As we look towards 2025, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) professionals must understand that in today’s saturated market, success relies on both:
Delivering high-quality products to consumers
Building strong partnerships and fostering collaboration with various stakeholders like distributors, manufacturers, and retailers
At CustomerGauge, our CPG partners actively investing in their B2B customer experience (CX) to build deeper human relationships are outpacing the competition.
CPG companies like Heineken, Coca-Cola HBC, and AB InBev are not only growing their bottom line but completely changing their culture by rallying around CX.
So, how did they start their customer experience journey? Through internal and external benchmarking.
In conversations with our CPG customers above, it’s been made clear there is massive demand in the market for reliable and extensive B2B CPG benchmarks.
That’s why we took it into our own hands to be the most trusted resource for B2B engagement in CPG and continue to drive the industry forward by improving one relationship at a time.
Whether you’re just starting with CX or looking to see where you stand among your competitors, you’ll find it all here.
Let’s dive in.
What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS) In Relation to CPG?
Net Promoter ScoreⓇ (NPS) is a metric used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction by assessing the likelihood of customers recommending a company's products or services to others.
NPSⓇ survey respondents are typically asked a single question:
"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?"
Organizations ask this question to customers either immediately after a touchpoint event to enquire about their experience, Transactional NPS, or as a general question about their overall experience with the brand, Relational NPS.
Depending on where they place themselves on the scale, you can categorize them as promoters, passives, or detractors.
We’ve seen the biggest names in CPG achieve several advantages by incorporating NPS into their CX strategy, and we have the numbers to back us up — in total, the CPG companies we work with have sent over 3 million surveys using CustomerGauge.
By understanding the factors that influence customers’ willingness to buy their products, businesses can easily identify areas for improvement and tailor their offerings to better meet consumer needs.
Plus, by leveraging real-time “always-on” customer feedback, CPG brands can establish a direct line of communication with their customers.
These conversations enable companies to address customer concerns and resolve issues quickly, demonstrating their commitment to customer satisfaction.
But above all, NPS surveys uncover seriously valuable insights regarding consumer preferences, buying behaviors, and trends.
Who Is Using Net Promoter Score in CPG?
While we’re focusing on CPG Benchmarks, there are a few other key B2B experience metrics other industries are utilizing worth covering.
CustomerGauge CEO and Co-Founder Adam Dorrell, and CPG Experience Council Chair Nigel Tordoff, walk through each section of the report discussing these metrics, the importance of measuring them, and their use within the industry.
Below, they started by diving deeper into who is using NPS and why it should be an industry standard (not only in CPG!)
Why NPS Helps to Define Excellence in CPG
It’s hard to define what excellence truly is in CPG, however, there are strong indications that can be found through Net Promoter.
Adam noted, “Maybe excellence is impossible to attain, but we have a scale that gives a sense of where people are on this so we can find out where world-class behavior is.”
It's not like we didn't listen to customers, but the feedback only reached a small group of people. Now, [with CustomerGauge], having the results be so transparent, with NPS coming in on an ongoing basis and having it seen throughout the company — it really, really helps with culture.
It all starts by standardizing the industry around key metrics (NPS) and benchmarking performance against industry standards and competitors — how can you know if you’re doing well if you aren’t comparing yourself against best practices?
By seeing NPS side-by-side with others in the sector, brands receive a full view of their market position and identify areas where they excel or lag.
Consumer Packaged Goods B2B NPS & CX Benchmarks
For the first-ever CPG Experience Benchmarks Report, we weren’t leaving any metrics unturned.
Leveraging our extensive network and industry expertise, we aimed to uncover key CX patterns in CPG supplemented by our internal benchmarks.
Analysis for this report has been made from more than 1,000,000 B2B responses from the customers of CPG and non-CPG companies received in the date range of September 2022 to August 2023.
The survey type and lengths are the same for all and the majority of the data was collected by email, with the balance from SMS or WhatsApp as survey distribution methods.
The customer feedback surveys were sent from the CustomerGauge platform with the logo and brand of the CPG CustomerGauge client.
They all asked the standard Net Promoter Score question you learned above:
“Based on your relationship with Company X, how likely would you be to recommend?”
The main B2B experience metrics we focused on in this report were contact response rate, detractor follow-up rate, and NPS.
- Response Rate: The top quartile companies have 25% response rate or better. However, the medians for both CPG and non-CPG are about the same at 12% respectively.
- Follow-up: CPG companies are significantly better at following up on feedback than non-CPG companies in both quantity of follow up and speed. We believe this is as a result of a highly engaged sales force in the CPG industry. CPG companies invest in their sales force, in training and equipping them with tools. In return, they are tasked with activities: having to visit 40 outlets a day is often a target.
- Net Promoter Score: CPG B2B customers have a higher NPS than non-CPG customers. The winners in this space are nudging NPS of 70, which is considered excellent regardless of industry.
Contact Response Rate for CPG
At a fundamental level, the response rate shows which customers are most engaged with you — but why is this important to track?
If accounts are unresponsive to your surveys, they're likely a high churn risk.
And we’ve learned in our first B2B NPS & CX benchmarks report, The State of Account Experience, that when the response rate is consistently tracked and improved upon, your Net Promoter Score increases (our CX Storm Webinar Part 3 goes into this in full detail)
In this report, we discovered that the median contact response rate for CPG is 11%.
What’s interesting is the best CPG companies have triple that with 32% at the top end.
After that, we advise circling back to the customers with individual answers or a more generalized “here’s what we learned” communication.
👉Discover how Engro Grows With Better CX and 90%+ Response Rates
Detractor Follow-up Rate for CPG
One of the core pillars of an Account Experience (AX) program is closing the loop, or following up with survey respondents — especially Detractors.
CustomerGauge is used by clients to improve their B2B relationships primarily, and that means sending the responses out to the frontline teams as soon as possible.
The median follow-up rate for the CPG industry is 61%.
This is significantly better than non-CPG companies, with a median of 38%. The best CPG and non-CPG companies both are scoring around 80% follow-up in 48 hours, with the top 25% of CPG companies getting very close to the 100% target.
We know what you’re thinking: why are CPG companies so much better? Our team has noticed that the majority of CPG companies invest in properly enabling their sales force.
They are equipping their sales teams with the IT tools they need to work closely with their customers like iPads, software tools, and training on how best to use feedback to help monetize their client relationships.
To CustomerGauge, that’s music to our ears. From engaging directly with customers to finding new business opportunities, those in sales positions are the backbone of so much of CPG's success after all!
Net Promoter Score Data for CPG
After 15 years of measuring Net Promoter Score, we understand that comparing scores without context is hard to do.
However, these cohorts all have very similar programs, so similar B2B clients and similar ways of using the data.
It’s about as close to a true benchmark as we believe it is possible to get in CPG.
Within our report, the data tells us the NPS median of the CPG companies is at 54 outpacing the non-CPG companies median of 45.
What that means is half of the CPG companies in our cohort are scoring more than 54 NPS. In addition, we see that the range of scores is closer together for the CPG companies.
Overall, this is impressive for the CPG companies within our benchmark!
The tenure of working on Net Promoter is less than the non-CPG companies, and we expect that the NPS median score will only continue to improve.
*Note: we are firm believers that you should not bonus or target your staff on Net Promoter Scores.
It is the output of the response and follow-up activities that we touched on earlier that have a lasting impact on your scores and ultimately, your business.
World-Class CPG CX Programs Getting Customer Experience Right
Every year we see all new CPG businesses trade in the old ways of researching the market behind (once a year surveying, stale PDF formats, and more) to bring in real-time “always-on” customer feedback to scale business faster than ever.
The most successful CPG companies are collecting feedback right now from the head office to outlets in an “always-on” fashion to anticipate customer needs.
A few of those success stories continue to stand out by taking their customer experience program beyond the dashboard and fully integrating it throughout the culture.
How Happy Customers Grow Heineken’s Business by 3X
While we know Heineken for their consumer-facing business serving cold beverages all over the world, their B2B customer experience is just as critical, if not more, than its consumer-facing experience.
In its frequent dealings with vendors and resellers, Heineken continues to take a customer-centric approach through CustomerGauge’s Account Experience program.
That means going the extra mile to ensure that bars, restaurants, and other resellers have the opportunity to communicate feedback and act on that feedback fast.
And their CX program’s impact speaks for itself. We welcomed Heineken’s Voice of Customer (VoC) Program Lead, Stefan Visser, and Program Manager VoC, Iris Boon, to our annual Monetize! Conference stage to share their results.
🎤 Watch the full recording of How Heineken Amps up Their B2B Customer Experience Here
Coca-Cola HBC’s Global Impact With Real-Time Customer Feedback
With “always-on” feedback, businesses collect customer responses 24/7, allowing teams to intercept and act on feedback as fast as it comes in.
That’s exactly what Stuart Ward, Head of Sales Capability at Coca-Cola HBC knew his team needed to scale efficiency during COVID-19.
Fast forward to today and Coca-Cola HBC is seeing over 50% of all their customers in 29+ countries, direct and indirect, provide feedback. His team can quickly view all key accounts, wholesalers, large retail chains, and more while adjusting slight nuances across each survey for each segment.
🎧 Catch the entire CPG Experience Roundtable with Coca-Cola HBC, AB InBev, and Heineken Here
Roll Out a World-Class CX Program of Your Own With CustomerGauge
Digital transformation is changing CPG right before our eyes.
And the truth is, the old way of researching the market once a year with stale feedback just won’t cut it anymore in this new digital-first world.
The best of the best are leveraging real-time insights and an automatic system to follow up on B2B customer feedback to grow marketshare faster than the competition.
If you’re ready to roll out a world-class CX program of your own, our team is ready to chat!
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