The 5 metrics that prove your customer experience strategy is worth the investment

In today’s competitive marketplace, consumers are presented with numerous choices across industries, products, and services, leaving them with little tolerance for a poor experience. Having a customer experience (CX) strategy has become less of an option and more of a necessity for businesses to boost customer loyalty.

But how should you go about investing into an effective customer experience strategy that leads to increased customer loyalty, improved brand reputation, and revenue growth? 

In this post we’ll share the five most important customer experience performance metrics and show you how to determine whether the investment is worth it.

The 5 most effective metrics to prove the impact of your customer experience strategy

Evaluating your customer experience strategy is critical to ensuring your customers stick around—but which metrics should you watch to prove the value of your investment?

Ask yourself: is my CX strategy able to …

1) Generate new revenue?

You want to prove how your program is able to attract more customers, open more channels, and help guide product offerings expansion.

2) Grow existing revenue?

You want to prove how your program is able to increase basket size and lifetime value, shrink return cycles, and build loyalty for your brand.

3) Reduce churn + detractors?

You want to prove how your program is able to lessen at-risk revenue, recover lost customers, and curb employee churn.

4) Drive operational efficiencies?

You want to prove how your program is able to serve customers better, reduce operating costs, and increase employee satisfaction.

5) Show which actions have the largest impact on revenue?

You want to prove your insights, which can be derived from all your data points, can lead to frontline action.

The example below shows that the fastest route to increasing your revenue is by improving the experience of 4-star satisfied customers so they become 5-star highly satisfied customers, thus increasing their loyalty by three times.

How to evaluate your CX strategy investment

While the cost of an effective customer experience program depends on numerous factors (your organization’s size, current performance, desired outcomes, etc.), any successful program will need to support the five key components above. 

To partner, or not to partner – that is the question

Evaluating what you should invest into your customer experience strategy comes down to how much CX expertise you want to support in-house—commonly known as a DIY approach—vs. using a CX success partner.

Option 1: Build your in-house customer experience success team (DIY)
This approach involves building internal capabilities to:

• collect data from multiple sources at a location-specific level
• analyze this data to create meaningful insights
• determine what frontline action needs to occur
• create training materials and guide on-site, location-specific training
• evaluate the impact of your CX program to boost leadership support

Even with an in-house team, you’ll carry an external cost for technology and software. However, your team will be responsible for turning  this data into meaningful insights that drive frontline action. Additionally, it’ll fall on the internal team to be able to measure the impact of their efforts to secure support from leadership.

Option 2: Secure a customer experience success partner
This approach includes all the necessary expert support and program guidance, according to the specific components outlined above. While external costs are higher than with a DIY approach, your internal costs are usually much lower, and the best partners are going to be able to prove the impact of the overall program (make sure you ask them about this specifically).

Proving a positive ROI in your customer experience strategy is a crucial step to ensure it’s working effectively and to get leadership on board with your efforts.

At SMG, we build a revenue growth prediction at the beginning of all our engagements to use as a benchmark to demonstrate our impact. You can experiment with our ROI calculator.

Ultimately, if your customer experience strategy allows you to:

1. Turn data into frontline action to drive real business impact
2. Demonstrate this impact to leadership

Then you’re well on your way to delivering program and business success.

If the value of your customer experience strategy is in question, learn how you can drive real frontline business impact and clearly demonstrate this impact by requesting a demo today!