If great customer experience doesn't make you money, what’s the point?

Being known for great customer experience is fantastic. But, if it isn't adding revenue, then what’s the point?

You can make the same argument for great branding, great marketing, also, great leadership. If it doesn't connect to a commercial outcome at some point, it's just an expensive hobby with a (maybe) good-looking dashboard.

In one of my discovery calls for a consulting assignment, I was asked to come in and track a metric that would look good on paper and make the early investors happy. They wanted to put my name against this metric as a trust marker.

I knew what I had to do. RUN!

A business that needs a trusted name to make a vanity metric look credible to investors isn't building customer experience. It's building a fantasy story. And I've never been good at telling fantasy stories.

What I've noticed working with startups and high growth companies is, everyone talks about customer experience, but hardly anyone can tell you what it's actually doing for the business.

The ones who can? They're usually the founders.

Founders understand this instinctively. In the early days of a startup, the connection between experience and revenue is a survival exercise.

If customers can't figure out how to onboard, they don't activate. If the product is clunky, they don't return. If support is painful, they leave and they tell everyone. There's no safety net. No marketing budget big enough to cover a leaky product. No years of brand trust to cushion a bad experience.

The feedback loop is immediate and brutal.

But also, if you nail the experience, they will stick around and tell people.

Founders don't need a CX framework to tell them this.

Early in my career, there was a founder who I worked with. He wanted to know what the sales at the end of the day would look like by noon.

This sounded absurd to me. But I thought about it and said, we could perhaps look historical trends to predict what a range might look like.

He shook his head.

He said, “We’ve changed so much from the previous quarter. Historical data is not going to give you an answer.”

I went back, thought about it. Drew a blank.

Came back the next day, he asked me the same question in the first hour of the day, “What number will be close the day at?”

I didn’t have an answer.

But he did.

He gave me a number and said + or - 5%.

And he was spot on.

The next morning, I pinged him to ask how he did it. I had to know.

His answer, “Customer feedback + product updates + lead to conversion time"

Ofcourse, the + is not literally addition. But it was these 3 factors in a way in his head that could spew out a number that was freakishly accurate.

But this was only possible because he was on top of the pulse of customer feedback.

That founder wasn't chasing wow moments. He was just obsessive about not losing the signal. Most CX professionals never get there because they're too busy planning the next surprise and delight campaign. But that’s not where the commercial gains come from.

The biggest driver of customer loyalty isn't how good the highs are. It's how rare the lows are. And, how small you can keep the delta between the highs and the lows.

This delta reduction is a big part of why I do what I do. There is a thrill here that is absolutely worth chasing (for me!). But the reason to do it isn't just because it feels good. It's because it's the thing that makes them come back. And coming back is revenue.

Everything else is just a very expensive survey.