So the question that Christophe is trying to answer is, once you've bought a company - how do you ensure you get ongoing value from the investment? Or in other words, and to use Christophe's golfing analogy - how do you become Ben Hogan or Arnold Palmer with repeatable, attractive performance over time?

The research done comes from a wide number of industry areas, B2B, B2B2C, global data and was focused around 3 key themes

• What are the drivers behind returns for PEG funds?
• Can you prove the link between NPS and these drivers?
• And if so - how do you get started?

The best private equity companies do not just go into the acquired company and strip out resources or simply cut costs. What they try to do is:

• Leverage the assets - increase the equity stake
• Multiple expansion - improve value from purchase to exit point
• Increase in operating value - EBITDA

But the world has fundamentally changed. It's harder to get investment funding, and difficult to focus on expansion. So the critical driver becomes increasing the operating value. Getting value is harder, cutting costs won't achieve it.

Over the years, Bain have built up factual proof points that NPS does link to the drivers behind returns for PEG funds that focus on Growth, Share-of-Wallet and Market Share. Using examples from the Private Equity world, Christophe clearly demonstrated that higher regional NPS scores led to significantly increased sales and that Promoters spend a higher Share of Wallet, and poor customer experience provides advantages to your competitors.

But by making the right decisions and using NPS as one of the critical drivers, a PEG could realise a 94% return on equity across 2 years!

So how to implement NPS?

• Use NPS during the due diligence phase
• Use NPS post acquisition to driver longer term value and optimize investments

The program will then drive insight and action for key functional areas and business themes including:

• Innovation
• Relative competitive performance
• Marketing
• Sales Process
• Correct business definition

And this will drive the Ultimate goal: creating a repeatable and selling operating model.

Be a Ben Hogan or an Arnold Palmer!