How Belron combines VoC and NPS to drive action

As essential as Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback is to CX, it brings many challenges, among them engaging customers and actioning feedback.

At Belron, the parent company of Autoglass, one of the primary VoC channels is net promoter scores (NPS), which also guide the company’s strategic direction.

But in recent months, a new VoC blueprint has driven significant CX improvements across all the organization’s operating markets and resulted in the establishment of a formal Center of Excellence (CoE).

At All Access: Voice of the Customer 2025, Belron’s VoC manager, Jamie Carter, will explain how he built a collaborative VoC culture and turned feedback into action. Ahead of his session he tells CX Network about the global VoC blueprint, how it was used to solidify the organization’s CoE and how Belron is using NPS results to drive clear strategic actions.

CX Network: Your session at All Access: Voice of the Customer looks at building a global VoC program that can drive real change. What are some of the challenges you have had to overcome during while running VoC at Belron?

Jamie Carter: For us, NPS has always been the holy grail of KPIs. We have used it for almost 15 years.

When we designed the new VoC blueprint, as we call it – which includes multiple surveys at different touch points of the customer journey – there was hesitancy about it impacting our NPS metrics, due to survey fatigue among our customer base.
However, we had a couple of countries that were bold and took the plunge with implementing the new survey blueprint. We were quickly able to prove with their response rates and their data that actually the NPS score had gone up as a result, and the response rate had either maintained or also increased.

That meant had were able to prove with our own data in our own countries that it's a bit of a dogma that the more surveys we send to customers, the more likely they are not to respond to our NPS survey.

CX Network: Could that increased response rate be attributed to survey design, rewriting questions or any form of incentives?

Jamie Carter: As part of our global blueprint build, we did a review of our NPS survey and completely revamped it.

At the time, we worked on quite a decentralized model, under which we would offer our different operating countries a mandatory set of questions, then give them free reign on their NPS survey.

However, while some countries rolled out the mandatory 10 to 15 question survey that was fairly quick to complete, some countries were asking up to 50 questions and took 10 to 15 minutes for a customer to complete.

This led to a wide range in response rates, completion rates, open rates and other factors. We needed more consistency in both the NPS survey itself and the communication that went with it.

In that review, we also found we have a series of key driver questions which relate to different touch points on our journey; and they had not been reviewed or updated for almost 10 years. This meant that some were no longer adding value.

We revamped them, we looked at our journey and we looked at the key touch points that detractors and passives were talking about, then added them as key drivers rather than just the old school ones that we had before.

CX Network: The project you will talk about at All Access: Voice of the Customer also included establishing a Center of Excellence. Why was that a necessary step in the process?

Jamie Carter: The Centre of Excellence (CoE) is my number one favorite thing to talk about, because the VoC teams we work with in the different operating countries have a huge amount of knowledge. This means mandating how each territory should run its VoC program – this is how your dashboards should look, this is what to report – wouldn’t be the right approach. It would miss out on the wealth of knowledge, best practice and expertise that those teams and countries have.

We had a Centre of Excellence model previously without branding it as a CoE and without having a real structure.

Under the new VoC blueprint, we formed a CoE group. Essentially, it is the VoC lead from each of our core markets – the US, European countries, Australia and New Zealand – working together to form the CoE.

We meet every other week for one hour to share best practice around actionable insights. We talk about what we’re doing with our operational insights, what new insights we have, if we have made any changes in Qualtrics, which is the software we use, and if we have made any process changes that have delivered positive results.
As well as the factual insights, we share our opinions, we debate best practice and once a month the team I am in visits a different country to do a CX deep dive. That allows me to meet with the different VoC teams face to face, strategize, look at their whole VoC plan and how that links to their wider communication plan, then think about what's next.

The CoE essentially brings them together to share best practices, processes, actions and other knowledge.

CX Network: Many organizations use NPS, but most only scratch the surface. How should practitioners use NPS to quantify the impact of their work and go from metric to action?

Jamie Carter: NPS has always worked well for us because of the strength of our brand. When I meet anybody and I tell them that I work for Belron, the first thing they do is sing the Autoglass jingle back to me!

Where NPS perhaps fell down a little bit for us is when it starts to create dogmas. We had a belief that if for some reason the customer has had an average experience before the job, the technician that goes to them is the star of the show and you still get a good NPS.

When we started to roll out this blueprint, we introduced a post-booking survey and linked I to the post-job NPS, which showed that actually that's not necessarily true. When the customer didn't have a good booking, when they gave us a negative customer effort score at the time of booking, it very much linked to a passive or detractor NPS.

So NPS has always been a great approach for us to use. Our NPS scores are world-class and that shows the strength of the brand and it shows the willingness for customers to return to us. What it did not show, however, is the individual kind of stages of the booking experience and how we can constantly improve and optimize the journey.

That's what we have focused on over the last couple of years.

CX Network: What are your top  tips for how practitioners can elevate their VoC program?

Jamie Carter: The top tip is to get buy-in from top to bottom. Our CX team lead does a fantastic job of selling the work that our team is doing on VoC to shareholders and the executive team.

It's equally important that technicians, contact center agents, branch managers and contact center team leaders also understand what NPS is and what your customer experience metrics are, as well as how their work impacts them.

I started out in the contact center and I know that, when calls are queuing up, NPS is not what you're thinking about. But it's important to let those teams know how big a part of the customer experience NPS is.

The second tip concerns the CoE. If you have a global model, like the one we work with where each country manages its own processes locally, it’s worth pursuing.
The number of times the different VoC leaders in our CoE bring a new best practice, a new process or a new idea to me is phenomenal. Leveraging the skills and the differences, nuances that there may be country to country – rather than seeing the differences as a challenge – is vital for any global business.

Find out more about Jamie’s session and how to tune in, here.