In 2020, we undertook an exercise to uncover our “Purpose”. In business terms, Purpose functions as a guide for everything a company does and ultimately explains why a business exists. Acting as a ‘north star’ Purpose helps guide decisions, shape behaviours and provide every employee with a common, enduring goal to shoot towards.
So where to start?
Firstly, we looked closely at our history, our founding and our deep experience in the international relocations space. We also, interrogated our expansion into other specialist logistics fields like records and information management and explored what motivates our teams to get out of bed in the morning in every corner of our business.
It was a very insightful process and confirmed there had always been a common purpose driving us since Crown was founded in 1965:
“Making it simpler to live, work, and do business anywhere in the world”
This makes intuitive sense; we facilitate relocations internationally, for international companies and their teams as well as private individuals (“live and work”). We also provide a wealth of services like information auditing, risk assessment, luxury goods transportation, office relocation and more (“do business”).
Its clear much of what we do isn’t easy, but highly complex and time consuming, and we know we’re driven to make things simpler by caretaking that complexity so our customers can focus elsewhere. It also connects to our beliefs that everyone has the right to live and work wherever the best opportunities are for them, and that every country and culture can learn from how others see the world.
Jeremy Laight, Director Of Brand Marketing explained, “We now have a common language around how we express our Purpose, helping everyone across Crown work better together. This also fits brilliantly with our existing brand values that define the behaviours that help all our people bring our purpose to life’.
Introducing the Net Simpler Score (NSS)
Making it simpler is truly within our DNA and drives Crown and its teams every day. But we wanted to ensure we could tangibly measure our purpose as well, understand its drivers, impact on employee engagement and ultimately better drive efforts.
Part of our commitment to meaningful and tangible measurement, we’re very proud to have developed our own proprietary metric, which we call the Net Simpler Score (NSS). Taking inspiration from other improvement metrics, it results in a score between -100 to 100, where -100 equates to high complexity and 100 equates to super simplicity. It centres around 2 simple questions; first we ask customers how simple a task, experience or service was, asking them to rate their experience from 1 to 7.
We then take all collated figures and work out the split of response across the score spectrum, from which we can derive the Net Simpler Score.
Crucially we also ask customers why they chose that score so we can tackle the drivers of complexity and ‘double down’ on the drivers on simplicity. Through time we can monitor score progression, especially where it really matters for customers.
Making it Simpler, where it matters most
So the Net Simpler Score provides one of the key metrics we use to tangibly view our business practices, operationally and internally, and, very simply, determine whether we’re delivering on our Purpose to “make things simpler”.
Thomas Nagy, Head of Insight, who co-created the Net Simpler Score and developed the wider integrated measurement program, also commented, adding “The Net Simpler Score helps us hold ourselves to account and ensure we understand where we can improve. NSS is one of our key performance indicators that fuels new continuous improvement discussions across Crown which ensure we continue to put customers at the very heart of the company’.
Moving forward, NSS will also allow us to link to employee engagement and benchmark across our businesses and geographical regions, identifying what exactly we’re doing right and applying these practices elsewhere. But ultimately it helps us make it simpler for our customers and clients to live, work and do business anywhere in the world, providing an entirely new and unique understanding of our business.