The economic impact of a customer experience management program on your business: How to potentially develop 550% ROI in 3 years or less

An experience management (XM) program can drive changes across your business that increase loyalty, reduce churn, and generate revenue—and even the smallest changes can have a major impact on your bottom line.

In their brief, How Customer Experience Drives Business Growth, 2020, Forrester calculated the impact of improving customer experience (CX) index scores by just 1 point for 12 industries. Across all industries, on average, that small improvement led to millions—and in some cases, billions—of added annual revenue.

The problem, however, is many organizations struggle to connect data to insights, insights to action, and actions to enterprise-level growth.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the challenges, solutions, and results brands encountered with their experience management (XM) programs, and how they leveraged those XM insights to save time, increase revenue, and produce enterprise-wide ROI.

XM challenge: How do we uncover customer experience insights necessary to drive decisions that lead to business outcomes?

An experience management program is successful when it’s providing actionable customer data that drives change to boost loyalty and business performance at the location and brand level. A technology platform gets you part of the way there. The addition of partnership, service, and operator support gets you all the way there.

One of the biggest differentiators between XM providers is their level of support. Many vendors primarily offer software as a service (SaaS)—dedicating minimal resources to analysis support, insight delivery, and strategic partnership.

Organizations that choose to partner with SMG, a software with a service (SwaS) provider, get hands-on professional support with powerful technology—making it easier to activate insights across the enterprise. From onboarding to developing program best practices, SMG offers support throughout the entire program lifecycle.

XM solution: “Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. In addition to providing us input on what we are asking them about, they also provide us with valuable insights on things that we hadn’t thought of.” —Store communications manager, US retailer

Customer experience feedback should provide necessary perspective on what works, what doesn’t, and what you must do to move your brand forward. To see if you’re getting the level of quality customer feedback you deserve from your XM provider, ensure your solution has these capabilities:

• Program agility that keeps up with the ever-changing needs of your customers + evolves with your business goals
• Integration functionality that streamlines multiple sources of data together for one holistic view of the customer experience
• Professional services that provide a team of in-house experts to support you throughout your entire program lifecycle
• Outcome-focused insights that answer your most pressing research questions + link findings to financial results
• True CX partnership—not just a solution with dashboards

XM results: “In just 18 months with SMG, they played an integral role in completing our customer-centric strategy. Quickly taking action on SMG recommendations and validations has played a crucial role in our recent successes.” —Retail management director, European retailer

When it comes to understanding the economic impact of your XM program, numbers speak louder than words. If your XM vendor is only talking about ROI in a vacuum and can’t provide you with a tangible connection to specific business outcomes, your program is falling short.

SMG is dedicated to providing brands with outcome-focused insights that yield true value to their business. In our recently commissioned Total Economic Impact^™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting, clients quantify the efficiencies SMG brings to their business. Based on client interviews and data validations, this Forrester TEI study details the tangible business outcomes achieved by a composite organization leveraging the smg360® CX solution.

The in-depth analysis also determined—within just 3 years—a composite SMG client saw:

• 551% ROI
• $12.44M net present value
• <6 months payback period

Is your experience management program costing you time + money—or driving business outcomes?

With organizations continuing to ramp up investments in their experience management (XM) strategies, the onus is on brands to choose an ROI-driven solution that delivers consistent and significant impact across the enterprise. If you can’t prove your XM program is adding to your bottom line, it may be time to evaluate other options.

To learn more on how SMG’s customer experience solution helps our clients identify real-world ROI through their CX programs, download the study: The Total Economic Impact™ Of The smg360® Customer Experience (CX) Solution.

Ken White | President