Learn, Improve, and Drive Value: The Role of CX Measurement in Business Growth

No matter how big your organization is or where you stand on the corporate ladder, successful leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs understand this basic truth: you must know how customers feel about your brand, and the impact of those feelings on business results. Measuring these isn’t just about gathering numbers; it’s about interpreting the story of your customer relationships, generating insights, and turning those insights into actions that drive growth.

As one of the 8 Keys of the Experience Operating System (XOS), we’ve talked about how listening to your customers helps uncover their wants, needs, and preferences... Now, we’re diving into another XOS Key—experience measurement and metrics, and the impact that flows from knowing what happened and why, how to improve it, and where to drive value.

Done right, experience measurement provides a view across all activities in an organization—both internal and external—and what to improve to drive desired customer behaviors and business results. While this seems self-evident, many organizations still don’t do this—even though they have the ability to do so in other areas of the business, like finance, marketing, and operations.

Experience measurement should be no different.

You measure experience because…you can’t easily manage what you don’t measure!

Why measure customer experience? The answer seems obvious, though of course there’s more to it. After all, positive experiences result in greater loyalty, top-line revenue, share of wallet, retention, and customers buying and referring more. Negative experiences drive friction, dissatisfaction, negative word-of-mouth, and customer churn.

If you don’t measure customers’ experiences, you won’t know what they do, or more importantly, why they do it. You can’t see where systems and processes are making things harder than they need to be. You can’t know how they feel about their experience, or how those experiences change behaviors that positively or negatively affect your business.

Even more surprising is that many organizations that do listen to their customers don’t link what they learn to desired business outcomes, nor do they regularly communicate what they learn across the organization to improve performance or experiences.

This needs to change.

Effective measurement drives insights, and actions that deliver business value

Experience measurement is at the heart of every customer-focused organization because everything your customers do or don’t do has a positive or negative impact on your business. Metrics (such as loyalty, lifetime value, or satisfaction) are derived from one or more things you measure, and tell you important information about the performance of what you measure.

Experience measurement quantifies the quality of experiences based on four interconnected dimensions: what you do ‘to’ your customers, or how you interact with them (operational data); how customers feel (customer perceptions); what they do (customer behaviors); and the impact of these actions on your business (business results).

When you measure effectively, you’re not just capturing data—you’re generating insights that reveal where your experiences and your business is thriving and where there’s room to grow. An effective experience measurement framework should include a clear definition of the business results you aim to achieve, whether it’s revenue growth, higher retention, or increased loyalty, and link those back to customer actions.

This framework creates a holistic view, allowing CX leaders to align customer needs and behaviors with business objectives. When it comes together, experience measurement becomes more than a metric—it’s a dynamic system that directly links what customers think and feel with tangible business outcomes.

The measurement challenges we hear about aren’t the ones we most commonly see

Even with the best measurement systems in place, challenges will arise. The two we hear most often from practitioners are lack of buy-in from across the organization, and an inability to link experience measures to meaningful business outcomes. But what we’ve observed is that practitioners struggle with these challenges because of things they’re not doing.

They’re not going beyond surveys to gather more actionable data from other sources. They’re not using customer journeys analysis to measure where value is or isn’t delivered, or how systems are or aren’t performing optimally. They’re not building cause-and-effect linkage models. They’re not working internally to understand financial models—an important initial step. They’re not identifying metrics that illustrate the value gained or lost. And they’re not using the data they gather to help stakeholders make decisions.

Our advice for avoiding these challenges then is very straightforward: find ways to measure the impact and value of experience….and help stakeholders across the organization use that information to make decisions based on what affects customers and what affects the business outcomes they care about.

Starting or tuning experience measurement and customer intelligence in your organization

Unsurprisingly, executives invest in experience measurement when they can see how it predictably delivers business results. This is why getting off the ground quickly, measuring the right things and proving value while bringing stakeholders along is such a critical part of the process.

Best practice-based measurement systems also rely on broad data sets (i.e. not just surveys), bringing customer and systems-related data together across multiple listening posts and sources. This means doing things like moving beyond NPS to include operational and financial data, how they link to customer perceptions and behaviors, and the business results those behaviors drive.

Measurement also needs to be systematic and supported by stakeholders. This means your system is continually running, you are purposefully engaging various teams for insight, and results are dynamically communicated across the organization. You should also continue to validate and improve what you’re measuring and how you’re measuring it, what you do as a result, and financial impacts.

Like experience management itself, measuring experiences isn’t a sprint—it’s a marathon.  And every marathon, like every journey, begins with a single step.