
What Is Experience-Led Growth?

Make new customers but keep the old. One is silver and the other is gold.
The Girl Scouts song lyrics provide good advice for businesses as well as troops. Some companies focus primarily on acquiring new customers while failing to keep their existing ones happy in the everyday moments that matter. That can be a costly mistake. According to a PwC survey of 4,036 consumers in the U.S., 55% of respondents said they would stop buying from a company after several negative experiences—and 8% would leave after just one.
Businesses have to acquire three new customers to compensate for the value of one lost customer, falling into the trap of constantly needing to bring in more and more customers. Recognizing this, successful business leaders focus on experience-led growth: improving and providing consistent customer experiences to retain loyal customers, increasing customer lifetime value .
According to McKinsey, experience-led growth refers to a customer strategy that drives profitable growth:
“Providing a distinctive customer experience (CX), consistently and proactively, that entices existing customers who choose their brand. These customers change their behaviors, and such behavior changes can be measured by concrete financial metrics like share of wallet, repeat purchases, or net revenue retention (NRR).”
To succeed with experience-led growth, business leaders define their desired financial outcome, such as higher upsell rates or reduced churn, and then prioritize the CX improvements that will produce those results.
Why Does Experience-Led Growth Matter?
The world's most successful growth companies generate the majority (80%) of their value by tapping into new revenue streams from their existing customer base. According to McKinsey, companies that are CX leaders achieved more than double the revenue growth of “CX laggards” between 2016 and 2021–and rebounded more quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Successful experience-led growth strategies—those that increase customer satisfaction by 20% or more—have positive financial impacts, increasing:
