“Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.” — Stephen R. Covey

At Urban Company (UC), we strongly believe that the way our employees and partners feel is the way our customers will feel. Our partners represent UC in tens of thousands of daily interactions with our customers and their happiness and well-being is of paramount importance to UC.

My colleagues have previously written about the numerous steps we’ve taken to ensure our partners well-being and keeping the josh high for our employees. (Also, you can read here the new safety protocols we’ve introduced to protect our customers and partners.)

Today, in continuation with the previous blogs, I’m going to share how partners have responded to our measures and the latest numbers that reflect their sentiment.

How We Track Partner Sentiment at UC

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
— Peter Drucker

The primary metric we use internally to track partner sentiment is partner NPS. In addition to partner NPS, we also track our play store rating for the UC Partner app and our partner helpline CSAT score. Here, I’m going to talk about the first two — partner NPS and partner play store rating.

Partner NPS: 70+ in March — 23pp increase over February

We ask for partner NPS on our partner app every month. Since it is asked on the partner app, we see high response rates to the tune of 30–50% of our total partner base. We use the typical NPS question though we take responses on a five-point scale[1] — 5s are treated as promoters, 4s as passives and anything below 4 as detractors. In addition to the NPS question, we also ask a few other questions and have a verbatim text field where our partners can give any feedback.

Our aggregate partner NPS for March was 71.8%. This was 23pp NPS points above our partner NPS for February (47%). This is the highest partner NPS score we’ve received ever.

Play Store Ratings: Sharp divergence from peer apps in April

Our Partner App ratings in Google Play Store have significantly improved in April over February and March (see screenshot from Google Play Console above). Google Play Console provides an interesting feature where it compares your app with its peer apps (represented by the dotted line in the chart above). Interestingly, while we were trending closely with our peer apps till March, we have sharply increased our ratings while the peer app median rating has continued to fall.

Play Console automatically chooses other gig economy partner apps for the peer set (note: you can also add/delete apps). The screenshot below shows the currently defined peer apps for the UC Partner App according to the Google Play Console — we are ahead of most other partner apps in the ecosystem.

What’s the so-what?

We believe that our measures to ensure our partners well-being are working and have been well-received by our partner base.

We further believe that companies that maintain a strong and motivated workforce in these uncertain times will gain a competitive edge over others as the lockdowns are slowly relaxed.

Ending this post with a few encouraging[2] comments (unedited) from the March Partner NPS:

“Jo Urban company karti he hamare liye Wo Aur koi company nahi kar shakti muje Khushi he ki me urban company me Kaam karti Hu Tnx UC” — Salon partner

“sir thank you for your loan AMT.very helful for lockdown situation….” — AC Service partner

“the best place and supportive company I have ever seen, urban helping there partners in there toughest conditions.. extremely very happy for that..” — AC Service partner

“I feel working in Urban company is a proud. no company is taken care of there partners like this in this crucial condition. once lockdown is over it’s our duty to make Urban company proud.” — Repair partner

“urban company is a great company providing all facilities, I am too happy with this company and will refer to my friends” — Cleaning partner

“what u have done to us in lockdown really superb” — Repair partner

[1] Technically, we shouldn’t call it NPS.

[2] In addition to the encouraging feedback, our partners also give strong, constructive feedback on how UC should continue to improve (as all engaged stakeholders should).