Customer experience (CX) professionals must show their executives that good CX is critical to business success, especially in this down economy. Many metrics help CX pros track the quality of those experiences, including customer satisfaction, advocacy, and effort. But these metrics alone don’t tell business leaders whether investments in CX deliver improved business performance. After all, the bookseller Borders scored well in several CX benchmarks the same year it went out of business.

So this raises two important questions:

  1. Which customers are having good experiences with the business?
  2. If these customers are having a good experience, does that improve the health of the business?

To address these questions, CX pros must develop a customer segmentation model that ties how well each customer grouping fits their value proposition and how much money that good fit means to the business. My colleague Pete Jacques and I spent a year exploring our Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) data to begin building this model. The first group we’ve identified is the Devotees. These customers earned their moniker because they are willing to:

  • Spend more money with their favored brands.
  • Keep their business with these brands.
  • Forgive these brands.
  • Pay a premium price for these brands.
  • Go out of their way to work with these brands.

This devotion pays off for businesses that can deliver the right customer experience. Devotees’ average revenue per customer outpaces all other customers — in some cases, it’s a more than 100% increase. As such, these customers are the foundation of any business’s customer base. So how can CX pros help their businesses identify these people, tailor experiences for them, and — most importantly — create more of them?

We’ve begun to tackle this topic in our latest report, “Delight The Right Customers To Build A Successful Business,” and we’ll be continuing this conversation at our upcoming event, CX North America. So please give the report a read, and let’s talk about it at the event.