I said what I said: There’s no point in a great customer experience if it doesn’t create revenue
Good customer experience is a “nice to have”. If it isn’t adding revenue though, what is the point?
You can make the same argument for great branding, marketing, or dare I say it… leadership.
Customer experience is increasingly establishing itself as a priority across most organizations. Or at least organizations are adding a CX function in name. Executives talk about customer centricity. Teams invest in new CX tools. Dashboards track satisfaction scores in real time. We’re seeing the actions and the words of bigger and more prominent CX priorities.
But are they doing anything for the businesses?
Despite this progress, many organizations still struggle with the fundamental challenge:
CX ROI – the ability to clearly connect customer experience to tangible commercial outcomes.
It’s much easier to show this and see this effect in startups, scale-ups, and small businesses. But as companies grow and expand, or in existing large organizations, CX is often measured extensively and leveraged insufficiently.
And when experience is not explicitly designed to drive growth, retention, and revenue, why are we even working to make it better? Seriously! Isn’t that the whole point?
Moving beyond satisfaction as the end goal
What early-stage and high-growth businesses understand instinctively is that customer satisfaction is not just a metric or a tick-box, it’s a growth engine.
In a start-up or scale-up, the connection between experience and revenue is brutally clear. Customers have no loyalty, plenty of other options, and/or haven’t grown to rely on those products or services yet. They have no reason to put up with a bad experience. This is where CX ROI is intensely felt.
If customers struggle to onboard, they don’t activate. If the product is clunky, they don’t return. If support is painful, they leave.
However, if the experience is seamless and valuable, they stick around and they tell people.
There’s no brand legacy or loyalty to cushion bad experiences. No massive marketing budget to mask friction. No years of habit keeping customers loyal despite poor journeys.
In smaller and faster-growing businesses, customer satisfaction translates almost immediately into behavior. Higher satisfaction means:
- More repeat usage
- More referrals
- Lower churn
- Higher lifetime value
Lower satisfaction shows up just as quickly. Deletions, cancellations, negative reviews, and stalled growth are all quick and telling ways to know when the customer experience is causing a devastating loss in revenue.
The feedback loop is tight, visible, and unforgiving. That is why in the start-up or scale-up stage, these businesses know they have to invest in customer experience the right way. We all know founders who obsess over retention, activation, and word of mouth long before they care about efficiency.
It’s because they instinctively know that without a great experience, growth simply won’t happen. They know that because they remember that they too are a customer and don’t put up with poor experiences.
Harder in bigger organizations
Making that connection in larger, well-established organizations is so much harder and often takes longer to show up. The same connection still exists but it becomes slower, noisier, disconnected, and easier to ignore.
Big businesses have buffers that start-ups don’t, including:
- Strong brand recognition and market presence.
- Long-term, loyal customer relationships.
- Complex contracts or switching costs.
- Huge marketing and acquisition engines.
These factors can hide experience problems in the overall experience for years!
Customers will often stay for longer than they would with smaller businesses despite frustration. Sometimes customers have no other legitimate or similar choices, leading to begrudgingly spent dollars and detrimental word of mouth. Sometimes that means revenue may hold despite declining satisfaction. Those are the industries and giants always ripe for disruption – Blockbuster anyone?
Eventually the cracks show and leadership often sees that as a commercial problem, not an experience problem. There’s where CX gets stuck.
NPS looks great. The dashboard is green. The satisfaction line is going up! Why then are the dollars falling?
The delay between poor experience and revenue impact creates the illusion that CX isn’t directly driving growth and that couldn’t be more wrong.
The problem is most CX functions focus on largely attitudinal indicators. You know the ones:
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer Effort Score (CES)
These metrics are valuable (some more than others – I see you CES). They offer insight into how customers perceive interactions and where friction exists. However, on their own, they do not represent commercial impact.
The real purpose of customer experience is not simply to improve sentiment but to influence what customers do next. They need to return. They need to purchase again. They need to recommend the brand. They need to stay longer.
Until CX is explicitly tied to these outcomes, organizations risk optimising experience just for kicks and giggles – because it sounds like something they should be doing.
Revenue is the ultimate validation of experience
While survey data offers directional insight, customer behaviour remains the most reliable indicator of experience success. Are they spending their money with you?
Customers might report being satisfied while simultaneously switching providers. They may give positive feedback after a pleasant interaction and yet never return. I’ve done that. A lot.
In contrast, revenue-linked behaviour tells a much clearer story.
Repeat purchases demonstrate trust. Retention reflects sustained value. Referrals signal advocacy. Lifetime value captures the cumulative impact of experience over time.
The real metric is revenue. It cannot be separated from customer experience because it is the consequence of it.
Organizations that lead in CX consistently design experience improvements around behavioral objectives, such as:
- Increasing activation after onboarding
- Reducing friction in the journey to drive usage
- Improving service and recovery to reduce churn
- Building trust to accelerate referrals
The experience itself becomes the mechanism through which growth and revenue is achieved.
Friction removal: the strongest driver of growth
Another common misconception is that CX that is primarily focused on delight leads to revenue.
In practice, the largest revenue gains typically come not from WOW moments, but from removing everyday pain and making the journey easy. Matthew Dixon talks about this at great length in his book, The Effortless Experience.
Reducing effort, increasing reliability, and creating predictable outcomes consistently deliver stronger commercial results than surface-level experience enhancements. Translation: Getting the basics right means more revenue.
In high growth environments especially, friction compounds quickly and shows up in operations right away.
CX strategies that prioritize an easy experience with no roadblocks will be the largest contributing factor to a company’s skyrocketing growth.
Embedding CX in growth strategy
Organizations that successfully monetize customer experience typically share a few characteristics:
- Experience improvements are tied to specific business behaviors
- CX leaders sit in strategic decision-making forums
- Metrics connect sentiment to revenue outcomes
- Root cause fixes are prioritised over symptom management
Rather than asking, “How do we improve this touchpoint?” They ask, “What customer behaviour needs to change and how can experience enable that?”
This shift reframes CX from a cost center to a growth engine which should be its primary purpose before anything else.
A practical and confronting question
One question can reveal whether CX is truly embedded as a strategic driver within an organization or it has become a “nice to have”:
If the customer experience team disappeared tomorrow, would revenue performance decline within six months?
In high-performing organizations, experience is so closely linked to retention, conversion, and loyalty that its absence would quickly impact growth.
The strategic imperative
A good customer experience is an expectation. You’ve felt that in yourself and with your customers. It’s not a “nice to have”. It must be delivered if you are to retain customers.
What separates market leaders from the rest is how effectively experience is leveraged to drive business outcomes.
When designed with commercial intent, it becomes one of the best investments a business can make.
When treated purely as a satisfaction exercise, it becomes unnecessary noise.
There is nothing wrong with striving for happy customers. I do it all the time because it makes me feel good inside. I like making people’s lives better. But the point of doing that is to get them to come back. Plain and simple.
The true measure of customer experience success lies in behavior: their loyalty, repeat usage, advocacy, and revenue growth.
Organizations that connect CX strategy directly to these outcomes unlock its full commercial power.
Those that don’t are underutilizing the most powerful function in their entire business.
Quick links
- Bringing a long-term vision to CX
- How Simon Clarke tells the story in CX
- 101 practical principles from behavioral science