How can you quantify the customer experience: can you show effective ROI?
Harley Manning’s comments on his Forrestor blog about a study that researched if there was a correlation between Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CxPi) rankings and stock market performance.
“Andrew’s analysis confirmed Watermark’s findings: The customer experience leaders consistently outperformed the other two groups; the customer experience laggards consistently fell short.”
While this isn’t hard and fast evidence of the impact of a positive customer experience, the correlation speaks for itself. One of the simplest explanations of a good customer experience is that organisations treat their customers well. Customers that are treated well are more likely to come back for business and buy more. Hopefully we’ll continue to see more investigative studies into the influence of a great Customer Experience
Hi Colin
I saw the Forrester survey earlier as well. It reminded me of an earlier study that showed a perfect corelation between the price of rum in Havana and Presbyterian minister’s salaries in the USA. Go figure.
As we both recognise, the correlation between what Forrester measured as the CEx (itself rather flawed) and stockmarket performance means little if anything at all. Correlation is not causation.
A superior CEx could have influenced the stockmarket performance. Superior stockmarket performance could have released funds to improve the CEx. They could both be related to a third factor, such as customer satisfaction (where there is some evidence for a causal reationship with business performance). Or bearing in mind the complete lack of robust data in Forrester’s survey, the relationship could be entirely due to chance.
It is time that CEx was investigated properly to identify what makes a good CEx, how that changes with customers’ experience of the CEx, what that means for customer behaviour and ultimately, what that means for business performance. Causation is what we are looking for, not correlation.
Sadly, the Forester survey provides more heat than light. Plus Ça change!
Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
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