How to Measure Customer Experience Initiatives and Build Real Evidence
How many times has this happened to you?
You and your team developed a new CX initiative that you’re excited to bring to your customers. But once you take it up the ranks for financial buy-in, you hit a dead end. You know your vision will make a difference—you just can’t convert its projected value into guaranteed dollars and cents. You go back to the drawing board feeling frustrated, and maybe underappreciated.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. CX teams tend to struggle with measuring customer experience initiatives to justify their investment. More than half of CX professionals say their teams are unable to prove the ROI of CX projects , according to a Forrester study. A lot of good programs that would produce good outcomes for customers stay grounded because CX teams find themselves unable to make the business case. That disconnect not only hinders the organization’s ability to retain customers, but also the CX team’s ability to grow.
CX Teams Need an ‘ROI Rethink’
At the same time, brands are facing increasing pressure to improve their customer experiences. Forrester just announced that CX quality in the U.S. dropped again to an all-time low in their Customer Experience Index rankings. Executive leadership knows something needs to be done, but that doesn’t mean they’ll write CX teams a blank check to fix whatever those teams see fit. They need to hear the right story with qualitative evidence, not just the soft, non-financial metrics that many CX teams tend to bias toward: CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer effort score (CES) and the like.
So how do you go beyond positive feedback and qualitative opinions to build the business case for your CX program? With real evidence to prove its direct financial benefits. Here are some tips to help you and your team get started on making that happen (drawn from Guide to Showing ROI: 6 Better Ways to Justify Your CX Spend, which you can download for free ).
4 Best Practices to Build Real Evidence for CX ROI
To ensure your project convincingly conveys quantitative value, make sure you set it up the right way. You need to be able to vet the data with A/B or multivariate testing to calculate CX ROI. The gold standard to confirm that your CX project is truly performing as well as it appears to be is to use a randomized controlled trial. Unless you test how people are doing with and without the solution, there’s no proving one strategy is better than the other.
