Organizations Struggle to Quantify the Business Impact of CX

By Steve Offsey

Today, companies compete based on customer experience (CX). In fact, almost nine in 10 CX pros say providing exceptional customer experience is very or extremely important to their business. But how do leading organizations optimize customers’ journeys, improve customer experience and measure its impact on the business?

To find out, Pointillist surveyed over 700 CX, marketing, and analytics professionals worldwide across a range of industries. In this article, I’ll highlight some of the key survey findings in the 2019 State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement Report.

High Performers Succeed With a Data-Driven, Journey-Based Approach to CX

To identify key factors that separate top-performing teams from their peers, survey respondents were grouped into three segments based upon overall satisfaction with their organization’s CX performance. The results showed that high-performing CX teams are more likely to employ quantitative, data-driven methods such as customer journey analytics, journey-based key performance indicators (KPIs) and milestones, journey testing and optimization, and journey orchestration.

Most Organizations Aren't Connecting CX Initiatives and Business KPIs

Organizations are still struggling to measure and quantify the impact of customer experience on important business KPIs such as revenue, churn and customer lifetime value. Less than a quarter of respondents say their CX measurement program is very or extremely mature.

Almost 50 percent of respondents indicated that they’re unsatisfied with their ability to quantify the impact of CX on hard metrics like revenue, churn and customer lifetime value. Dissatisfaction was even higher among retailers, with two-thirds either not so satisfied or not at all satisfied.

CX Teams Struggle to Quantify the ROI of CX Initiatives, Take Action Based on the Insights They Uncover

Voice-of-customer-based metrics such as NPS^® and CSAT are used by most CX professionals to measure customer experience performance, while only 26 percent say they use revenue as a yardstick to measure customer experience success. In contrast, conversion rates are the No. 1 metric for retailers, used by 47 percent, with NPS and CSAT coming second and third, respectively.

Most CX teams are unable to quantify customer experience return on investment, which was identified as the top overall CX challenge. As a result, most are unable to justify the increase in budget and resources they require to execute their CX initiatives. Furthermore, many are also struggling to identify and prioritize high-impact opportunities to improve customer experience.

Integration of Cross-Channel Customer Data is a Top Challenge

Even as the number of channels through which customers interact with companies continues to grow exponentially, most organizations still lack a single, unified view of the customer. This was identified by survey respondents as the No. 1 CX measurement challenge, cited by 45 percent of respondents.

For retailers, however, lacking access to siloed data and lacking a single, unified view of the customer were tied for third behind a lack of time or resources and an inability to generate actionable insights in real time.

Conclusion

Our study of more than 700 CX, marketing and analytics professionals revealed the following key insights:

High adoption of a journey-based approach to CX is critical for success.
High performers succeed with a data-driven, journey-based approach to CX.
Organizations struggle to quantify the business impact of customer experience.
Integration of cross-channel customer data is a top challenge for retailers.
Current tools and technologies are insufficient for quantifying and improving customer experience.

Steve Offsey is the vice president of marketing at Pointillist, a customer journey analytics platform.