This CX Mini Masterclass explores practical ideas for how to measure customer experience impact beyond the usual-suspect CX measure like NPS and CSAT. From efficiency gains to market share growth, there are many options for CX professional to demonstrate their value to the business. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares tips for how to measure and quantify the impact of your CX efforts. If you’re tired of being shackled to your CSAT or Net Promoter Score and want some inspiration on how to demonstrate the business impact of CX, then this episode is for you.




Don't lose sight of the bigger picture

CX professionals are constantly looking for ways to demonstrate their value and worth to the business. Sometimes it seems like all roads lead to metrics and measures. Often, this results in score chasing. CX thought leaders, such a Jeanne Bliss, have famously raised the flag about the dangers of score chasing, as it's a surefire way to have everyone take their eye off the prize. When CX professionals become obsessed with Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction or other metrics, they can easily lose sight of the bigger picture: how customer experience helps brands thrive and grow.
Of course the classic CX metrics serve an important function. There is plenty of research showing that happy customers are good for business, but when it comes time to have conversations about things like business budget allocation, “happy customers are good for business” has an uphill fight against “we’re going to save the business $2 million dollars next year”. Executives are, after all, beholden to their own performance metrics, and most of these are related to classic business indicators like market share, profit and loss.
It's up to CX leaders and their teams to share stores about the business impact of CX, in a way that will resonate with decision-makers. 

Look for efficiency

What’s good for the customer experience is often good for the business. When a customer experience involves a lot of hurdles or extra steps, it probably means there are the same hurdles and extra steps going on from a process perspective. If a CX initiative simplifies or cleans up the customer journey, there is an opportunity to look at how that translates into business efficiency. If a simplified journey means less behind-the-scenes processing time, that's an efficiency gain. If experience changes proactively address an issue that is linked to a high volume of customer calls, that's also an efficiency gain.
In the business world, time is money. If journey improvements result in time saved, that can be quantified as a cost savings or as time that can be diverted into a more productive activity. For example, if a journey improvement results in a reduction of 10 calls per day at an average of 5 minutes per call, that means 50 minutes per day of time saved. This could translate into money saved through more efficient resource planning or revenue gained by diverting those 50 minutes of agent time to some outbound revenue-generating customer interaction.
Customer understanding improves business accuracy
The more that organizations know about their customers, the more precisely they can interpret customer needs and tailor interactions. Often these insights emanate from a CX team, so CX leaders should not be shy with highlighting the results.
So how do we measure customer experience impact? One way is to look for how improved accuracy of understanding customers might drive efficiency. For example, if a sales team is armed with more accurate information about their customer...