Better customer experience drives improvement for three types of customer loyalty: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague. But how does that affect a company’s bottom line? Our models estimate that the revenue impact from a 10 percentage-point improvement in a company’s performance, as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CxPi) score, could be in excess of $1 billion.

My colleague at Forrester, Megan Burns, spotlights in her research how companies are using best practices to improve their CxPi score and capture untapped revenue growth opportunities:

• Create or enhance voice of the customer programs. Voice of the customer (VoC) programs help companies understand what customers want from their interactions and how customers think that current interactions stack up.
• Implement customer-centric design processes. Too often, customer interactions are designed to meet business needs or are based on incorrect assumptions about what customers want. Customer-centric design processes solve that problem by putting well-researched information about customers into the right hands at the right point in the design cycle.
• Give employees the tools they need to deliver great customer experiences. For example, Citigroup discovered that when customers of the credit-card side of the business accidentally phone the call center on the bank side of the business, 90% of the time they’re calling with one of 10 fairly simple questions. Rather than force bank-side agents to transfer the call, the company armed them with answers to those top 10 credit-card questions.
• Reward customer-centric behavior. Formal and informal incentives keep employees focused on what’s important: delivering a great customer experience. Citigroup takes a bottom-up approach by increasing the weight of client metrics on which call center rep incentives are based and adding first-contact resolution as one of those metrics. Charter Communications started top-down, adding customer-focused metrics to the corporate scorecard that drives executive compensation.

Megan will be taking a deep dive into the business impact of customer experience in her presentation on “The New World of Customer Engagement” at our upcoming Business Process Forum (#BPF11), September 22-23 in Boston. For two days, we’ll hear from business process executives who are transforming processes from the outside in. I invite you to be there, and also to follow Forrester’s Blog For Business Process Professionals in the weeks leading up to the event to hear from Forrester thought leaders and some of the speakers from the event.