Jon Picoult, the Founder of Watermark Consulting, just published a blog post called Yes, Virginia, There Is A Return On Customer Experience Investments. He looked at the stock performance of companies based on how well they did in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CxPi).

It’s great work! Here’s a graphic from his post that shows how customer experience leaders outperform customer experience laggards in the stock market. His analysis used the results from our 2007 CxPi.

(Customer Think) Yes, Virginia, There Is A Return On Customer Experience Investments

My take: Picoult’s work complements my findings from research called customer experience boosts revenue in which I analyzed last year’s CxPi. Here’s the difference in loyalty that I found between companies in the top quartile of customer experience (when measured against industry averages) and the companies in the lowest quartile:

  • 14.4% more customers willing to buy another product
  • 15.8% more customers reluctant to switch
  • 16.6% more customers likely to recommend

The bottom line: There’s good reason to be bullish on customer experience