CHICAGO: Aditya Birla Group, the conglomerate, has seen tangible business benefits from using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gain a deeper understanding of its customers.

Prakash Nedungadi, Group Head/Customer Insights and Brand Development at Aditya Birla Group, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2017 Masters of B2B Marketing Conference.

And he asserted that the company’s use of the Net Promoter Score has delivered meaningful results for the organisation, which boasts a portfolio of brands present in sectors from apparel to financial services and concrete mixing.

“Trial programs that were supported by NPS customer-concentricity were 12% more successful than previous initiatives that weren't supported by the same kind of grounding,” he said. (For more details, read WARC's exclusive report: How NPS simplifies enterprise-wide marketing cohesion for Aditya Birla Group.)

In supplying brand insights, the NPS has the benefit of being easy to comprehend, with a customer who rates a product or company with a nine or ten on a ten-point scale marked as a ‘Promoter’, and a buyer giving it six or below termed a ‘Detractor’.

The difference separating these two totals is then used to determine the final Net Promoter Score, which is an absolute number that sits between –100 and +100.

“Our agencies came to me with the best, most sophisticated measures of customer satisfaction, but I finally chose what was the simplest one: NPS [Net Promoter Score]. I chose it because it is so simple,” said Nedungadi.

“The chairman could understand it. The marketing folks could understand it. The guys in sales could understand it. The guys in [retail] could understand it. Everybody could get it. So, we decided to use NPS across the organization.”

As Aditya Birla Group is a data-driven enterprise, the hard figures provided by this gauge of customer satisfaction also helped to prompt responses within the company.

“If I could get a number, we could start having a discussion and get marketing actions going,” Nedungadi explained to the ANA delegates.

Data sourced from WARC