Unpacking the Impact of Customer Experience on Revenue

Whether you’re an ecommerce startup, a brick-and-mortar powerhouse, or an omnichannel brand with both an online and offline presence, your customer experience impacts your revenue. In the best cases, it can be transformative for a business. So, what is the customer experience impact on revenue?

In this post, we’ll dive into how customer experience can generate revenue and share three tactics you can implement to boost customers’ lifetime value, attract new customers to your brand, and help support agents work more efficiently.

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How Does Customer Experience Create Value?

An excellent customer experience creates value for the business because word-of-mouth increases when customers feel listened to and taken care of, resulting in a subsequent rise in loyalty rates and sales.

How Customer Experience Drives Revenue Growth

Most ecommerce brands don’t come out of the gate generating revenue from their customer experiences and support centers. But there are tangible steps you can take to scale from a pre-revenue stage to a revenue-generation stage. By the end, customer experience will drive revenue growth by creating repeat business from loyal customers and elevating support agents to organically create upsell and cross-sell opportunities on their own.

Each of these tactics is formulated with loyalty and CX revenue generation in mind, providing the scalable pathways to building a mature, profitable customer experience.

1. Use proactive chat to reduce checkout abandonment

With nearly 70% of all shopping carts abandoned, friction at checkout can be a headache for ecommerce brands. It’s inevitable for some shoppers to have sudden questions about your product sizing, item availability, and shipping, returns, and exchange policies while completing the checkout process, but luckily, with proactive chat, these bouts of hesitation don’t have to mean a loss of potential revenue with your brand.

You can design your proactive chat to pop up using triggers such as time spent on page or multiple attempts at a promotional code entry. After Ulta Beauty implemented proactive chat, they found that their conversation rates doubled compared to instances when support agents didn’t reach out to shoppers.

Learn more: Bringing proactive service to each channel comprehensively improves customer relationships in order to meet modern expectations. Growing digital channels like SMS and email are huge growth areas for brands to explore proactive service.

2. Hire the right customer support agents

Having a top-notch customer service team can transform brands’ bottom lines: Happy customers return for more (and tell their friends about you), while frustrated customers will only give your business one more chance before never shopping with you again.

While it’s important to do recruiting and enablement right, there’s no need to stress over the process. Try to find individuals who:

• Are eager to engage with others and are clear communicators
• Are comfortable with creative problem-solving and multitasking
• Match your company values
• Are technically savvy

Once you’ve nailed this down, the next step is to use training to empower your support agents. Instead of relying solely on scripts, provide support agents with resources to help them make the best decision for each customer’s unique situation and needs. Gladly is a fantastic platform for this: It’s easy to use, intuitive, and offers clear and comprehensive information for support agents, regardless of skill level, to tackle any challenge.

Learn more: Hiring the best-fit candidates for your customer support team is tricky and takes a lot of asking the right questions to make sure your brand is putting its best people up front. Make sure you cover your bases with this checklist.

3. Maximize the opportunities offered by loyal customers

Loyal customers are a gift to any brand, but all too often, businesses don’t capitalize on the information, data, and insights they have on returning customers to upsell, cross-sell, and nurture the relationship. (Even if they’re well-aware of the relationship between customer experience and revenue.)

Rather than thinking of returning customers as transactional relationships, try reframing your perspective and strategy. Customer support isn’t just a post-purchase team simply there to answer “where is my order?” questions. Instead, with the right data and processes, support agents can be more purposeful and deliver a truly personalized experience to increase revenue and loyalty.

At Ulta, for example, where 95% of sales come from its ultimate rewards program members, customer support agents are trained to recognize and acknowledge that loyalty. Beyond that, knowing customers’ preferences and favorite brands enables support agents to recommend products, upsell, cross-sell, and deliver more help and engagement whenever possible.

One way to do this is to match customers with the best customer support agent trained to help them (based on their history, situation, sentiment, or needs) with a solution like People Match. People Match ensures that your brand goes above and beyond to get customers the help they need.

Learn more: Your support center should be empowered to upsell and cross-sell when those opportunities arise. Here are scripts to use for those occasions.

More Ways to Drive Growth With Customer Experience

Beyond these three tactics, take our CX Maturity Assessment to bridge the link between revenue and customer experience and cover all your bases when designing a successful customer experience that boosts revenue. The key is implementing a people-centered customer service approach that focuses on building relationships rather than workflow functions.

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