Customer Experience Quotes from Experts

“Customer experience” is a phrase that is generating increasing amounts of buzz. It’s grown from a philosophical understanding of the effect of customer/brand interactions into a metric to track, a goal to obtain.

We’ve collected customer experience quotes, definitions and statistics from industry sources to help you understand the power of improving CX.

The Customer Experience Quotes Roundup

Experts have a lot to say about customer experience, especially as the market continues to evolve around the idea of wowing the customer, not just satisfying them.

Below are customer experience quotes divided between different subtopics and angles to show you just how much impact results when brands and customers align.

Customer Experience Quote Sections Below:

• What Is Customer Experience?
• Why Customer Experience (CX)?
• Customer Experience (CX) Best Practices
• What is Customer Experience Management (CXM)
• Customer Experience Metrics
• Customer Experience Failure
• Customer Experience and Growth, Loyalty & Retention
• CX Transformation

What is Customer Experience?

“Customer Experience is the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer.” – Harvard Business Review’s Adam Richardson in “Understanding Customer Experience.”

Forrester puts it in even more amorphous terms: “Customer Experience is how customers perceive their interaction with your company.”

The first definition gives companies the illusion of control over CX – after all, you can manipulate engagement metrics, study touchpoints. But Forrester throws a monkey wrench into the works. Because CX isn’t about you. It’s about the customers – and their perceptions of you.

The expert CX quotes we’ve gathered explore Customer Experience from all of these angles and show just how much impact results when brands and customers align.

Why Customer Experience (CX)?

• Gartner predicts that by 2018, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations.
• Forrester’s data shows that:
  • The revenue growth of CX leaders is 5.1x that of laggards
  • Customers who have excellent vs. poor very poor experience are 4.5x willing to pay a price premium
  • 2.7x the operating margin for companies with engaged employees

               (Source: Why CX? Why Now?)

• “As competition and buyer empowerment compounds, customer experience itself is proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage.” – Jake Sorofman, Research VP, Gartner

Customer Experience (CX) Best Practices

• “There are perhaps signs of a realization here that CX is more than just customer satisfaction (CSAT); you actually have to drive word-of-mouth recommendations and give your existing customers more reasons to keep coming back to you.”  – Nick Ingelbrecht, research director at Gartner

• “You want to be customer obsessed, not competitor obsessed. Forget the competition, think customer first.” – Ted Schadler, Co-author of Mobile Mind Shift, Forrester VP & Principal Analyst (Source: Twitter)

• “Customer experience (CX) strategies that lack critical details lead to inconsistent execution and wasted effort. To improve, firms need a strategy that clearly 1) defines the intended experience; 2) directs employees’ activities and decision-making; and 3) guides funding decisions and project prioritization.” – Forrester (Source: Customer Experience Strategy Best Practices [Report])
• In SaaS, there are a lot of great “rules” that do make sense overall but can be confusing or borderline misleading at times. One you may not have heard — but it’s a good one — is:
  “Hire one customer success manager for every $2m in ARR. – Jason Lemkin, SaaStr (Source: The $2 Million Dollar Man/Woman: How to Think About Scaling Your Customer Success Team)
  
  (Image source: SaaStr.com)

What is Customer Experience Management (CXM)?

• “Customer experience management is the practice of using customer insight to design and execute a cross-functional CX strategy.” – Gartner for Marketers
  
• “CX management is a team sport and should engage all departments from supply chain to HR to ensure success. The advocacy of the CEO or a top executive is important in making this happen; creating internal pressure to support the vision the CX leader produces and implements.” – Olive Huang, Research VP, Gartner

Customer Experience (CX) Metrics

• “The revenue impact from a 10% improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion.” – Forrester 
• “Different teams and different executives can have heated debates about your product….Who’s right?  Net Promoter Score is.  It’s the voice of the customer.  If you have a high NPS score, you’re doing something right here, no matter the feature gaps or other issues.  If it’s low — take action, my friends.  Stop being so proud of yourself.  Your customers aren’t.” – Jason Lemkin, Venture Capitalist and Founder of SaaStr
• “Bain analysis shows that sustained value creators—companies that achieve long-term profitable growth—have Net Promoter Scores (NPS) two times higher than the average company.” – Bain & Company
  
• From The Predictive Ability of  Different Customer Feedback Metrics for Retention – Evert de Haan et al
  • All CX metrics (CFMs), except the CES, have a significant impact on retention at both the customer and firm levels.
  • Changes in top-2-box customer satisfaction, followed by the official NPS, have the highest impact on customer retention.
  • The predictive power of CFMs differs across industries, i.e. there is no single best metric across industries.
  • The usefulness of CFMs differs depending on the level of analysis, i.e. comparing customers or firms.
  • Combining CFMs tends to improve predictions. Therefore, firms might be better off using a dashboard of CFMs.

Customer Experience Failure

• • • “While 73% of companies with the most positive CX impact understand the link between customer experience and business results, only 35% of companies with the least positive CX impact claim the same.” – Data Snapshot: CX Expectations and Plans for 2014, Temkin Group

         Forrester’s data shows that:

• • • 84% of firms aspire to be a CX leader, but only 1 out of 5 companies delivers good or great CX
    • The top four challenges facing CX professionals are organizational culture, organizational structure, organizational processes, and peer support and alignment.
    • Firms lack discipline in six competencies to execute great CX consistently: customer understanding, design, measurement, prioritization, delivery, culture.
      • Only 16% believe their customer-facing employees can summarize the full arc of the experience
      • Only 36% require prototyping and iteration
      • Only 50% have modeled how overall CX quality influences customer behavior
      • Only 49% know what key experiences are
      • Only 33% of rms require soft-skills training for customer-facing employees
      • Only 33% formally evaluate how customer-centric executives are before offering them a job

(Source: Why CX? Why Now?)

Customer Experience (CX) and Growth, Loyalty & Retention

• • • “55% – Customers would pay more to guarantee a good experience
    • 13% [of dissatisfied customers] tell 15 or more people (if unhappy)
    • 72% tell 6 or more people (if happy)” – Slideshare: CX for Executives, Esteban Kolsky, ThinkJar

(Source: Why CX? Why Now?)

• • • “Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experiences.” – Peter Kriss, Senior Research Scientist at Medallia and the Director of Research for Vision Prize (Source: The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified)

(Source: The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified)

• • • Loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase, 5x as likely to forgive, 7x as likely to try a new offering, and 4x as likely to refer. – Temkin Group (Source: Customer Experience Leads to Recommendations)

(Source: Customer Experience Leads to Recommendations)

• • • “As a SaaS startup grows, recurring revenue begins to fuel the company. Not too far into the future, the existing customer base begins to contribute more of the startup’s revenue than new customers and bookings. Each startup will observe this revenue composition transition at a different point in its evolution because it’s a function of growth rate and churn rate. This evolution demands a focus on retention, upsell and cross-sell.” – Tomasz Tunguz, VC at Redpoint (Source: The Strategic Shift In Revenue For SaaS Startups As They Scale)

(Source: The Strategic Shift In Revenue For SaaS Startups As They Scale)

Customer Experience Transformation

• • • “The customer of 2020 will be more informed and in charge of the experience they receive. They will expect companies to know their individual needs and personalize the experience. Immediate resolution will not be fast enough as customers will expect companies to proactively address their current and future needs.” – Customers 2020, Walker
      
    • Organizational culture remains a top priority for CX transformation among CX Executives and CMOs (CX + Marketing). – Forrester (Source: Twitter)
      
      
    • “Every organization, every company across the line needs to go from a relatively anonymous relationship to a one-to-one relationship with the customer. They need to think, ‘How do I connect with my customer in a whole new way?’ No industry is exempt from this transformation.” – Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce (Source: 14 Memorable Quotes from #ET13)
    • “Analytics, personalization, digital store, and omnichannel tech are high priority / key investments for most firms in 2017.” – Zhi Ying Ng, Forrester Analyst (Source: Twitter)

• • • “Customers are evolving in five key ways, which is driving customer empowerment: willingness to experiment, self-efficacy, information savviness, device usage, digital / physical integration.” – Forrester (Source: Twitter)

(Source: @Forrester)

Customer Experience is the New Brand

Every single one of these customer experience quotes leads us to a final thought: if Customer Experience is the subjective sum total of a customer’s life-long experience and perception of a company – it’s really your brand. Consider:

“Brand is not a thing. It’s a perception. And by no means today is the brand controllable.” – Dipanjan Chatterjee, Forrester VP & Principal Analyst (Source: The new brand framework, how emotions fuel your brand energy [Podcast])

In an eerie echo of the first Forrester quote, “Customer Experience is how customers perceive their interaction with your company,” brand and CX are drawing closer and closer together, becoming nearly indistinguishable from each other. This, as much as anything predicted or observed by the experts cited above, is the future of business: Your brand is only as good as your customers feel about it.