How to Connect Customer Experience to Business Growth

A customer who associates your brand with great service will directly drive growth for your business. They are 93% more likely to make repeat purchases, 40% more inclined to recommend your brand to others, and can be worth up to 10x more than their initial purchase.

This explains why 80% of companies have increased their level of investment in CX over the last year. However, less than half can measure and demonstrate the ROI of their CX initiatives. How can your organization effectively leverage CX as its biggest growth engine to deliver more customers, revenue, and measurable results? Here’s how to fire on all cylinders.

Step 1: Understand Your Customers

Data is crucial for developing a deep understanding of your customers, allowing you to create value, enhance experiences, and drive growth. Here’s how to get started:

• Collect Data: Implement a robust system for the continuous collection and review of all customer data within your organization, with a focus on your contact center as a key source of insights. Ensure the data is regularly cleaned to eliminate duplicates, errors, and irrelevant information, which is vital for maintaining accuracy.
• Visualize Data: Develop visual representations of your customer base using detailed personas, as well as mapping out each customer’s journey. This will help you understand their interactions with your brand across all touchpoints. For instance, you might discover that your chatbot is causing friction for customers, as indicated by a high abandonment rate. Feedback may reveal that customers struggle to seamlessly escalate to a live agent.

The ultimate goal is to take actionable steps based on your data. For example, you can improve chatbot handoffs by ensuring that the bot transfers all relevant context to agents, so they don’t have to start the conversation over (70% of your customers expect this, FYI).

Step 2: Define Your Customer Experience Goals

While customer experience goals vary by company, key themes consistently emerge as drivers of revenue growth. Here are four proven CX goals to consider:

• CX Personalization: Companies that excel in personalization enjoy a 1.5 times higher customer loyalty rate than their counterparts. Over 65% of companies also agree that personalization leads to lower customer acquisition costs.
• Relationship-building: Consider that 66% of people who believe a business cares about their emotional state will likely become repeat customers. Strong relationships equal strong loyalty and brand advocacy.
• Overall customer satisfaction: Customer retention rates increase by 5% for every 1% increase in customer satisfaction, and increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.
• CX consistency across channels: Customers who use multiple channels shop nearly twice as much as shoppers who use a single channel. But beware: over 60% are ready to walk away if these experiences are disjointed.

Step 3: Align CX Goals to Business Growth Objectives and Metrics

Once you’ve established clear CX goals, the next step is to connect them to your defined growth objectives. This step is crucial for creating a strategic framework that drives meaningful improvements and measurable results.

Here are some examples of how to align CX goals with business growth objectives:

• Drive Revenue Growth: Implement more personalized upselling and cross-selling strategies to increase average transaction value.
• Enhance Customer Effort: Streamline digital access to make interactions as seamless as possible, reducing friction for customers.
• Reduce Customer Churn: Focus on proactive customer care initiatives that anticipate issues and address them before they lead to attrition.
• Boost Customer Satisfaction: Introduce new AI-powered solutions that enhance service delivery and tailor interactions to individual needs.
• Increase Customer Loyalty and Lifetime Value: Use customer journey orchestration to create cohesive and engaging experiences that keep customers coming back.
• Improve Customer Acquisition: Leverage data analytics to refine marketing strategies, ensuring targeted outreach that resonates with potential customers.

5 Ways Avaya Strengthens the CX-BG Connection

Avaya empowers organizations with an industry-leading customer experience (CX) solution that helps navigate complexities, bridge capability gaps, and foster innovation without disruption.

Consider Access Bank, a leading full-service bank with more than 600 branches and 60 million customers worldwide. Here are five ways the bank uses Avaya Experience Platform to improve its CX initiatives, directly driving business growth:

• Increased Customer Satisfaction: The bank’s Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score rose from 53% to 64% between 2022 and 2024.
• Reduced Customer Effort: Customer Effort Score (CES) improved from 68% to 75% during the same period.
• Faster Customer Response Times: Voice response times improved significantly, dropping from 2 minutes and 25 seconds in 2022 to just 30 seconds in 2024 – an 80% reduction.
• Quicker Issue Resolution: The bank’s rate of case resolution increased by 20% from 2022 to 2024.
• Enhanced Customer Retention: The number of abandoned calls decreased by 22%.

Connecting CX to business growth (BG) is not just a strategic advantage–it’s a necessity. Harness the full potential of your customer relationships, leveraging existing strengths to fuel future growth.