ROI Archives – Pearl-Plaza

Struggling to Prove the ROI of Customer Experience? You Could Be Missing These 3 Keys to Success

More than ever before, proving the ROI of customer experience is absolutely vital. Businesses are under pressure (amidst the Year of the Squeeze, declining employee engagement, etc.) to look at cutting discretionary spending. And, unfortunately, customer experience programs may fall on the chopping block. In fact, research shows that 30% of businesses reported having budget related issues to their CX programs.

Under all that pressure, how are you supposed to build a CX program that continuously demonstrates its value?

If you are looking to unlock a true return on investment in your experience program, you need to go beyond sending and collecting surveys. You need to craft a strategy that enables you to use customer feedback and employee feedback to take action in strategic areas that actually improve the experience and map to business value.

To help our customers to do just that, we leverage a philosophy we like to call the “Continuous Improvement Framework.”

The Continuous Improvement Framework: A Quick Summary

The Continuous Improvement Framework focuses on building an experience program that moves past measuring and managing what customers are saying and transforms into one that actually improves the customer experience and benefits your business.

To reach the goal of a truly effective, ROI-focused CX program, we cycle our customers through our five step framework. Those steps are:

Design

The road to true experience program success begins with clearly defining an experience strategy that aligns with overall business goals and brand promises and then designing a program purpose-built to support those goals.

Take this opportunity to take a step back, identify goals, and assess the current experience program to see if it is achieving the desired outcomes. This would be a good time to engage in customer journey mapping, to visualize the ideal touchpoints a customer would hit in their journey with your brand.

Listen

Thoughtfully deploy modern listening strategies and data integrations to expand and enhance holistic understanding.

This step revolves around customer feedback. Analyzing feedback from your customers will help you uncover their wants, needs, and expectations.

Understand

Centralize data streams and leverage advanced analytics and behavioral science experts to identify where and how to act—and the anticipated impact.

Merely attuning to customer voices isn’t sufficient for businesses; even if they manage to listen diligently. It’s equally imperative for companies to delve into comprehending the identities of these individuals, enabling a profound grasp of their desires and anticipations. Pinpointing customers empowers brands to prioritize both the amassed insights and any feasible knowledge, culminating in the provision of a heightened, tailored experience.

Transform

Create and implement dynamic actions plans, trainings, and policies that facilitate organizational change and promote revenue-generating activities.

After organizations have lent an ear to their customers and acquired insight into their identities and expectations, it is time to initiate impactful changes or even forge fresh encounters. How can businesses embark on this journey of transformation following attentive customer listening and heightened comprehension? The foremost stride towards effecting any form of change involves sharing these newfound insights among other stakeholders.

Realize

Evaluate and demonstrate results of experience initiatives including organizational change, improved metrics, and financial impact while determining appropriate next steps.

A Common CX ROI Misperception

Where we’ve seen so many brands go wrong on their path to CX ROI is that they are too focused on the “Listen” and “Understand” steps of this framework, and not enough on the other three.

In our latest webinar, “Designing, Actioning, and Realizing a ROI-Focused CX Program,” two of our esteemed experts, Jim Katzman and Eric Smuda, break down the truth behind common difficulties in proving the ROI of customer experience—and discuss why surveys alone do not create ROI.

And because we are all about sharing the best practices you need to overcome obstacles, here is a breakdown of those three necessary keys you need to take your experience program to the next level.

3 Keys to Prove the ROI of Customer Experience

Design
Transform
Realize

Key #1: Design

Design is arguably the most important phase of your experience program. If you build your program on a faulty foundation, the results can be deadly for your program (think lack of actionable insights, false signals, and hours of work that don’t accumulate ROI).

When designing the right program for your business, it is important to shift your focus away from scores, scores, scores. A program that relies too much on scores can hurt your chances of proving ROI. Additionally, if there is too much focus on the financial drivers of the past, there isn’t much room to ideate, test, and implement financial drivers for the future.

So what should you focus on when designing your program? The answer is simple: you need to focus on what you want to get out of the program. And if that’s ROI, you want to build a program that will allow you to capture insights that can be turned into actions that result in financial returns.

In our experience, the four areas most programs prove the ROI of customer experiences in are:

Key #2: Transform

In order to completely transform your experience program, you need to focus on three key processes: organization, action planning and project management.

Organization

Organization refers to how you are taking action, and how that is being implemented across your company. One major step in successful organization comes from developing cross-functional teams and avoiding siloing data from department to department.

Each department needs to be connected to the customer experience and work to support front-line employees. Upward and downward organization will lead to a more holistic customer experience.

Action Planning

Using the Net Promoter System (NPS), you can look at inner loop and outer loop processes for action planning. Inner loop processes are very 1:1 based. They refer to individual customer feedback and the learning, and actions that come from that.

Outer loop processes are when teams meet and determine that they keep hearing similar feedback from multiple customers and that maybe something is going on systemically that is causing issues for many customers. Learning how to close the outer loop and create a culture of customer centricity is incredibly important in order to realize success.

The inner loop is generally focused on short-term action, while the outer loop focuses on structural improvements that may take longer.

Project Management

Whether they be short-term or long-term, you will always have multiple projects going on at the same time. With so many things to do, how do you decide where to focus your efforts? You need to consider how many customers are going to be impacted by this project, what is the cost/benefit of this change, and how easy is the change to implement.

Now, if you design your program thoughtfully, you should be able to use your findings to understand where you focus your efforts to help continuously improve the customer experience.

Key #3: Realize

After you collect insights and take action based on your findings, you need to measure success and then share that proof across the company. Because if you truly can prove the ROI of your customer experience but don’t share it with your stakeholders, how is it helping you in the long run?

It is important to share your wins! Be vocal about the success you have seen from your CX program. Not only will it help show how your program is helping the customer, it will also create a culture of commitment within your business and show your employees that their efforts are being successful.

Additionally, when you are looking to prove the success of your CX program, it is important to partner with your finance department. They are the ones who will help you measure and validate your wins, then turn them into a cost analysis report that your c-suite will want to see.

If you are able to use the metrics your c-suite cares about (customer acquisition, customer retention, customer lifetime value and cost reduction) then your program will become a proven asset in your company, not a liability at risk of being cut.

To Sum It All Up

Proving the ROI of your experience program is crucial. But, it is important to remember that it isn’t always about the money.

Changing your CX program is as much about driving a culture of customer centricity as it is about driving revenue. This cultural journey can be reflected in an increase in employee commitment, and by building a program that delivers as many cultural wins as it does financial wins.

To learn more about how you can transform your CX program into an ROI-Focused, revenue generating machine, watch the full webinar with experts Jim Katzman and Eric Smuda here!

In this Post

The Continuous Improvement Framework: A Quick Summary A Common CX ROI Misperception 3 Keys to Prove the ROI of Customer Experience To Sum It All Up

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 7 minutes

Your Top 3 ROI Questions, Answered

Imagine if you were still operating your business in the same way you were in 2019. Total nightmare, right? Your customer experience (CX) program, like your business, needs to be able to grow and evolve to prove a return on investment. If you’re like the majority of CX practitioners (CX Network’s “Global State of CX” report shows that it is the second highest concern for CX practitioners), you likely have quite a few ROI questions.

In our over two decades of experience helping the world’s best brands positively impact their bottom line with Experience Improvement, we’ve heard quite a few of these ROI questions, and have determined the strategies at the heart of a profitable program. In order to achieve true ROI, you need to take an integrated approach to experience by breaking down data silos and creating one ecosystem of data.

All of your customer data needs to exist in one place, where it can be accessed from anywhere in the organization, meaning that the game changing insights you need to acquire new customers, keep the old ones, expand customer lifetime value, and cut inefficient or costly processes are all in one place.

Pearl-Plaza recently held a webinar with representatives from Forrester, an independent market research firm, to give you the answers you need about your top CX ROI questions. Pearl-Plaza’s Principal CX Strategist Jim Katzman and Forrester’s Senior Analyst Judy Weader discuss showing the value of your CX program, designing digital experiences that make your business stand out, and setting your brand up for success. Let’s dive in!

Your Top 3 ROI Questions

ROI Question #1: Why Is Showing the Value of Customer Experience So Difficult?

Showing the value of your CX program can be a daunting task. How are you supposed to link improving experiences back to financial gain? Well, the truth is, most CX professionals don’t know the right mechanics they need to perform in order to show ROI through their CX program.

In order to showcase the ROI of your CX program, there are going to be calculations involved. But, don’t be intimidated by that. It isn’t as complicated as it may seem.

Let’s take a look at a call center for an example. At every call center, there is an average cost per call. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say our call center has an average cost per call of $5. If this call center receives 100 calls per day about an identified pain point (let’s say it’s a confusing process), you would be able to take that customer feedback and turn it into an actionable insight which would clarify the process, thus relieving the pain point.

By taking action, you may be able to turn 100 calls per day into 80 calls per day. 20 less calls per day at $5 average cost per call is a $100 of daily savings. Just like that, we have proved that having a CX program that creates actionable insights provides a return on investment to the organization.

Showing the value of your CX program is easiest when you are able to turn actions into numbers. By making decisions based on customer data, are you increasing revenue? Decreasing costs?

ROI Question #2: How Are Business Designing Digital Experiences That Make a Difference?

When developing a digital product or service, it’s important to think about the context that your offering will be used in. Think of your favorite airline, or an airline that has developed a “good” mobile application. The reason these apps succeed are because they were designed with the knowledge that when you check-in for a flight, you aren’t going to haul out your computer. These airlines knew it would be easier and more convenient for their customers to be able to check-in for a flight when they were on the go.

When you develop your products and services around your end customer, you’ll be able to create digital experiences that enrich peoples’ lives and generate more adoption, engagement, and advocacy.

When designing and developing your products, you also need to remember to design for accessibility. If you aren’t thinking about accessibility in your products, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. There are over a billion people in the world that are disabled. Whether it be different font sizes, text-to-speech options, or modified touchscreen shortcuts, designing for accessibility is something that needs to be done throughout the design process. It is not something that can be bolted on after the launch date.

ROI Question #3: What Three Things I Can Do to Set My CX Program Up for Success?

Have a Good CX Vision

The optimal CX vision for your organization should be derived from your brand vision. Your brand vision should answer the question “What do I want my brand to be for the market?” Consequently, your CX vision should answer the question “What do I want my CX program to be for my customers in order to support my brand vision?”

Build Out a CX Strategy

Developing a CX strategy can seem like a long, intimidating process. But, it is important to remember that the goal of your CX strategy is to bring your CX vision to life. If we take one more step back, your CX vision should reflect your brand vision. So, at its core, your CX strategy should align with your business goals in order to bring that brand vision to life. Using your business goals as a base, you will be able to develop an effective, focused CX strategy. Your motto should be to “design with the end in mind.”

Align Your Priorities

You want to make decisions that are grounded in customer understanding and current business initiatives. When thinking about which initiatives to go after first, take a moment to think. What matters most to the business? What are the goals that your business is trying to achieve now versus what they hope to achieve later? By prioritizing your CX initiatives with your business goals, you will create an effective CX program.

Moving Forward

As you look forward and adopt these principles into your own ROI strategy, don’t stress about being perfect. CX programs are ongoing, ever-changing, and constantly evolving assets to your business. There is no set “right” way to utilize your CX program.

Our recommendation? Start with a quick win—a straightforward project you can measure the success of.

An ROI Example from an Pearl-Plaza Client

A few years ago, one of our clients, a national chain restaurant, was looking for a new way to get in touch with their customers. They already had an internal assessment system that was used as a comprehensive assessment of performance in front- and back-of-house operations and policies related to Food Safety, company standards, and guest experience (e.g., quality, order accuracy, speed of service, staff friendliness, cleanliness, and team engagement).

With more than 13,000 of these assessments completed each year, the results helped drive continuous improvement in quality, operations, and brand standards—but they lacked a view into the guest perspective.

This company chose Pearl-Plaza as its CX optimization partner based on its ability to interface audit data with CX data. By bringing audit and guest feedback data together, Pearl-Plaza’s prescriptive analytics automatically generated two improvement priorities for each location. The integration model takes into consideration both guest experience and audit score, and creates priorities tied to the greatest return on investment: where this organization should put more time, energy, and effort.

After implementing these data-driven improvements using the Pearl-Plaza and internal audit correlated system, the organization’s restaurants saw a significant increase in all key metrics in just eight months:

34% in OSAT
33% in Friendliness
22% in Product Quality
22% in Cleanliness and Facility
19% in Speed of Service
12% in “Make it Right” (if an order had a mistake, was it corrected?)
3% in Order Accuracy

By focusing on just two improvement priorities at each location, this organization was able to completely transform its relationship with its customers. Starting with small, measurable initiatives is a great way to kickstart your CX program. These small initiatives might even have results that expand further across the organization than you would expect.

If you want to learn more about extracting ROI from your CX program, watch the full webinar here!

In this Post

Your Top 3 ROI Questions Moving Forward

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 7 minutes

How to Improve Customer Retention

There is something to be said about how vital it is to leverage market research to understand your non-buyers so you can convert them into customers. But focusing on how to improve customer retention is just as important, if not more. It is more profitable to invest in existing customers, especially since acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

The market may be vast, but there is a finite number of potential customers, so making a good lasting impression is key to keeping the customers you have already won, regardless of the industry you’re in. That is why your customer retention efforts are so important.

What Is Customer Retention?

The definition of customer retention is pretty simple: it’s your business’s ability to keep your existing customers coming back to you time after time. But with such a crowded market, that is easier said than done.

Did you know that the average business today loses between 10-30% of its customers annually? Additionally, research by CarlsonMarketing shows that U.S. companies lose 50% of their customers every five years.

The fact of the matter is that today’s customers have more options than ever before when it comes to purchasing products and services. So, if you aren’t working purposefully to keep those customers, it’s likely they will go somewhere else.

How Is Customer Retention Measured?

We’ve already mentioned a few customer retention statistics, so you might be wondering how those are calculated. Well, let’s do some math here.

Assume the following definitions:

CE = The total # of customers when the period ends
CN = The total # of new customers that you acquired during the period
CS = The total # of customers at the beginning of a period

To calculate retention rate, you need to use the following equation:

Retention Rate = ((CE-CN)/CS)) X 100

What Is Considered a Good Customer Retention Rate?

It goes without saying that a retention rate of 100% is virtually impossible. But a “good” retention rate is highly varied by the industry you’re in. Here are some industry-average customer retention rates for you to benchmark against:

Industry	Average Customer Retention Rate (%)
Media	84
Professional Services	84
Automotive and Transportation	83
Insurance	83
IT Services	81
Construction and Engineering	80
Financial Services	78
Telecommunications	78
Healthcare	77
IT and Software	77
Banking	75
Consumer Services	67
Manufacturing	67
Retail	63
Hospitality, Restaurants, Travel	55

Why Is Customer Retention Important?

Regardless of the industry you’re in, retaining your customers should be one of the top four goals of your overall business (alongside acquiring customers, increasing customer lifetime value via cross-sell and upsell efforts, and reducing operating costs). After all, it is your customers that keep you in business.

If you fail to keep track of your customers, their experiences, and how many of them are staying with you versus leaving for a competitor, you could be bleeding customers (and money) without even realizing it. Need some more convincing? Here are some additional facts for you:

68% of sales come from recurring customers
Loyal customers are more likely to share their experience with the company and they are also more likely to purchase from the company again in the future
Loyal customers who continue to support your brand will increase your profits
iLoyal customers will also recommend your brand and give positive reviews to their family and friends”
Returning customers tend to spend more on your brand over time.
You get a greater return on your investment (ROI) from repeat customers than trying to acquire a first-time customer
Even though only 12% to 15% of customers are loyal to a single retailer, they represent between 55% to 70% of the retailer’s sales.

How to Improve Customer Retention

The most effective way to improve customer retention? You guessed it! By leveraging your customer experience (CX) program. Your CX program gives you direct insight into how satisfied your customers are with their experience, and then identifies the areas in which you need to improve in order to keep those customers.

There are four cornerstones of customer retention that your CX program helps to support. They are:

Understand Why Customers Leave

Exit Interviews: Drive true learnings from the people who understand why customers leave the most (ex customers)
Market Pulse Programs: Stay ahead of the competition and learn from our competitor’s customers, other industry customers, and identify other opportunities in the market.
Invest in the Right Analytics: Predictive models help to extend lifetime value (LTV) by warning you when specific customers are likely to churn

Eliminate Customer Friction

Customer Journey Mapping: Understand moments of impact and potential frustration across your customer journey
Employee Forums: Access the employee perspective—and socialize that perspective up the chain of command to create effective change
Leverage All Information Sources: Look beyond traditional surveys to include other forms of experience data, such as social data, review site data, operational data, and more!
Deploy Microsurveys at Key Touchpoints: Get customer feedback in the moments that matter

Recover Customers Effectively

Closed Loop Programs: Address concerns when it matters most
Multichannel Listening: Fix broken processes before they become retention detractors
Empower Employees: Encourage and train your employees to use their best judgment and make things right without layers upon layers of approval

Drive Deep Relationships

Support Teams Consistency: Identify fundamental customer needs and create customized value and benefits
Formal Relationship Surveys: Create goal-oriented relationship surveys; look for churn warning signs specific to your business
Leverage Loyalty Programs: Leverage your best customers to be your most outspoken advocates

Calculating the Value of Customer Retention Using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

At Pearl-Plaza, we frequently sit down with brand executives and look at real-time metrics that show how much revenue has been recovered due to their closed loop program. Here is the equation we use to prove that value.

Begin with the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer— for example, a prominent pizza chain has publicly stated that their LTV of each customer is $10,000. So, let’s use that for our example. Because your CX efforts are listening to the voice of your customer across all channels, you have the ability to report that last week (hypothetically) you had 300 service lapse incidents across your digital and retail journeys. Multiply that 300 by your customer LTV of $10,000 and you now have $3M of at risk revenue. (Yikes!)

Studies tell us that 50% of those customers will continue to do business with your brand, however, 50% will defect—this is where your closed loop program comes into play. If we resolve the issues with half of that 50% that might defect, we know we have recovered $750,000 of revenue across your brand just in the last week!

From these numbers, it’s clear that, although it can be complex, focusing your efforts on improving customer retention is well worth it! And if you’re using your customer experience program to guide you, you’re sure to create the types of experiences that keep customers around for a lifetime!

To learn more about how to improve customer retention, download this whitepaper that teaches you how to use your customer experience program to improve customer retention and become a revenue generating machine!

In this Post

What Is Customer Retention?How Is Customer Retention Measured?What Is Considered a Good Customer Retention Rate?Why Is Customer Retention Important?How to Improve Customer Retention Calculating the Value of Customer Retention Using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 5 minutes

How Employee Churn Costs You Money

It turns out that your greatest asset in your efforts to create an excellent customer experience (CX) can actually be one of your greatest costs. What are we talking about? Your employees, of course! And, more specifically, employee churn.

Employees make or break the customer experience, and if they are not satisfied in their position, they can cost you money by negatively impacting customer experiences—or by packing up their bags and going elsewhere.

What Are the Effects of Employee Churn?

Employee churn is complicated. There are so many reasons why employees may choose to leave, whether it’s personal circumstances, career opportunities, or just a negative employee experience.

There are also many different effects to consider when you lose an employee, both tangible and intangible. When you lose an employee:

You Lose:

Existing Customer Relationships: When you lose a customer-facing employee like a salesperson or an account manager, you can also lose their contacts and relationships. Take the example of an auto dealership. Some customers come back again to the same sales person because they have an excellent relationship and know that the experience they receive will be just as excellent. These customers will likely follow that sales person to their next dealership should they decide to move on.
Employee Knowledge and Expertise: We all have been new on the job—and so we all know how difficult and lengthy the onboarding process can be. When employees that have become acclimated to your company and their roles leave, then you lose all the knowledge and expertise those employees have gained. And, you’ll need to start fresh with new employees. Additionally, you remaining employees will miss out on the mentorship of more tenured employees.

You Take on:

Cost to Recruit and Replace: We bridged this subject in the previous section, but losing experienced employees means starting over. And in this economy, finding new employees is much more difficult than it has been in the past. When actively searching to fill a position, you can accrue recruiting costs from promoting your posting on job sites or from using recruiting agencies.
Cost to Train and Develop Knowledge: Recruiting new employees is only the beginning of the costs. Once you’ve signed a contract, then the training begins. Check out the next section to discover how much that can truly add up to!

How Do You Calculate the Cost of Employee Churn?

Now that we’ve laid out how losing employees can cost you, it’s time to calculate that cost down to dollars and cents. Here is a quick equation you can use to add up the exact cost of training employees for your brand:

Sounds like a lot, right? It is! In fact, turnover can cost a company about 33% of an employee’s annual salary, according to Employee Benefits News.

How Employee Experience Programs Reduce Employee Churn (and More!)

When you focus your experience programs on making employees feel heard, removing friction from their everyday lives, and making them feel engaged and inspired by their job, you are investing in keeping employees around. And when you reduce churn, you reduce churn costs!

Here are just a few of the ways employee experience programs can benefit your business:

Retain Top Talent: When you identify barriers that undermine the employee experience, understand why people leave and recover at-risk employees.
Retain Customers: 68% of customers will leave because of poor employee attitude.
Boost Brand Perception: 70% of customer brand perception is determined by experience with people.
Encourage Cross-Sell and Upsell: 41% of customers are more loyal when they interact with employees with positive attitudes.
Decrease Cost to Serve: Higher-quality experiences mean fewer calls to customer care and a subsequent reduction in call center costs.
Increased Profitability: Engage and empower employees to take ownership of profitable CX outcomes. Companies with engaged employees are 21% more profitable.

Want to learn more about how you can boost employee engagement and your bottom line? Check out this free eBook!

In this Post

What Are the Effects of Employee Churn?How Do You Calculate the Cost of Employee Churn?

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Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

4 Keys to Transforming Your CX Program to an ROI-Focused, Revenue Generating Machine

2022 is being branded as “The Year of the Squeeze.” Challenging economic conditions that are bordering on a recession have forced businesses to either raise prices, cut costs, or a combination of both. And due to these conditions, businesses need to justify the return on investment (ROI) for every initiative—including their customer experience (CX) program.

CX Network, an online CX organization sponsored by Pearl-Plaza, recently asked a panel of over 250 customer experience experts across the globe what the top obstacles complicating customer experience investments were and compiled them into a report. Unsurprisingly, the answers were return on investment, finding budget space, and enabling stakeholder buy-in.

The key to facing these challenges is to build an ROI-focused customer experience from the ground up (and not as an afterthought). Customer experience strategist Simon Fraser has developed a list of four tools, tips, and techniques to help do just that!

4 Keys to an ROI-Focused CX Program

C-Suite Buy-In
Design with the End in Mind
Holistic View
Don’t Stop

#1: C-Suite Buy-In

Before you can further invest in your CX program, you’ll need the approval of your board or c-suite. In order to do this, you need to talk about the situation and possible complications, as well as answer any questions they are going to ask.

The situation refers to the environment or sector that your business is operating in. Then, it is important you state the complication. What is giving your c-suite headaches? What problems are they facing? What are they worried about in regards to a customer experience program? Lastly, what questions are they asking that you need to be able to answer through your customer experience program?

One common question is, ”How can I hold on to my happy, loyal customers who prefer the way things have been, and are opposed to change?” Your customer experience program needs to be able to provide those answers.

You also need to be able to prove the value of what you are doing in regards to your customer experience program in the terms that matter most to the c-suite. At Pearl-Plaza, we focus on four economic pillars that most businesses are trying to focus on.

Customer Acquisition: This comes from supporting the brand positioning and positive word of mouth.
Customer Retention: Forrester research shows that a customer who receives a positive experience is 2.7x’s likely to remain with your brand as opposed to a customer who has had a negative experience.
Increasing Customer Lifetime Value: Additionally, Forrester research also proves that a customer who receives great experiences is 2.7x’s more likely to purchase additional products.
Minimize Costs: This can take many different forms. It might be how you focus to try and move customers to a digital experience or how you can improve to receive less complaints.

You need to ask yourself: What is it that my business is looking to solve and how am I designing a customer experience program that supports each of these pillars? That is what the c-suite is hungry to understand.

#2: Design with the End in Mind

Have you ever undergone a major home renovation? If you have, you’ll know that during the first meeting with the architect, you don’t discuss where the power outlets are going to be. Instead, the architect asks why you are doing this renovation, what lifestyle you hope to achieve with it, and what will that look like in five years?

The same train of thought can be used for CX programs and CX strategy. Everything should be tied into your vision as a business. While designing surveys and preparing email marketing campaigns are important, you need to make sure the designs are in line with your customer vision and brand promise, and that your customer experience program can support the changes that you need to deliver.

#3: Holistic View

A fully functioning CX program cannot rely on transactional surveys alone. You need to be measuring and managing customer journeys, not just transactional data, so that you can improve on the customer experience as a whole.

There are four categories of data to be examining to accurately run your CX program:

Customer Surveys: Aside from transactional surveys, you need to be measuring journeys from a customer perspective and being able to access those points
Other Feedback: To build on customer surveys, you need to be managing complaints, social media, and creating a space where your employees feel comfortable providing feedback.
Internal Data: Most businesses will have a strong customer relationship management system (CRM) that will store all customer and behavioral data. Along with that, it will also store financial and operational data from within your business. Integrating this data against your CX metrics is essential to the success of your business.
Market Data: You need to know what your competitors are offering so that you can continue to improve your customer experience and keep delivering on your brand promises. It is also important to know how your potential customers are feeling and what changes you can make to convert them.

You need to be listening to social media, complaints, and your employees who are likely to understand where your paint points are. By measuring data from transactions, along with internal data, market data, and miscellaneous data, you’ll be able to complete the picture of your customer’s experience.

#4: Don’t Stop

It is vital that you maintain momentum in your CX program transformation. Remember, customer experience is not a linear piece. Rather, it is a continuous improvement journey.

You need to ensure that you have the governance around your customer experience program to drive change. Most businesses are looking at experience data that has happened in the past. What you need to be doing, is measuring and managing your CX program and making sure it is continuously evolving with your business. Furthermore, it’s important to develop a “Culture of Commitment” where every employee across every department is focused on continuous Experience Improvement (XI) and understands (and is dedicated to) that mission. Only then will your CX program be truly ROI-focused—and achieve all the success it’s capable of.

For more in depth information on these four steps to building an ROI focused customer experience program, watch the full webinar here!

In this Post

4 Keys to an ROI-Focused CX Program

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 5 minutes

3 Most Common CX Metrics Questions (And Their Answers)

Customer experience (CX) metrics are a CX program’s bread and butter. NPS, CSAT, and CES have historically been the main tools every program utilizes to have a systematic way of establishing a voice of customer (VoC) source and leveraging those findings to improve customer experiences. But it’s not easy—a CX metric score alone can’t create transformation.

CX metrics aren’t one-size-fits-all. Certain CX metrics are more fitting for specific industries—and even then your brand might not need to use the same metrics as your direct competitors. Case in point, there’s no one golden method to measuring CX metrics, which is actually why many businesses struggle to create a success framework.

In our decades of experience helping brands to build programs (and the success frameworks that accompany them), we’ve noticed there are a few common obstacles companies face. Here are the three most common CX questions we get all the time:

CX Metrics Question #1: What Metrics Can You Use to Determine Industry and Organizational Maturity?

Before you can answer this question for your company, there are three things you should answer first:

Are you measuring a customer experience—and is it satisfaction or NPS—or a metric that aligns with the goal you have?
What are you doing with it? How are the metrics of field services, retail, call-center, first-contact resolution, etc. used?
From an employee perspective, are you doing something beyond a basic employee engagement study? Or do you have an employee pulse metric by division, region, or queue?

There’s no one-size-fits-all metric that determines maturity—and should there be? Instead, you need to focus on where your company is on the journey toward your specific goals. Success, then, is determined by how close you are to achieving that goal, instead of a set of objective metrics that may not even relate to your business. Truly mature organizations are aligned on specific business goals and have metrics directly attached to those individual goals. They frequently check in on those metrics and take action to move the needle and tie that success back to their experience programs.

CX Metrics Question #2: How Can You Tie Metrics Directly to CX and VoC Programs Versus Other Internal and External Factors?

The important thing is to look at your organization and how they talk about success—and learning to speak that language. Are you a finance, operations, or retention-focused organization? And how are you integrating operational, technical, and financial data with customer survey data?

Organizations that are technically or engineering focused often look for an extreme amount of precision. But survey data doesn’t always lead to one answer—or the answer you expect. The real question is, “how do you pull information together and communicate that collectively?” As much as the mathematical connections are crucial, so are the practical ones.

Ultimately, metrics can be tied either statistically or practically, but the latter is much more realistic for a business. For example, the broader benefits when enabling an entire organization is hard to quantify but there could be specific benefits your program has contributed to make a project more successful. Maybe the insights your program provided can take accountability for 10% of the project’s effects. Then you can say, “it wasn’t all from our VoC or CX program but we get credit for that 10%.”

Want to learn about the 4 areas where we see CX practitioners tie their efforts to the bottom line most successfully? Check out this infographic!

CX Metrics Question #3: When It Comes to Survey Analysis, What’s the Best Practice to Analyze Which Attributes Are Affecting NPS?

Let’s say your organization leadership is focusing in on NPS—where you are, what drives it, and so on. So, you try structural equation modeling, key driver analysis, or heavy duty analytics. That approach is equatable to killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer. Instead, you want to break methodology down to core factors—using statistical analysis or text analytics—to see what themes come out and categorize them according to where your organization is.

Now, at an executive level, you might not want to communicate the “R-squared” of the modeling. Usually, executives just want answers to the questions, “what’s driving NPS?” and “what should I do with it?” Your job is to articulate the answers in a clear and simple way throughout the organization. That will drive your success from the top down. But of course, you should still have in-depth analyses prepared in your back pocket if you encounter someone who is statistically oriented.

Wrapping Things Up

You probably still have a bunch of questions of your own. Like, “what are the best practices to make sure you’re appropriately capturing feedback across the customer journey?” Or, “how do you focus on the experiences that make the biggest impact to the bottomline?”

If you’re looking for more resources and insight into CX metrics and ensuring your CX program delivers business value (ROI) to your organization, watch this webinar with third-party analyst firm, Forrester, to learn the answers.

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Wrapping Things Up

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 4 minutes

3 Tips to Bridge the Gap Between Your CX Team & C-Suite

Oftentimes, the c-suite and the customer experience (CX) or customer success team live on the same planet, but almost in separate countries—they simply speak different languages. The former is interested in counting dollars and profitability and the latter with measuring metrics. So how should a CX practitioner go about bridging that gap in communication? How can you take the invaluable insights your CX team is discovering and translate it into meaning that executives will understand and act on?

We know that customer experience can be a tough sell—after all, your business has so many priorities! Proving that your CX program has direct ROI and impact on your bottom line can be nebulous at best. But when your CX team has the c-suite’s backing, many organizational walls are broken and it becomes easier to demonstrate the insurmountable value that a successful CX program produces for a business. To help your brand along, here are three essential tips to close the gap between the C-Suite and CX teams.

Tip #1: Break Down Metrics

Customer experience metrics are core to any CX program—whether it’s NPS, CSAT, CES, etc. The challenge is how do you present those metrics in a way that makes executives regard them as crucial data points? At Pearl-Plaza, we start with an approach we like to call the “Solving for X:” take your executives through your business objectives and what you’re truly trying to solve for customers. Then put it under categories like customer acquisition, customer retention, cross-sell and up-sell, cross-savings, etc. By parsing out the problems your team is solving for, you can show executives how they map onto the customer journey. And eventually, how those metrics directly inform the important touchpoints in that journey.

Tip #2: Tell Stories

Beyond all the data, numbers, and statistics, there’s a human customer at the heart of your CX program. So how do you get executives to see and empathize with the customers they don’t interact with on a daily basis? Stories, stories, stories. It can be a customer story, verbatims, videos, etc., but the point is that storytelling connects humans together—and it can do the same with your customers and executives.

And it doesn’t have to stop at just customers. Employees play a significant role as customer experience providers, especially as frontline ones. Getting executives to understand a day in the life of frontline employees or customers can shift their perspective on how your program is adding value to the company. It’s easy to latch onto numbers as concrete evidence, but stories can make the numbers come alive.

Tip #3: Use Small, Real Money Examples

When you’re presenting a business case, the goal shouldn’t be complexity. Even the most simple of cases can prove to be a persuasive argument. For example, let’s say there’s a rental car business that sells at airports. What if we could save one customer per month at each of the top airport rental locations? If you multiply that customer by ten and then by hundred, that’s millions of dollars of value saved. So asking small questions like that can be a huge game changer in how your executives understand the value in a successful customer journey.

Building a Strong CX Foundation with the C-Suite

Luckily, your relationship with executives is an ongoing one. Which means there will be countless meetings and presentations, and most importantly chances to learn to speak in the C-Suite language. Each conversation is an opportunity for your CX team to prove that CX value and business value is one and the same. So don’t be devastated if it takes a few swings. Fail and adjust your strategy for the next meeting.

And when you’re looking for a boost of confidence and CX expertise, watch this webinar: Eric Smuda (Principal, CX Strategy & Enablement) speaks on Translating CX Value into the C-Suite’s Language.

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Building a Strong CX Foundation with the C-Suite

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

The Employee & Customer Experience Framework for Improvement You Need in 2022

Every year, we at team Pearl-Plaza like to look back and reflect on what we’ve learned about employee and customer Experience Improvement, and then put those top learnings into a “cheat sheet” of sorts for our readers. Building a customer experience program that helps you to differentiate from the competition is difficult—that’s where Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience framework, the Continuous Improvement Framework comes in. This employee and customer experience framework will provide you with some of the best practices in the business to help you get the most out of your customer experience program.

So, sit back and read on to learn how our customer experience framework can benefit your business!

What Is a Customer Experience Framework?

As a starting point, it is important to define what a customer experience framework is.

A customer experience framework is a set of processes a company implements in conjunction with its customer experience program to help the program be as successful as possible in its efforts to improve the customer experience, create a customer-centric culture, and positively impact the bottom line. It is like an map that you follow as you go through all the steps of gathering feedback from customers and improving processes based on the feedback.

Without a customer experience framework, it is hard to get consistent results you want. But with a customer experience framework, you’ll be able to make your CX program consistently successful, and adapt your program to scale and evolve with your company, customers, and the greater market.

The Continuous Improvement Customer Experience Framework

Your Path to Employee & Customer Experience Improvement Success

The key to Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience framework, the Continuous Improvement Framework, is to move beyond merely monitoring employee and customer feedback. Instead, experience professionals need to focus on using that feedback to inform action plans. Customer narratives are a goldmine for companies looking to eradicate superficial and deep-seated problems. Their feedback allows you to identify issues, define remedies that positively impact the bottom line, and ultimately create more meaningful experiences.

Brands can achieve all of this by sticking to a simple, five-step customer experience framework that we call the Continuous Improvement Framework: define, listen, understand, transform, realize.

Step #1: Design

When folks start up their employee and customer Experience Improvement programs, they’re often tempted to start listening right off the bat. However, it is absolutely essential that experience professionals design their programs before they launch listening posts.

Here are some notes from Pearl-Plaza expert Andrew Park about the first step of the customer experience framework, design:

“Listening to customers is obviously an integral part of any well-built experience program, but it isn’t enough on its own, especially when brands don’t truly know what they’re listening for. Listening broadly can be helpful, but far more useful is the capability (and the willingness) to listen purposefully.

There are mountains of data out there, and the only way for companies to own the moments that matter (when business, customer, and employee needs intersect) and thus achieve transformational success is to figure out how to listen purposefully. That’s why it’s important for brands to design their experience program’s goals, objectives, and other factors before turning the listening posts on.”

Step #2: Listen

Now that you know what you’re listening for, you can start setting up your listening posts. And whenever most of us think about employee and customer listening, we tend to also think about surveys. But what are the best practices and philosophies successful listening programs follow?

Here’s Andrew Park again:

“Traditional forms of listening usually involve long-winded surveys that focus on single points within brand channels. These surveys may also take a spray-and-pray approach, asking about everything the brand cares about—but that customers may not. Finally, brands may also spend too much time focusing solely on solicited customer feedback, which results in fragmented data. Fortunately, brands can be more versatile when it comes to collecting feedback.”

Want a succinct look at how to achieve meaningful survey listening? Get the four steps you need to follow in “How to Achieve Meaningful Listening Through Surveys”

Steps #3: Understand

You’ve collected data at strategic touchpoints using best practices. Now it’s time to leverage analytics to get to the actionable insights in your data. That’s when text analytics come into the picture.

Text analytics are vital to your brand’s ability to understand your customer and employee experiences. You can have listening posts across every channel and at every point in the customer journey, but if you don’t have the best-possible text analytics solution in place, your ability to derive actionable intelligence from that data is essentially moot. And your ability to create transformational change across the organization and drive business growth? That’d be a non-starter without effective text analytics. Without them, all you have is a score, not any context or information on what actually went well or needs improvement.

It’s obvious that text analytics are vital, but in an industry full of jargon, claims about accuracy, and a huge amount of conflicting data, how can you tell what solution attributes will be the best for your company?

Learn everything you need to know about text analytics in this eBook.

Step #4: Transform

In our experience, we’ve found that the hardest step for programs to conquer is going from insights to action—and therefore, to transformation. This is also arguably the most important step in the employee and customer experience framework.

Transformation is an important step of the process not just because brands can actively improve themselves, but also because it’s what your customers expect is happening. Customers wouldn’t provide feedback if they didn’t expect brands to do something about it, so bear this in mind when working toward providing the best experience for them.

So how do you go from insights to transformation? Learn the process in this article.

Step #5: Realize

This is what you’ve been building toward all along: realizing employee and customer Experience Improvement. But what does true success look like? How do you prove it to your business stakeholders?

Here are some thoughts from Pearl-Plaza XI Strategist Jim Katzman:
“Realizing success occurs when you can evaluate how well your program is hitting goals and when you can quantify the results. Even if you don’t hit a homerun against all your goals, evaluating what you have achieved—and what you haven’t—still gives you a great idea of what exactly about your program might need tweaking.

There’s another, more profound way to evaluate your experience program’s impact on the business, and that’s through the lens of four economic pillars. The handy thing about our model is that it’s broad enough to be of use to any company regardless of size, brand, or industry while also giving experience practitioners a foundation from which to evaluate additional financial metrics.”

Want to learn about the four economic pillars and other ways to quantify program results? Read Jim’s full piece here.

A World of Possibilities

With the right mindset and a proven employee and customer experience framework for success in place, the possibilities for your employee or customer experience improvement initiative are truly endless this next year.

With that, we’d like to say happy holidays from our team to yours!

In this Post

What Is a Customer Experience Framework?The Continuous Improvement Customer Experience Framework A World of Possibilities

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 6 minutes

Three Steps to Align Your CX Program Goals with Business Initiatives

Has your customer experience (CX) program matured or just begun? Or is it somewhere in the middle? No matter where you’re at, CX program goals need consistent tweaking to be aligned to greater business initiatives. And with the proper alignment, your company can drive better decisions that will positively impact your customers, employees, and bottom line.

In our recent experience forum with Forrester, Goldilocks and the CX Paradigm: Too Little, Too Much, Just Right, we broke down the mystical process of melding a program and business together to work in harmony. It starts with three important steps:

Step #1: Develop a Strategic Plan

Okay, maybe you’ve been thinking, “this program’s been in the game for years, what do I do now?” or “I don’t even know where to start.” Do yourself a favor and take a step back.

To develop a strategic plan, you need to zoom out so that you can focus on the overarching CX program goals that matter. What’s your company’s vision and how can this program play a key role? When you first identify the big-picture mission, the smaller decisions become easier. And then you can start to set trail marker goals that’ll push you towards the finish line. This will only work, however, if the CX goals you create are practical ones. Goals that are too aspirational will inevitably cause your business to lose organizational efficacy and buy-in. Make sure anything you set your program for is actually achievable. Remember: Quick wins build momentum for major buy-in in the long run.

Step #2: Establish Customer, Employee, and Stakeholder Essentials

Just because developing a strategic plan is step one doesn’t mean you’ll never have to revisit that strategy down the road. Your plan will need to continuously adapt according to several factors. Namely, who are your customers, employees, and stakeholders?

To flesh these core groups out, try analyzing the trends in your market from both global, regional, and local perspectives. What benchmarks does your CX program need to meet to stand against competitors and how will that fit into your company’s business plans? If that’s still not enough information, it’s also useful to look at how your specific industry (in terms of CX maturity) is evolving. Some industries are in the early stages and some have a long-established history. And that history makes a difference.

Gathering these broader insights into the industry and market will help you to realize realistic goals and give better direction on how to move your CX program forward.

Step #3: Design & Assemble CX Leadership

You can’t have CX program goals without a CX team. There needs to be dedicated leaders consistently working on customer experience as your business initiatives and the business world changes over time.

One might think, “Why don’t I just have a few CX experts figure this out?” And you should let your CX pros do what they do best. But when customer experience exists in a vacuum, it ignores one crucial reality. Customer experience programs should be owned by and should encompass all parts of a business because it informs all parts of the business. Your program needs to be cross-functional to be truly successful and aligned with big-picture business goals. The more experts from various departments you bring in, the greater the perspective and outcome. The ideal CX leadership doesn’t look like a single team—it looks like multiple teams overlapping.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated June 20, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 2 minutes

4 Reads That Will Help You Prove CX ROI

At the end of the day, investing in customer experience (CX) is about more than just the score. Sure, it’s great to see a boost in CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES, but what really drives impact? Creating tangible value for your business—and that means proving that sometimes elusive CX ROI.

Historically, CX practitioners have struggled to assign a dollar amount to the value of their programs. And if that sounds familiar to you, that’s okay! Throughout our decades of experience helping the world’s top brands craft memorable, business-powering Experience Improvement (XI) programs, We like to call them the four economic pillars of customer experience (or the four pillars of CX ROI for short).

Curious about the pillars and how they support a foundation of bottom-line value? Look no further! We’ve packed this blog with information on each pillar, examples of programs who have found success in that area, and assets you can leverage to mirror that success in your own program. Let’s dive in!

Four Ways to Prove CX ROI (and Assets That Show You How)

Customer Acquisition
Customer Retention
Cross-sell & Upsell
Cost Reduction

#1: Customer Acquisition

A well-built voice of customer (VoC) program enables organizations to anticipate what new customers are seeking in a brand and thus be ahead of the curve.

For example, a major athletic company sought to capitalize on acquisitions by optimizing its surveys to find new types of customers. By targeting respondents between the ages of 18 and 35 with specific questions, the company was able to understand this demographic and expand to new cities and demographics.The practitioners who ran this initiative were able to prove CX ROI by tracking the new customer acquisition, increases in unique customers, and market share growth that it generated.

In “Four Customer Experience Tools That Fuel Your Customer Acquisition Strategy,” we highlight four CX solutions you can add to your tool box that will help you bring new customers through your doors. They include Key Driver Analysis, Competitive Benchmarking, Microsurveys, and Multimedia Feedback. You can read the full piece here!

#2: Customer Retention

Organizations should never underestimate the power of service recovery—70 percent of customers who have a situation resolved in their favor will return to a brand, while a 10 percent increase in customer retention can grow a company’s value by 30 percent. Truly customer-centric companies can easily reach and maintain these percentages.

For example, America’s largest cable and home internet provider leverages VoC technology in their regional customer care centers (and are able to prove millions in CX ROI). They discovered that 3% of all respondents requested callbacks, meaning the brand had 1,000 customer recovery opportunities a month (or a whopping 12,000 per year). By combining this insight with customer lifetime value, the company was able to identify $23 million in recoverable revenue—directly resulting from customer retention!

Our eBook, “How to Improve Customer Retention & Generate Revenue with Your CX Program” is an all inclusive guide to everything you need to know to make your program a customer-keeping machine. Read it here!

#3: Cross-sell and Upsell

Given that it costs 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, brands stand to gain a lot from finding new cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Organizations can leverage CX listening tools to identify what about a brand spurs trust and loyalty from its customers and take action to make those offerings even stronger. After all, nearly 50 percent of customers are willing to spend anywhere from 11 to 50 percent more with a brand they feel they can trust.

An example of this is a large cafe group that was able to capture feedback from its existing customer base, analyze their sentiments, and make fundamental menu changes accordingly. As a result, the cafe group saw a noticeable revenue bump that it was able to link directly to their program insights and subsequent menu changes.

Curious how your CX program can help you identify opportunities for cross-sell and upsell? Check out our white paper, “Understand and Predict Your Customers’ Needs with Customer Journey Analytics,” you’ll learn more about understanding your customer journey, identifying what matters most to your customers, predicting customer concerns and behaviors, and how that information helps you to drive business growth. Get your copy here!

#4: Cost Reduction

Organizations can use CX feedback and employee feedback to both save money within operations and to simplify their provided experience. Are there ineffective processes that are costing more than they’re worth? Eliminating such costs can save companies time, resources, and revenue. (After all, training one employee can cost an average of almost $1,100!)

A top-tier mattress retailer used CX tools to install an exit survey for departing employees, giving them a greater understanding of employee sentiment. After implementing the necessary changes to reduce turnover and new hire training costs, the company was able to establish a clear link between its CX strategy and the ROI it helped to generate.
This infographic, “3 Ways Your CX Program Can Save You Money” lays out three areas where you can cut costs, lower cost to serve, and still deliver the same great experiences. You can access it here!

In this Post

Four Ways to Prove CX ROI (and Assets That Show You How)

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated July 31, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 4 minutes

Four Pro-Tips For Building a Customer Experience Business Case in Superannuation

Like many superannuation funds, legalsuper has had to quickly adapt to increased customer demands in response to legislation change and economic and global events like COVID-19. Like many businesses, legalsuper did its best to adapt to the increase in demand, but knew there was a better way to provide outcomes to its customers.

The answer? Customer Experience! The business used real-time intelligence to react quickly to COVID-19 demands, which enhanced customer experiences through the pandemic and beyond.

Elizabeth Swartz, legalsuper’s Manager of Insights and Service Design, shares how her team built a business case for a customer experience platform, and how this helped their brand adapt and evolve to a changing industry.

Pro-Tip #1: Establish Financial Linkage

The most compelling part of the business case was financial linkage. Swartz focused on the value of a customer feedback loop and drew a line back to ROI. She knew if the business could reach detractor customers and recover them from churning, it would help impact legalsuper’s bottom line and make sure members are happy with the service they receive.

Pro-Tip #2: Show the Impact Your Program Can Have by Explaining Top-Line Growth

Top line growth and increased revenue from an experience management perspective looks like retaining existing customers, finding new customers, discovering opportunities to cut the costs involved with serving customers and establishing sustainable, recurring revenue.

Pro-Tip #3: Describe the Coaching and Performance Impact to Your Call Centre

A CX program can involve real-time insights that help your front-line staff become more efficient. In legalsuper’s case, the business was able to save the contact centre from pulling lists and analysing insights, as this was now done automatically in the platform.

The Results? Direct and Immediate Business Value

Whilst the program is still new, Elizabeth says that it’s easy to see the value. Every time a new part of the program is implemented, the value is clear right away. Some of the immediate improvements to the business have been:

Customer satisfaction scores increased by seven percent, exceeding customer experience targets
Survey response rates increased by 8.5 percent over twelve months
Customer feedback is reviewed and responded to within two business days

Interested in learning more? Read legalsuper’s full story here: /en-au/resource/legalsuper-improves-member-experiences-through-real-time-intelligence/

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 1 minutes

Three Ideas for Showing the ROI of Experience Improvement (Once and For All)

Let’s be frank—establishing a customer experience (CX) program’s return on investment (ROI) is one of the greatest challenges that CX practitioners and the organisations they serve face in the modern experience landscape.

Did you know, according to Forrester research, only 14% of CX Professionals strongly agreed that ROI from CX is well established in their firm?

Across all businesses, the entire C-Suite leadership team is looking to validate an experience program by understanding: what is the financial impact of my CX investment?

The dilemma we face as CX and EX professionals is that across our organisations people can rationalise the need and function of excellent customer experiences with relative ease. We easily create an “emotional connection” and take the leap of faith that our belief will be true.

However, at a business level, when we are looking to make decisions to invest more in our voice of customer and voice of employee programs, we as CX/EX professionals often struggle to show the return on the CX and EX investment and thus can miss out on further invested funds as the rational minds look to maximise returns on what is tangible.

Here are some suggestions I’ve put together to enable the organisation to be customer centric, but also to understand how that centricity adds value to the organisation beyond “emotional connection”.

First Up: Map Your Program to Economic Pillars

In order to prove business value, it’s essential to draw a line back to economic pillars. Here are a few examples of economic pillars that could be affected by your experience program:

Customer Acquisition. Understand the market environment and changing consumer preferences.
Customer Retention. Address organisational or procedural issues that negatively impact customer experience.
Cross-sell and Upsell. Identify opportunities to expand loyalty and share of wallet within existing customer base.
Minimise Costs. Find areas for achieving greater efficiency, eliminating unnecessary elements.

Next: Understand Your Driver Tree

While the industry conditions and expectations for a CX investment vary from one organisation to another, there are basic ingredients across the board that should be included in your benefits driver tree.

CX practitioners have a much greater chance of proving financial linkage between CX and ROI if they can demonstrate CX’s ability to increase revenue, decrease costs, and reduce capital.

These pillars are fundamental to how a company’s CEO and CFO manage a business (and how both shareholders and the broader market evaluate a brand’s future viability).

When looking at the wider driver tree there are some more common areas of focus the VoC programs can focus on like a reduction on failure demand costs, a reduction of churn, an increase in tenure and more—see graph below.

Finally: Build Your Financial ROI Roadmap

To win the minds of your executive leadership team, it’s really important for each listening post (i.e. survey program) to think about the related operational and finance measures already being used by the business and link to those so the program is relevant. In other words, you need a financial ROI roadmap to continually point back to.

For example, your roadmap might include steps to reduce repeat calls or reduce wait times. An in-person brand could be focused on sales, basket size, queue time. For an episode survey like onboarding, it could be increasing product/service uptake or reducing early tenure churn. Your organisation already has success metrics that it’s focused on. Find out what these are and draw a link.

Focus where you can on cost saving assumptions first, as these models are typically easier to defend than revenue based models (e.g. reducing churn, increasing share of wallet, increasing average tenure or LTV). They generally require less calculations, less assumptions, and less time to prove an impact. For example, failure demand—where you identify the issues that drive avoidable contacts into the organisation—can be much quicker to identify and act upon. Empowering frontline teams to deliver better outcomes, increasing engagement and reducing staff attrition (or turnover) is another. But something like proving the multiplier effect on acquisition (so how WOM drives new business) is often a lot harder.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated June 28, 2024

Written by Andrew Crowhurst

Reading time 3 minutes

Build an Integrated CX Program

Build an Integrated CX Program

2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report

The Continuous Improvement Framework: A Quick Summary

Design

Listen

Understand

Transform

Realize

A Common CX ROI Misperception

3 Keys to Prove the ROI of Customer Experience

Key #1: Design

Key #2: Transform

Organization

Action Planning

Project Management

Key #3: Realize

To Sum It All Up

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

Your Top 3 ROI Questions

ROI Question #1: Why Is Showing the Value of Customer Experience So Difficult?

ROI Question #2: How Are Business Designing Digital Experiences That Make a Difference?

ROI Question #3: What Three Things I Can Do to Set My CX Program Up for Success?

Moving Forward

An ROI Example from an Pearl-Plaza Client

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

What Is Customer Retention?

How Is Customer Retention Measured?

What Is Considered a Good Customer Retention Rate?

Why Is Customer Retention Important?

How to Improve Customer Retention

Understand Why Customers Leave

Eliminate Customer Friction

Recover Customers Effectively

Drive Deep Relationships

Calculating the Value of Customer Retention Using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

What Are the Effects of Employee Churn?

You Lose:

You Take on:

How Do You Calculate the Cost of Employee Churn?

How Employee Experience Programs Reduce Employee Churn (and More!)

In this Post

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

See Our Software in Action

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

4 Keys to an ROI-Focused CX Program

#1: C-Suite Buy-In

#2: Design with the End in Mind

#3: Holistic View

#4: Don’t Stop

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

CX Metrics Question #1: What Metrics Can You Use to Determine Industry and Organizational Maturity?

CX Metrics Question #2: How Can You Tie Metrics Directly to CX and VoC Programs Versus Other Internal and External Factors?

CX Metrics Question #3: When It Comes to Survey Analysis, What’s the Best Practice to Analyze Which Attributes Are Affecting NPS?

Wrapping Things Up

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

Tip #1: Break Down Metrics

Tip #2: Tell Stories