(New) Age Old Question: Does Customer Experience Drive Growth?

I’ve been really busy lately and missed a nice research report from Forrester back in July 2015. In the report Does Customer Experience Really Drive Business Success?, analyst Harley Manning presented lots of data saying basically yes.

To start with, however, Mr. Manning presented several Customer Experience (CX) leaders who have tanked recently and CX laggards who have soared. Forrester annually ranks companies in terms of overall CX, not just in terms of a company web site.

Borders and JCPenney are two CX Leaders that both had close to -50% return.  Clearly their CX did not lead to business growth.  On the other hand, CX Laggards Cigna and Comcast both had tremendous growth rates well over 50%.  Obviously four samples do not make for a very compelling correlation, so Mr. Manning dug deeper and more broadly.

His team then looked at the growth compared to CX within specific industries and compared leaders to laggards.  What he found is that growth correlates to CX within most industries.  So don’t compare Comcast to JCPenney as they are not in the same industry. Rather compare Comcast (Laggard) to another cable company like ATT Uverse.  Forrester judged ATT to be a CX Leader in cable.  Guess what?  ATT’s growth rate beat Comcast.

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Forrester looked at other industries:

• Airlines:  JetBlue (CX Leader) beat out United (CX Laggard)
• Investment Firms: CX Leaders Edward Jones and Charles Schwab beat out the CX Laggards
• Retailers:  Here a superior online experience trumped traditional retail experiences.  CX Leader Amazon clearly beat out CX Laggard Walmart
• Only in Health Insurance Payers did Forrester call a draw.  They could not correlate CX to growth in this industry.  Perhaps the turmoil of all the changes brought on by the U.S. Affordable Care Act supersede all others.

Forrester presented a CX/Revenue Growth equation to explain the impact potential.  The chart here summarizes the findings across industries using the equation.

The next step is to see if this analysis holds true for other industries.

You can go to Forrester.com to find the full report.