How to Improve the ROI of Your Customer Experience Program
Measures such as customer segmentation, customer data collection, and identifying patterns in customer behavior can help you achieve better ROI from your customer experience initiatives.
Customer experience plays a massive part in every organization’s success. It’s what inspires loyalty and brand advocacy, but it can also turn customers away.
According to the latest customer experience stats, 84% of businesses that regularly improve customer experience witness a steady revenue growth. As a matter of fact, companies with excellent customer experience generate 5.7 times more ROI than those offering poor CX.
Regularly measuring the ROI of your customer experience program will help you pinpoint potential areas for improvement. It’ll also help you uncover new opportunities, ensure you have the right budget and grow your revenue.
Here are the crucial steps for generating more ROI from your CX initiatives.
Differentiate Customers Based on Their Preferences
Instead of trying to please everyone in one or several ways, you need to learn what makes each customer tick. That way, you’ll be able to personalize customer experiences, which is the key to retaining clients and inspiring long-term loyalty.
You can then offer irresistible discounts or recommend products or services – all based on people’s personal preferences, needs, pain points, and spending habits.
A CRM can help you gather that information. It’s a central hub that stores all your customer interactions across various channels.
It can show you what products or services people are checking on your website, what they are buying, and whether they prefer cheaper products.
It can even help you delve deeper into their interests and preferences by storing customer support tickets and interactions, and social media conversations.
It’s an excellent tool for better understanding your audience and uncovering ways to satisfy their needs.
Segment Customers into Logical Clusters
Not every customer is the same. Some will bring you a high ROI over a short time period, while others will spend modestly over many years. Some of them will spend very little and soon switch to your competition.
Segmenting customers based on their behavior will help you retain them, thus improve your ROI.
So, apart from preferences and interests, you need to learn about consumer behavior. You should also segment customers based on demographics, geography, and lifecycle.
That way, you’ll have a full overview of different buyer personas, so you’ll know exactly how to engage and compel them to purchase from you.
A CRM can come in handy here as well. It can help you easily segment customers into logical clusters, as you can create a profile for each contact.
Every profile should contain various customer experience ROI metrics. Some of the most important include customer lifetime value, average contract value, average transaction size, average first response time, churn rate, and customer support costs.
When you have a clear insight into that contextual information, it will be much easier to uncover invaluable revenue growth opportunities.
Use Tools to Aid Your Data Gathering and Review Process
Some of the best research methods for gathering customer data include quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups.
They can help you collect honest feedback regarding your offerings, customer support, and overall interactions with your audience. Armed with that knowledge, you’ll know what to do to improve.
So, utilize a quiz maker and start creating interesting quizzes and surveys relevant to your customer experience program. Make sure you connect it to your CRM so that all the collected data goes straight to the central hub of interactions.
But don’t stop there. Utilize tools for gathering and analyzing data from social media conversations, customer reviews, and any other data you obtain from qualitative research.
Determine Patterns in Customer Behavior
Looking at your historical data will help you uncover trends, that is, patterns in consumer behavior.
For instance, one of your customer segments may have the highest churn rates. What makes them turn away from your brand and when? How do they perceive your business?
Another one of your customer segments may be particularly delighted by a specific feature of your product or service. Is that feature the main reason why they stay?
Your qualitative research data will show you all those patterns necessary for better understanding of your customers and the impact on your business.
It will show you a clearer picture of the CX programs – and customers – that bring you the most ROI. You’ll also learn what makes certain customers leave.
Determine Successful Practices and Drop Bad Ones
Once you know the patterns in consumer behavior, you can see what strategies work and what may be due for a replacement.
Your CRM and all the customer experience ROI metrics you’re measuring will help you pinpoint opportunities for a higher ROI.
For instance, that segment with a high churn rate could definitely do with a bit of improvement. Compare its historical data with that of a similar customer segment to see which CX programs have yielded positive results in the past.
Again, this is where your qualitative and quantitative research data come into play. The former will enable you to personalize experiences for better engagement, retention, and loyalty. The latter will help you measure the revenue that each practice will bring.
Conclusion
As you can see, the ROI of your customer experience program isn’t merely a metric that you should calculate on a regular basis. After all, how can numerical data help you if you don’t know how to drive insights from it?
The key to improving your customer experience ROI is to connect it with all the contextual data from quizzes, surveys, customer support, social media conversations, and other feedback you collected – and preferably stored in a CRM. That’s the only way to truly understand whether your CX initiatives are effective, as well as uncover areas for improvement.