Eighty-six percent of CX professionals we recently surveyed say that the ROI of CX isn’t well established in their firm. Yikes!

To be fair, building a CX business case can be hard. And even when you’ve built one, you may discover that it’s not compelling enough and therefore you miss out on the funding you hoped for.

That’s why I compiled 14 hacks for building a compelling CX business case. They are valuable and specific tactics that CX pros have applied to crack the CX business-case nut. These tactics fall into two big categories.

Galvanize Decision Makers Into Action (Hacks 1-7)

Before you even start to collect and analyze data, lay the groundwork. You must ensure that decision makers care about the resulting business case. That’s why the report lists seven tactics that inspire and reassure the audience.

Hacks include grounding the case in goals that are top of mind for executives, helping execs imagine a bleak future without investing in CX, and showing how not investing in CX is actually costing the company money.

Nail The Mechanics Of Linking CX Improvements To Business Success (Hacks 8-14)

Many CX pros have either too much or too little data at their disposal and find it hard to establish reliable links between CX improvements and business results.

Hacks include testing whether CX metrics drive target results before you create a model and delving below high-level CX metrics to find relationships.

Is Your CX Measurement Program Ready For Making The CX Business Case?

CX pros who want to make the case for CX struggle with quantifying the range of results for CX improvement projects. To complicate matters further, it usually takes a good 12 to 18 months before you have the required data. That’s why it’s important to check now whether your CX measurement program collects the data you need to establish reliable linkages between improving CX and financial success metrics. The following four questions help you assess whether your CX measurement program is ready:

  • Do you measure overall CX quality as well as the perceived quality of CX drivers?
  • Do you measure customer behaviors that drive desired business results?
  • Have you determined the relationship between CX quality and customer behavior?
  • Have you estimated the effect of improvements on behaviors and financial metrics?

Example For Estimating How Improving CX Creates A Lift In Revenue

Read details on all 14 hacks in the report, “The Top 14 Hacks For Your CX Business Case.”

And speaking of establishing linkages between CX and financial metrics: My colleague Tom Mouhsian just published an excellent piece, “Hardwire Customer Experience To Financial Performance,” on defining proxy metrics that let you tell the CX story to your CFO.