Improving the Customer Experience in Three Areas Positively Impacts Loyalty for Automotive OEMs

Customer advocacy in the automotive sector matters now more than ever. Globally, the automotive sector is facing a series of headwinds: increasing competition from new entrants, a transition towards more connected technology and hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs), and decreasing sales and profitability. Enhancing customer advocacy and loyalty can lead to additional spend from customers.

As one Automotive OEM found, promoters were far more likely to own more than one vehicle of the same OEM, use the OEM dealership for servicing, or purchase more warranties. Further, buyers of EVs tend to be more open to new brands.¹ Bain’s Net Promoter Score® (NPS) and system is an invaluable customer advocacy tool that can provide insight into these trends.

Our analysis of the latest industry-level data on the US market demonstrates that targeted improvements in the customer experience can elevate the episode NPS and increase the likelihood for customer loyalty and brand advocacy:

1. Digital and tech-enabled experiences, such as the OEM’s app and driver assist technology, have increased in importance over the last four years and have a high likelihood to delight and create promoters. As advanced features become more prevalent, personalized onboarding is necessary to enhance advocacy and relationship with the brand.
2. New episodes, such as EV charging at home or on the road, while of lower incidence, present a strong likelihood to create loyalty—though charging on the road also has a significant likelihood to create detractors. On the road, proactive in-vehicle support to overcome “range anxiety” optimizes the experience; at home, a smooth installation process is key.
3. Classic, high-incidence, service-related experiences continue to be critical detractor creators, with a higher likelihood of creating detractors from a bad service experience. Beyond price and timing, transparency and clear communication throughout the process are the keys to an elevated customer experience.

Our industry-leading CX benchmarking platform, NPS Prism®, builds on NPS and uses validated methodology to measure the likelihood of each episode in the customer journey to either annoy and create detractors or delight and create promoters. Our NPS Prism tool holds extensive automotive OEM-specific data that has been live in the US market since 2020 with quarterly updates. NPS Prism collects feedback from 35,000–45,000 US auto owners per year across many customer experience, product, and operational areas, including 25 episodes.

This tool can help you understand, over time and in an unbiased manner, the episodes that matter the most to your customers, how you perform relative to competitors, the root causes of the gaps, and the specific actions that will create the most loyalty from your customers—enabling targeted investment along the customer journey for the highest commercial impact.

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