customer loyalty program? There's a lot of different things that show this level of engagement with your customers.