How Does the Customer Experience Impact the Company?

How does the customer experience impact the company? Customer experience affects the entire organization — not just the contact center — including every department, from sales and marketing to product and operations, all the way up to the C-suite. 

In our e-book, How Customer Experience Serves Your Organization’s Most Crucial Goals, created in collaboration with Experience Investigators, we reveal the top ways customer experience can deliver results across the organization, shedding light on the reasons to invest in customer experience. We’ll recap key findings from that analysis here.

But first things first, what do we mean when we refer to customer experience?

What is customer experience, anyway? 

Here’s how we’ve defined the phrase customer experience in our customer experience glossary:

Customer experience (CX): Customers’ perception of their experience with a brand or organization over time, which results from every interaction they have, from the website to customer service to purchasing a product or service, etc. This allows companies to drive loyalty at every point along the customer lifecycle by capturing and analyzing signals to predict behavior, take action, and create experiences that lead to customer loyalty.

Brands develop customer experience strategies and utilize customer experience management approaches to optimize interactions with customers throughout their journeys to improve customer KPIs, like CSAT and NPS, and bottom-line business metrics, such as revenue. 

Customer experience programs are often overseen by customer experience teams led by a chief customer experience officer, head of customer experience, or a related senior role in marketing or operations. Other key customer experience team members include insights and analytics team members who capture the voice of the customer, designers who help the company embrace design thinking processes to improve customer experience across the organization, and change management practitioners who help embed customer experience within the very fabric of the company culture. While it’s important to have a dedicated CX group, this team is most effective when it is able to work cross-functionally to understand how customer experience impacts the company and to put measures in place to improve KPIs throughout the organization.

Top 11 reasons to invest in customer experience

According to research we share in this e-book, these are some of the top reasons to invest in customer experience.

Sales and marketing:

#1: Customer experience drives referrals. After analyzing 10,000 customer accounts, a bank in Germany found that customers that were referred to join the financial institution were 25% more profitable than customers acquired via other channels.

#2: Customer experience increases retention. When brands are able to deliver exceptional experiences and solve customer problems in a timely manner, customers are 7x more likely to stick around, according to a Forrester Analytics Customer Experience Index Online Survey.

Operations and product development:

#3: Customer experience enables product teams to better meet customer needs. Capturing and analyzing customer feedback can help product and operations teams gain a greater understanding of customer engagement, limit personal assumptions and biases, and introduce product enhancements based on quantitative and qualitative customer insights. 

#4: Customer experience strengthens customer loyalty. By acting on customer feedback, addressing gaps in the customer experience, and closing the loop with customers when issues arise, product and operations teams have the chance to make their offerings more valuable to customers and increase loyalty. 

Contact center:

#5: Customer experience can help brands address customer problems before they arise, reducing the burden on the contact center and decreasing customer support requests, customer wait times, and time to resolution. By listening to customers and acting on these insights, companies have the chance to preempt points of friction along the customer journey.

#6: Customer experience empowers agents to upgrade their performance. When customer support is needed, customer experience insights can be used to improve customer service training and outcomes. 

HR and finance:

#7-9: Customer experience improves employee retention, productivity, and satisfaction. Employee experience and customer experience are linked in a number of ways, which means that when CX outcomes are stronger, EX outcomes are too, and vice versa. Happy customers = happy employees, and brands with a strong employee experience are more likely to have people who are engaged, stick around, and get more done. 

#10-11: Customer experience can deliver employee referrals and slash hiring costs. When customer experience and employee experience improve, employees are more likely to encourage their colleagues to join the team, which can help offset recruitment costs. One study we cite in the eBook found that referrals are 4X as likely to get hired and stay for 4+ years, compared to those that apply via job boards.

How the customer experience impacts the company: Driving ROI

Too often, customer experience exists in a silo. Best-in-class practitioners, however, recognize that to truly achieve success, their customer experience efforts must be cross-functional. After all, customer experience has the power to impact — and drive ROI — across every area of the organization.

Get your copy of the e-book, How Customer Experience Serves Your Organization’s Most Crucial Goals, to find out how top brands drive millions in ROI by investing in customer experience.