Prove the value of your CX program

As important as CX metrics like NPS or CSAT are, many company executives still focus heavily on traditional operational metric like profit, revenue, customer lifetime value or sales leads when judging whether something is a success or not.

You already know that your CX metrics are just as important, but how do you convince the leadership team that NPS or CSAT should be held in equally high esteem when it comes to measuring success?

There are plenty of published studies that build the case for ROI, with great headline figures including:

• Promoters are 81% more likely to repurchase
• 86% of customers will pay more for a better experience
• CX leaders outperform laggards in the stock market by 79.9% over 8-years
• CX leaders grow twice as fast and at 15% lower cost than laggards

But what about getting really specific and demonstrating to your leadership team the precise impact your program is having on their metrics?

Combining your operational and experience data

To really prove value in your organisation, you need to make a direct link between what your customers are saying, and what they’re doing.

So if they’re saying they love the brand or rated the experience as 5/5 how does that translate into things like their average spend or whether they make a repeat purchase?

To find out, you need to have all the right data in place. There are two types of data you need:

• Operational data – the data that tells you what’s happened in the past like sales figures or leads. You’ll usually have plenty of this in various sources like your CRM system, web analytics or finance systems
• Experience data – the qualitative data that tells you why it’s happened. This would include your customer feedback and metrics like NPS or CSAT

The key to proving ROI is making links between the two. And when you have them all on a single platform that’s a much easier task.

When you can make links between what customers are saying, doing and spending, you can understand the key drivers at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

You can start to apply statistical tests to outcome metrics – for example average customer spend – and identify key drivers based on your customer feedback. It means you can see exactly which parts of the customer experience are impacting the metrics your leadership team cares most about.

See how Qualtrics iQ makes stats easy

Say for example a hotel chain identified that properties that run a kids club also have a higher number of returning guests, leading to increased revenue from their existing customers.

They could then run a regression to model the impact on revenue of having a kids club in the hotel, demonstrating the impact on the business’ bottom line.

So when the CX manager at the hotel chain asks the executive team for investment to roll out kids clubs across all its properties, they’ll be armed with data showing the predicted return for the business.

With both operational and experience data in one place, you can make those links and demonstrate to the executive team the impact of everything from increased NPS scores to rolling out improvements and changes based on your customer experience data.

It means everyone in the organisation will be able to see just how important CX metrics are and how they impact the organisation’s success.