12 Ways To Measure The ROI Of Customer Experience

What is one way to measure the ROI of customer experience? 

To help you improve your customer experience, we asked business professionals and leaders this question for their insights. From measuring customer lifetime value to evaluating web page analytics, there are several ways to track the success of customer experience. 

Here are 12 ways to measure ROI from customer experience:

  • Ask Clients How They Heard About You
  • Use a Tangible Metric to Measure
  • Discover Loyal Customers
  • Track Unsolicited Online Reviews
  • Measure Customer Lifetime Value
  • Use Simple Happiness Meters
  • Track Customer Social Media Shares
  • Determine Cost of Acquisition
  • Remember ROI is Customer Satisfaction
  • Conduct Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis
  • Evaluate Web Page Analytics
  • Improve Customer Support

Ask Clients How They Heard About You

Whenever you have new customers or clients reach out to you and make a purchase, ask them how they heard about you. More than 80% of small businesses get new customers through word of mouth. 

If new customers mention that one of your past clients directed them your way, it’s clear that your customer experience investment is working. Measuring this kind of ROI might not always happen on your schedule, so be patient.

Lily Yu, Oak Springs Realty

Use a Tangible Metric to Measure

Go too broad in trying to measure ROI for customer experience, and you’ll struggle to connect the data to anything concrete. Choose a tangible metric to go by, such as customer retention. A customer’s experience with your business informs their choices about where to purchase their products and whether they’ll do business with you again. 

Keep track of the number of customers you had from the start of a year, how much they spend on average, then compare that with the numbers at the end of the year. If your customer retention rate isn’t where you want it to be, low customer experience value or CXV ROI may be the culprit.

Vanessa Molica, The Lash & Sugar Company

Discover Loyal Customers

A great customer experience is not always the most tangible thing to measure but should be extremely important to any organization. No matter what you as an organization should be focused on, a great customer experience is a representation of you as a company. How you treat your customers speaks volumes of where your priorities are as a business. 

If you want to see how well you’re doing, you should track customer loyalty by watching how many return customers you have, along with watching your reviews on whichever platforms you are listed on. You can measure that, and you can track your repeat customers to see if your customer experience is giving you the ROI you are looking for.

Mark Smith, University of Advancing Technology

Track Unsolicited Online Reviews

I love review sites like Yelp because I know that many people on the platform actually enjoy sharing their experiences with others without being solicited or compensated to do so. Unsolicited reviews are terrific to receive from customers because it tells me that their experience with us was so good (or bad) that they took important time out of their day to inform the public about it.

It’s one thing to make people aware of your presence on these sites, but when you start incentivizing customers to write good things about you, it defeats the benefit of this feedback for everyone. I can appreciate this as a marketer, but I feel that business owners participating in this behavior are doing themselves a disservice. 

By not being open to real, unfiltered reviews, they’re closing themselves off to the opportunity for growth and a disillusioned understanding of the brand experience ROI.

Rani Sweis, AtticSalt

Measure Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (LTV) is one way to measure the ROI of customer experience. LTV measures the revenue attributed to a specific customer during their relationship with a business. Customer satisfaction and retention are both components in calculating LTV, and improve when customers have positive experiences throughout their relationship with a company.

Raaquib Pathan, Salesmate

Use Simple Happiness Meters

A great way to measure the ROI of customer experience is happiness meters. Every customer experience rep should send a follow-up email asking how they did in assisting customers. 

It can be as easy as a smiley face, straight face, and frowning face. Then the feedback is sent into a database after the link is clicked and tracked. This is a great way to measure the ROI of customer experience.

Olivia Young, Conscious Items

Track Customer Social Media Shares

One way to measure the ROI of customer experience is to track customer social media shares. When a customer shares his or her experience with your product or service on social platforms, it is easy to see what kind of emotion you evoked in them. 

Since the customer experience is emotion-centered, keeping an eye on social posts is one good way to help track the ROI of customer experience.

Adrian James, Markitors

Determine Cost of Acquisition

If you are invested in improving your customer experience, you can expect to get more customers due to word of mouth. If you examine your cost of acquisition over time, you can measure the ROI of your customer experience.

Wesley Jacobs, Apollo Medical Travel LLC

Remember ROI is Customer Satisfaction

We use our G2 reviews page to measure customer satisfaction. Our audience is typically B2B2C gift-givers such as event and HR professionals who gift our products to global teams, event attendees, or business partners. 

We send customers to our G2 reviews page, an industry standard for software companies to collect reviews for prospects to compare and contrast products and services. The reviews are all credible and honest, and other interested B2B prospects will come across them when they Google corporate promotional gifts. 

It’s an easy way for any business to measure the ROI of their customer experience.

Shaunak Amin, SnackMagic

Conduct Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Customer service is critical to every company’s success. It is necessary to make investments to guarantee that you have the correct personnel in place and follow the proper protocols. 

The best quantitative measurements to track the resulting ROI are renewal and repurchase rates, product and service engagement rates, and overall customer happiness. Customer surveys can be used to gather both quantitative and qualitative information. 

Suppose you utilize a CRM system that saves interactions. In that case, your team should examine them on a regular basis and discuss the good and bad with other members of the team so that everyone may benefit from the experience. Customer comments and evaluations should reflect if you have a good team and they’re performing a good job.

Steve Scott, Spreadsheet Planet

Evaluate Web Page Analytics

The best way to measure the ROI of customer experience is to understand what experience customers go through that leads them to purchase and how often this happens. 

This can be achieved through analytics of your website, as well as using certain applications that will map your customer web journey. The more that you understand this, the more you will be able to decipher how much money or time you invest in web design and marketing is returning via your eCommerce or sign-up page.

Amy Block, Navitar

Improve Customer Support

Customer support offers a great way to measure the ROI of customer experience. If you have a low number of complaints, then you know customers are satisfied with the service. Customer tickets are another factor and show whether there are any technical issues that need improving. 

Changes that lower complaints and tickets reduce the need for customer service and help cut costs. By implementing different tactics, you can track the impact it has on customer experience and determine how you can improve customer satisfaction while saving on expenses.

Desiree Medellin, Peels

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