Marketing and Sales
To serve our customers’ needs as best possible, we have industry-specific marketing and sales teams who are responsible for developing new business with prospective customers and expanding business relationships with existing customers, as well as for continually analyzing markets and trends. Each business entity engages in sales and marketing activities for its own products through its own sales organization as well as through trading houses and local distributors. Major customers with global operations are an exception to this, as these are serviced directly by our key account managers. All activities are conducted in close cooperation between marketing, sales, and application development teams. At Covestro, marketing activities are comprehensively managed by the business entities.
As part of our Sustainable Future strategy and the Customer Centricity concept described there, we use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure our customers’ willingness to recommend Covestro. To this end, we are conducting a survey to which all customers are invited with whom there has been an active business relationship or interaction in the previous 12 months. Central to this is the question of how likely it is that customers would recommend the company to employees or business partners. Covestro uses the NPS score, which ranges between –100 and +100, as a measure of customer satisfaction. An NPS of +42 was measured for fiscal 2023 (previous year: +42). According to those surveyed, the main reasons for this high willingness to recommend Covestro are the company’s customer service, product quality, and the good business relationship.
Our global marketing and sales activities continue to focus on progressive digitalization, the circular economy, and collaboration. At Covestro, we are confident that, through digital transformation, we can produce unique experiences that provide added value to our customers and partners. In this way, we create personalized experiences at each of our digital points of contact to further optimize the interaction with Covestro. We also continued to standardize and intensify the use of omnichannel campaigns to make our digital marketing measures even more efficient and effective.
Initially launched in 2022, the rollout of the Circular Intelligence(CQ) label for products – a key module on our path to becoming fully circular – continued on an expanded scale as a result of adding innovative recycling technologies. The positioning of these CQ solutions in the marketplace was accompanied by a corporate campaign. In addition, the business entities conducted campaigns on specific individual solutions, such as the better buildings campaign run by the Performance Materials business entity. At industry events and through various social media channels, the benefits to the construction industry of low-carbon insulation on the basis of climate-neutral MDI were demonstrated along the entire value chain.
The corporate Supply Chain & Logistics function with its regional hubs in EMLA, NA, and APAC is responsible for deliveries to customers and efficient order processing. Supply Chain & Logistics owns the process – from order acceptance to site logistics, and from shipping planning to invoicing and complaints handling. Via customer-oriented support within the individual regions, orders can be processed quickly and smoothly. Covestro prioritizes the use of channels such as e-commerce platforms for order entry and processing. Our customers can submit orders and check the status of their orders at any time in the Order@Covestro self-service portal. The portal is not used to initiate new business, but rather complements the services we provide to our existing customers and helps us handle routine inquiries independently of our customer service and sales staff’s business hours. Covestro is improving its options for shipment tracking solutions in all regions, providing customers with a transparent overview of their orders and deliveries.
Covestro operates a global production network and produces in EMLA, NA, and APAC, in particular for customers within the respective regions. Our products are transported to the customer by logistics service providers with safety, environmental, and quality criteria being part of awarding the contract. On the basis of this foundation, delivery reliability is particularly important to us. Our foremost quality goal is therefore to eliminate errors in all our processes to guarantee a high level of customer satisfaction. This is regularly measured in a global management system: We take into account customer satisfaction analyses in which we are rated as a supplier, as well as supplier assessments that we originate, in which we evaluate our transport service providers on the basis of the responses from our customers. We use this data as well as reliability, availability, and process adherence performance indicators to derive corrective and preventive actions for the purpose of continually increasing quality and customer satisfaction and lowering the error rate and the incidence of complaints. When choosing the transport route, we pay particular attention to resource efficiency and the associated reduction in GHG emissions. Particularly in Europe, intermodal transport, which uses a combination of rail and waterways, is preferred for longer-distance shipments of bulk product. Projects on drives with alternative sources of energy and on the use of alternative fuels are the main focus of cooperation with our logistics partners. At the same time, we are driving further automation and digitalization of our business processes.
Fiscal 2023 as a whole was affected by high energy costs and a decline in new orders. In the reporting year, we received 5.30 customer complaints (previous year: 5.11) per 1,000 deliveries. Complaints caused by logistical problems are included in Covestro’s assessment of the performance of the freight forwarders and are discussed in the regularly held review meetings.