Building a business case for investments in customer experience

Good news!  I found another great resource for connecting customer loyalty to customer experience!

Forrester: The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012.

A comment in the first paragraph sums it up:  “Years of Forrester data confirm the strong relationship between the quality of a firm’s customer experience (as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index [CXi]) and loyalty measures like willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch business, and likelihood to recommend.”

But it raises two questions:

1. What is the CXi and what does it measure?
2. How does this translate into cash?

The CXi measures: (still looking into this one).

The financial payoff breaks down into the following:

• Additional purchases from existing customers
• Cost reductions from lower customer churn
• New customers resulting from referrals.

A customer with a bank having an above-average CXi score is 12% more likely to consider another purchase than with a bank having a below-average customer experience score.  Conversely, the above-average bank is 12% less likely to have a customer defect.  The above average bank is 15% more likely to have customers recommend the bank to friends.  The competitive advantage is even more positive for credit card issuers.

For U.S. banks, the annual revenue boost can be up to $252M.  They provide a spreadsheet so you can customize this calculation.

I am not going to beat the drum for strategic design again but you can read about the benefits here if interested.