Celebrating CX Day 2024 with everyday tips for showing your impact

October 1st marks CX Day, an annual global celebration by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) of the companies creating great experiences for their customers and the people who work tirelessly to enhance interactions and optimize touchpoints day-in and day-out.

The theme for 2024 is ‘Good CX delivers better outcomes for customers, employees, and their organizations’, and if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the exact same theme from last year.

Why the repeat?

According to CXPA research, CX professionals’ top challenge continues to be making the case that CX delivers valuable results. A common issue we see in organizations that face this challenge is that CEOs don’t prioritize customers. When you consider CEOs are rewarded for business results and not for creating better customer experiences, the disconnect makes sense.

But when you look at the bigger picture, companies can’t grow organically without growing and retaining customers. Bad customer experiences make things even more difficult as they often result in costs through re-work or customer service, refunds, and more.

Last year the XM Institute estimated that a global $3.1 trillion was at risk from poor experiences. This year? That number has risen to $3.7 trillion. With so much potential revenue at risk, businesses can’t afford to have CX programs underfunded and understaffed.

Proof of business impact is paramount for CX teams to secure CEO and senior leadership support for customer experience programs, because if you don’t connect your work to their outcomes, they won’t invest.

So this CX Day we’d like to share some tips & resources on how you can better connect CX and executive-relevant outcomes, as well as real-life examples of dynamic customers raising the bar on what great customer and employee experiences look like.

Best practices for measuring customer experience ROI

Calculating the ROI of customer experience initiatives has many benefits. Besides showing the value created for the business, assessing ROI can also help secure investments, prioritize efforts, demonstrate accountability, and build cross-functional alignment.

Here are five tips to get started:

1. Start with clear goals. Before looking at metrics and data, define what you want to achieve with your CX program. Are you focused on increasing revenue or reducing costs? Consider which specific metrics you want to impact. Assess the potential value your organization might be losing due to a poor customer experience. This will help you see where there are the biggest opportunities for improvement. By setting clear objectives from the beginning, you can shape your approach to meet those goals effectively.
2. Use the right metrics. To prove that your customer experience efforts are adding value, it's important to identify and track relevant business metrics. Focus on business KPIs that reflect value for your organization and are directly impacted by customer experiences. Use these metrics to help calculate your ROI.
3. Prioritize actionable insights. To drive tangible value, avoid getting bogged down in endless analysis. Leverage your insights to pinpoint opportunities for improvement. Collaborate with stakeholders across the organization to implement targeted changes. Continuously assess the impact of these changes on predefined metrics to refine your approach and maximize effectiveness over time.
4. Use a control group. By implementing your initiative with a well-defined control group, you can isolate the effects of specific customer experience modifications on the desired outcomes. This approach strengthens the credibility of your business case for customer experience initiatives and enables you to measure the ROI more accurately.
5. Craft a compelling ROI narrative. When seeking approval for a customer experience initiative or explaining the impact of program-driven actions, communicating the ROI in a way that resonates with stakeholders and links your efforts to measurable outcomes is crucial. By maximizing your storytelling, CX teams can enhance their credibility and foster informed decision-making, all while securing buy-in from stakeholders for continued program support.

We’re passionate about improving experiences, and hope you are too. Here are some additional resources for a deeper dive on experience management & value.

• [Article] Understanding customer experience ROI
• [Research] What happens after a bad experience, 2024
• [Blog] Continuously manage XM value with the Realize Competency
• [Blog] Balancing value to your customers, employees, and business
• [Blog] Celebrate CX Day 2024 with the Experience Management Handbook

Celebrating experience management champions

Earlier this year at X4®, we heard how some of the world’s biggest brands are optimizing their customer experience to deliver exceptional digital & in-person journeys that lead to improved customer loyalty and increased market share.

Here are just a few examples of dynamic companies that are all-in on experience management:

Lumen

What do you do when your CX insights plateau? That’s the situation internet provider Lumen found themselves in after seeing improvements in key metrics like NPS. To jumpstart their CX program, Lumen bilt a real-time customer insights platform capable of bringing together data from more than two dozen different sources, from customer interactions to market-specific trends in unstructured feedback. By combining experiential and operational data Lumen gained clearer understanding of their key CX drivers. As a result, Lumen overcame its CX plateau and saw a 17-point year-over-year NPS surge.

“Real-time data signals [mean] that our people can meet the moment, and in many cases meet the customer with empathy and a good understanding of how to help them and how to action what matters to them most.” — Kristina Nissen, Senior Vice President, Strategic Pursuits and Mid-Market

Read more about Lumen's story

Stanford Health Care

The patient experience is an integral part of healthcare quality and has a direct connection to healthier outcomes. In order to provide the right kinds of experiences, Stanford Health Care has sharpened their focus on the right aspects of the patient experience to measure. In doing so, they’ve doubled the volume of patient feedback received by the health system, increasing response rates as well as bringing new visit types such as telemedicine into the patient-listening system.

“By measuring what matters, we’re able to improve future patient experiences and increase the value that patients place on their experiences with SHC.” — Alpa Vyas, SVP, Chief Patient Experience & Operational Performance Officer.

Hilton

Hilton recognizes that exceptional customer experience is vital to its success in the competitive hospitality industry. By focusing on enhancing every touchpoint in the guest journey—from booking to check-out—Hilton modernized their listening program, ensuring guests feel valued and understood.

Hilton also created a “Stay Score” that consolidates the in-stay feedback with other insights from sources such as streamlined post-stay surveys, contact center feedback, third-party review sites and unstructured data. Those sources feed into a new master metric that informs improvement opportunities across multiple operational focus areas, ultimately leading to increased bookings and sustained growth in market share.

"This composite score allows us to analyze guest feedback with a focus on key operational areas, ensuring that our metrics are both comprehensive and actionable." — Anthony Jahanbakhsh, Director, Customer Insights

Valley Bank

Gaining executive buy-in is no easy task. Valley Bank recognized that in order to translate the insights it was gathering from 40 different touchpoints into improvements, they needed to bring their stakeholders on board. To prove their case, they used customer feedback to identify gaps in their sign-up process for new high-yield savings accounts. No more than two months later the number of new accounts jumped by 25%! By demonstrating the connection between operational and experiential data their CX team was rewarded with long-term executive support. The cohesive approach between their CX team and executives ensures everyone is operating through a holistic lens and implementing targeted solutions that are enhancing the customer journey.

“Since we've had the customer feedback, we've been making incremental changes … and we are seeing our NPS increase as a result.” — Rhonda Armstrong, Customer Analytics Manager