Scale Revenue Growth Through Customer Experience

Your journey starts with a clear, customer-focused vision. Define this with guiding principles and make them the cornerstone of your organization’s culture. Every team member, from executives to front-line employees, should not only be familiar with these principles but also integrate them into their daily interactions and decision-making processes.

The Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than half of a customer's experience is influenced by emotions. Brands that consequently replace their own limited perspective with an accurate customer perspective succeed in establishing an emotional connection outperform competitors by 85% in sales growth. So, the best customer experiences are achieved when you create an emotional connection with the customer.

Remember, it's not just what you offer; it's how your customers feel about the entire experience.

So, what does that mean? A positive experience for customers 71% of people recommend a product or service because they received a “great experience” and 65% of all consumers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.

It is important to know if all this investment in your teams, process, and technology is working and paying off. What matters here is the money spent versus the money generated, also known as return on investment (ROI). To optimize return on investment (ROI) in business, focus on four key pillars:

1. Growth: Enhance lifetime value by integrating customer insights across all departments, from marketing to product management, and prioritize customer engagement.

2. Performance: Incorporate customer feedback into performance benchmarks, linking employee activities to customer satisfaction and overall business success.

3. Strategy: Ensure all departmental strategies are customer-experience-centric, promoting cross-functional collaboration and customer-focused decision-making.

4. Efficiency: Utilize customer insights to streamline operations, address brand integrity issues, and implement customer-oriented actions at all levels.

Measure success using top-line and bottom-line Customer Experience (CX) metrics:

• Top-line Metrics: Assess business growth through customer referrals, expanded purchases, longer customer tenure, positive word of mouth, growth from promoters, CX-inspired growth, recurring revenue, margin expansion, and sales velocity.

• Bottom-line Metrics: Focus on cost efficiency and include metrics like lower customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, customer service value, customer retention, reduced negative word of mouth, less workplace stress, shorter sales cycles, efficient product design, issue resolution, resource reallocation, risk reduction, and CX-inspired efficiency and strategies.

The ultimate goal is to maximize lifetime value, with all CS and CX measures contributing to this aim. By prioritizing bottom-line CX metrics, you'll see quicker and larger gains, benefiting all current and future customers.

Customers expect consistency across all channels. So focus on the entire journey, not just individual touchpoints. Ensure your CX strategy delivers a unified experience, whether they interact with your brand online, in-store, or through customer service, no matter which platform, channel, or device they’re using.

McKinsey research indicates that journey optimization can have a more substantial impact on customer satisfaction and business outcomes than focusing solely on specific interactions.

This means you need a clear understanding of the end-to-end experiences with customers and how interactions at each point are perceived. Focusing on a customer’s journey, and identifying the problems within them, offers new opportunities to create a great customer experience. This also enables your teams to brainstorm ideas to reduce friction, improve business relationships, and increase growth.