How to Tell The Story of Customer Experience ROI

Customer experience (CX) programs can usher in meaningful transformation, a more robust bottom line, and a better experience for customers, yet proving all of this ROI can be challenging for the CX teams and practitioners helming such efforts.

Today, we’re going to take a brief look at how to prove that ROI by telling the story of CX—a story of metrics, connections, aspirations, and, yes, hard numbers. The factors that comprise good CX storytelling are as follows:

  • Operational Metrics
  • Key Drivers
  • Key Metrics
  • Business Metrics

Operational Metrics

One of the best ways to prove customer experience programs’ worth is pointing to their impact on operational metrics. Of course, it’s equally important to include specific metric improvement as a goal at the outset of any CX initiative. That way, it becomes easier for practitioners to link the two when presenting to the higher-ups.

There are many operational metrics that CX programs can be used to improve. For example, if a given brand wants to decrease customer CPA (cost-per-acquisition), CX initiatives are a great way to lower cost to serve. CX practitioners can tell that story by establishing lowering cost to serve by a specific percentage as a program goal, then keep the mechanics of that program firmly tethered to that goal as they report to stakeholders and the C-suite.

Key Drivers

There are several drivers of customer satisfaction that CX programs can be particularly helpful for boosting—so, it’s also particularly helpful for CX practitioners to bear these drivers in mind as they link their initiatives to business success.

First, practitioners need to be mindful of their initiatives’ impact on trusted brand reputation. Are these CX efforts having a noticeable effect on the organization’s impact with customers? Other important drivers that brands can power with CX programs are better and more innovative advice to customers, as well as more promptness in returning to customers and closing the inner loop. Practitioners who can link customer experience to improvement in these areas will have told the CX story.

Key Metrics

Key metrics are useful tools for assessing and managing CX programs’ impact on an organization as a whole. There are several such metrics that brands can use to help measure CX efforts, including the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Overall Satisfaction (OSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).

The Net Promoter Score is particularly useful for distilling an organization’s CX efforts down to a single number. CX practitioners can use the Net Promoter Score to gauge how well single and multiple departments are doing in this regard. They can then utilize the Net Promoter System, the philosophy of continuous improvement that underpins the Net Promoter Score, to discern the meaning behind that number.

Metrics like NPS also make it easy to translate CX improvement into hard, specific numbers, which in turn makes practitioners’ job of pitching CX ROI to the boardroom significantly easier. Thus, relying on a key metric to tell the story of customer experience is a must.

Business Metrics

This is a big one. Improving a brand’s provided customer experience is an admirable goal, but CX program stakeholders and the C-suite are also interested in how these programs affect the bottom line.

Similarly to operational metrics, it’s important for CX practitioners to define how their initiative can positively impact several business metrics. A few of these metrics are particularly pertinent here—successfully telling the CX story means spelling out how customer experience increases brand revenue, lowers cost to serve, leads to better profitability, and finally, how it widens a company’s market share.

CX practitioners who can incorporate all four of these elements into their CX storytelling will have successfully made the case for experience initiatives’ positive impact on both a business’s standing and its interactions with customers. They can then be given additional leeway to keep improving those and other business elements through the power of customer experience.

Want to learn more about CX ROI, governance for success and more? Listen in to this latest webinar that includes brand new research from CX Network here!

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