Published on March 11, 2021
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty and customer satisfaction tool used by companies to improve business processes. It defines whether a customer will like or dislike the product and how highly will he/she recommend it to others. However, the process of manually collating, tracking, and analysing NPS results is complicated and difficult. For companies in the retail segment, where customer satisfaction is critical to both, revenue and brand, NPS is a key area of focus. Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG) connected various companies in the retail segment to share their practices with each other and enhance their learning in this area.
Infiniti Retail learns from Tata UniStore, Titan and AirAsia India
Infiniti Retail was looking for digital solutions for their NPS results and approached Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG) to check if there were any established processes in the Tata ecosystem. TBExG identified similar practices in Tata Unistore, AirAsia India and Titan and facilitated knowledge-sharing sessions with them in January-February 2020.
A three-member delegation from Infiniti Retail, led by Shiv Barai, General Manager - Customer Service, interacted with experts from Tata Unistore, AirAsia India, and Titan at their respective locations. Each of the experts shared features of their online NPS process and journeys of their companies.
Shweta Srivastava, Head - Customer Experience & Research, Tata UniStore, discussed the following features with Infiniti Retail:
- Response rate
- Detractor calling and action planning
- Win-back analysis to check if a detractor came back to the platform
- Data analysis at the brand, seller, and category level
- Action planning based on the feedback received
- NPS for product returns
- Service NPS is at two levels — agent interaction and resolution
- Use of customer journey map to identify touchpoints where feedback is needed
- Timing of sending out the feedback link to generate a higher response rate
In the discussions that followed, both companies identified the need for ‘speech to text’ and ‘text analysis’. They further agreed to collaborate in this area.
Sanjay Bhattacharjee, Head - CRM, and Bhavita, Senior Manager, CRM from Titan shared the company’s NPS journey which started in 2013. Titan’s NPS tracking varies across its three lines of business — watches, jewellery, and eyewear. However, Titan has a unique customer ID which is mapped to its all brands. In the session, Infiniti gained insights in:
- Detractor management
- War room and action planning across three lines of business
- Experiments on optimising the cost of sending out SMS and voice and text analysis
- Use of a survey after redemption of points
- Sample questionnaires
- CRM view of the customer — tagging of customers as promoter, detractors, and passives
- Brand-wise scorecards
- Co-relation of NPS with other metrics, including an average lifeline per customer as well as the number of bills per lifetime, number of buyers, ATS compared for passives, detractors and promoters
- Mapped NPS across all stores and bucketing stores on areas of improvement and monitoring trends
Santosh Chand, Head - Customer Happiness from AirAsia India outlined the company’s journey using NPS for the last five years. The tool has evolved progressively to emerge as a robust activity. The company uses NPS for the entire customer service cycle, starting from site navigation to post completion of travel. AirAsia India’s three-tier structure headed by the CEO drives customer obsession and NPS across the organisation. Infiniti Retail’s team had a fruitful discussion on:
- Use of customer journey maps to identify NPS at every customer touchpoint
- Tags to get a granular view of customer feedback
- Use of machine learning and google sentiment analysis to analyse open-ended feedback
- Dashboard with several filters to slice and dice data – by cluster – route – origin-destination – department – promoters/detractors – across AOCs
- Improvement projects – CCAP, SHIKHAR, Six Sigma projects based on NPS feedback
- Detractor management
- NPS culture-building
- Use of NPS in the daily management
- Competition NPS
- Live mapping of NPS scores
With learnings from these sessions, Infiniti Retail compared the effective application of NPS across different industries and was able to identify areas of improvement. Post the sessions, as a first step, Infiniti Retail embarked on its digital NPS journey from July 10, 2020. Through this digital approach, the company could use the learnings gathered to shortlist the right vendors, re-design questionnaires with one main question and five sub questions. The digital solution was implemented at the store level. Now, Infiniti Retail can obtain feedback from a large number of customers at a granular level. In the earlier approach, the respondent had no option but to respond to all questions. In the new approach, the customer can opt out of feedback survey at any question and feedback that is provided is recorded. Customer verbatims are investigated and improvement areas are worked upon. Infinti Retail, from January 2021, has integrated NPS on its online platform croma.com.
After the digital NPS launch, data analysis on a granular level and subsequent improvements, there has been consistent improvement in the NPS process. In February 2021, the NPS has improved by 10 points, compared to July 2020. The second learning of an integrated platform is being worked out and will be implemented in an agile method. This implementation is likely to be complete in H2 2021.
Participant Speak:
Learnings from group companies on NPS process has given us great insights to begin our digital NPS journey at Croma. Whether it was win-back analysis with Tata UniStore, last NPS score visibility on customer profile at Titan or use of NPS in daily management with AirAsia India, there was something to take away from each interaction. These learnings will help us improve the way we are currently using the NPS verbatims today to help customers as well as our business.
Shiv Barai, General Manager & Head - Customer Service, Infiniti RetailTitan benefits from AirAsia India and Tata Sky
Titan was looking for insights on tools and methodologies used for deploying NPS. Text analytics, sampling methodology, sharing of insights generated, engagement practices for promoters, detractors, and passives or any new or innovative practice that could be imbibed to drive improvements, from other Tata companies. To support Titan in its improvement endeavours, TBExG facilitated two sessions on NPS with AirAsia India and Tata Sky.
In a session held on May 29, 2020, Santosh Chand, Head - Customer Happiness, and Disha Bhatnagar, Head - Strategy and Insights from AirAsia, outlined the company’s experiences with NPS over the past five years. AirAsia uses NPS for its entire customer-service cycle, starting from site navigation to completion of travel. It has set in place a three-tier structure headed by the CEO to drive ‘customer obsession’ and NPS across the organisation. During the session, members from AirAsia elaborated on:
- Use of customer journey maps to identify NPS at every customer touchpoint
- Tags to get a granular view of customer feedback
- Use of machine learning and Google sentiment analysis to analyse open-ended feedback
- Live dashboards
- Improvement projects
- Detractor management
- Building an NPS culture
Over 30 members from Titan, including business heads, brand managers, CRM managers and analytics experts from several business lines - jewellery (Tanishq and Mia), watches and wearables, Eyeplus, Taneira, Helios and fragrances, attended the session. The members found the session stimulating, with many giving it a perfect 10 in NPS terms.
In the next session held on July 24, 2020, Ashwani Kukreja, General Manager - Consumer Planning & Research, Tata Sky, conducted a session on the company’s NPS practice. Mr Kukreja explained Tata Sky’s NPS journey in detail, how the company collects feedback and acts on it. He also elaborated on the associated IT systems and stakeholders involved in the execution.
Titan found these sessions useful and it helped the company get a better understanding on how NPS is being used to measure customer experience. The takeaways from the sessions were implementation of the real time dashboard, tagging of issues to specific departments, accountability of each department in making the process improvements and process of seeing improvements in specific areas.
With learnings from these sessions, Titan is now driving the following improvements in its NPS practice:
- A monthly target on NPS:
- September target overachieved +3 points
- October target achieved
- November target underachieved -3 points
- December target overachieved by +4 points
- Real time dashboard development has been in progress considering the requirements and KPI measures for each brand and is going live for Tanishq by mid Feb 2021. Development will follow suit for the other brands after launching the Tanishq dashboard
- NPS is a KPI across brands for every store and all RSOs and is measured on a monthly basis
- Identification of customer pain points from the primary and secondary sub tags by mapping functions responsible for the process, product and policy to drive improvements that would lead to ease of transactions for customers, higher engagement and improved customer experience
Participant speak
The best practice sessions with Air Asia and Tata Sky provided a deep understanding on how NPS is being used to measure customer experience. They were both insightful sessions in understanding the approach and structured methodology of capturing feedback, monitoring mechanisms and driving actions.
Bhavita, Senior Manager - CRM, Titan