Mastering & Understanding the ROI of Customer Feedback & CX

Let’s start with a quick equation:

🤑 Customer Feedback ROI = 100 x (Benefits – Investments) / Investments

In a recent study (which matches our experience), many CX leaders find it hard to quantify the impact 💥, or the ROI of customer feedback and customer experience (CX) on business outcomes and metrics.

But in a successful business, the benefits of initiatives must be defined not only qualitatively but also quantitatively, measurable.

And that’s exactly why you should calculate the ROI of customer feedback & CX. It’ll give you the ability to guide your investments to produce the greatest revenue return and ensure the sustainability of your business.

So, now that we’ve covered the theory, let’s get to practice: 

🧮 What steps can you take to calculate an ROI on customer feedback and customer experience?

Step 1: What business metrics will be most impacted through customer feedback and customer-improved experience?

Business metrics 💯 depend on the industry, but here are some common ones:

Revenue

A Forrester study found that companies focusing on CX outperform their competitors 5:1. Forrester is also providing a CX index, and with every added index point, companies in different industries can add millions of dollars in revenue.

The Forrester Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) tries to close the loop between CX measures and business growth.

Customer retention

Improving the customer experience through customer feedback has a direct positive impact on customer retention and fights every software company’s enemy: churn.

It’s easier than ever to switch a software product for other competitors, so you better get it right.

Cross-sell/Up-sell

It’s very simple: happy customers tend to spend more money with your company. If you can link upsells / cross-sells to improved CX or to actions led by customer feedback, you can calculate the additional revenue from improved CX in this area. Never forget: acquiring a new customer is nine times more effort than keeping an existing one.

Customer satisfaction

It’s not easy to calculate additional revenue gains initiated by improved experiences of customers based on CSAT (or NPS) scores, but you can evaluate what an increase (i.e., 1 point) in your score could financially mean for your customer retention or your sales.

Also Read:

What is a Good CSAT Score, and How to Measure It?

Top website feedback widgets

Cost-to-Serve

Improved customer experience and listening to your customers have a direct impact on improved processes and streamlined workflows. This leads to a reduction in costs that can be calculated.

Reduced volumes in customer support tickets mean less effort for your development team.

Reduced effort to identify issues and bugs

Another often underestimated area of investment is the identification and reproduction of issues in digital services and software. The ROI on issue tracking, reproduction, and solving can be calculated by the size of development teams & product teams, the effort invested in developing the product, and the rate (%) of how much time teams spend on identifying and validating issues.

📩 Download examples for calculating business metrics and ROI on customer feedback and CX

Step 2: Choose the right tools to give you insights to calculate your metrics for the ROI of Customer Feedback

Picking the right business metrics is difficult enough, but you also have to measure the business metrics that were impacted by the changed experience of customers with your product and by the feedback you collected from customers that you used to improve your processes.

There are three pillars when it comes to choosing solutions to have the foundation for calculating the ROI, connecting it to business behavior, and making it actionable.

• A) Analyze your customers’ behavior quantitatively by using analytics software that gives you key information on what changes are driving what CX metrics.

• B) Gather customer feedback along the journey through your product, measure your users’ experience, and offer ways to collect feedback, issue reports, and customer service requests. For this pillar, you can use customer feedback software like Usersnap.

• C) Finally, aside from analyzing & calculating, there’s also a final pillar that puts what you learned into action: add a digital adoption platform to help your users to get onboarded successfully. With that, you can improve the customer experience massively and your ROI.

Also Read:

Website feedback tool: what is the best option?

How to calculate investments in improving the experience of your customers:

With the previous method, you decided on your tools to get the necessary insights to build the foundation of your ROI calculation. As soon as you are measuring and identifying the areas of improvement, you should also calculate the necessary investments to improve your customers’ experience.

1. Which investments are needed?

Investments in infrastructure/solutions

Better CX is often bound to a modern tool stack, including analytical software, customer feedback, CRM, and digital adoption platforms.

Investments in training

All your customer-facing employees must get the opportunity to get the proper training to understand the customers’ needs and pains and how to support them properly.

Investment in operation costs

CX-Ops costs include creating new digital assets (websites, web applications, mobile apps), running VOC programs, user research, and customer feedback programs, and investing in transforming your organization into a customer-led organization with the customer at the heart of operations.

2. When to do which investment (planning)?

The timeline for these investments will go over several periods in the future.

3. Estimate the costs of the investments. After you have chosen your investment-”arsenal”, you have to give them a price tag. That depends massively on the type of investment and the company’s size.
   

We’ve provided an example of a Customer Feedback / Customer Experience ROI calculation for you to download.

Building a successful CX program with customer experience ROI:

Once you’ve identified how to calculate the ROI on customer experience and customer feedback for your company, you can start implementing a CX program to begin your enhancements. Keep these four points in mind:

1. Follow your company goals when picking investments for improving CX.
2. Never underestimate the impact and costs of inactivity.
3. Quick wins will help you kick off things.
4. Measure the ROI on customer feedback and customer experience over time.

To improve your business outcomes like revenue, retention, etc., through becoming a customer-led organization and improving customer experience, it’s crucial to measure the customer experience ROI in hard numbers.

In this case, it’s much easier to get the approval of the necessary budgets to make the necessary investments in becoming customer-centric. Never forget that companies focusing on improved customer experience by listening to their customers outperform their laggard competitors 1:5!