Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
Wed, 8 Jan 2025
Are traditional metrics like ROI failing to capture the true value of experience? Sujay Saha, President of Acquis Cortico-X, challenges the status quo and argues for a new framework: return on experience. He explains why focusing solely on monetary returns can be detrimental and how a broader perspective can lead to sustainable success. Plus, Sujay debunks common myths surrounding AI in the workplace and discusses how to approach digital transformation with a values-driven mindset.Tune in to learn:Tune in to learn:00:00 Introduction to Customer Experience01:49 The Evolution of Customer Experience04:24 Key Metrics Surrounding CX Investment05:32 Implementing Return on Experience (ROX)08:38 Challenges in CX Metrics10:03 Creating a Bespoke Measurement System14:46 The Role of Leadership in Experience16:20 Diagnosing Organizational Maturity23:17 High Ground vs. Low Ground Thinking25:41 The Importance of Aligned Purpose 34:59 Curating AI According to Your Values41:10 A Personal Experience With an Impressive CX Team46:23 Key Advice for CX Leaders –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What is Return on Experience (ROX)?
Chapter 2: How is Customer Experience Evolving?
Rocks ultimately indicates that the customers are satisfied or not. How likely are they to recommend the brand? How are the customers engaging positively or not?
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we are going to dive into the key word of this show, experience. We are joined by Sujay Saha, the founder and president of Aquis Cortico-X, a boutique experience-led strategy and transformation firm.
We are going to dive into Sujay's insights around experience and driving innovation through a human-centric lens. Let's get into it. Sujay, wonderful to have you on the show.
Same here, Lauren. Very excited to be talking about the topic that I talk about every night and day.
Chapter 3: What Challenges Exist in Measuring CX?
Amazing. Well, as you know, this is my favorite topic. And I'd love to just kick it off by talking a little bit about employee and customer experience. I know this is something that you talk about all day, every day at work with your clients. It's a key focus of what you do at CorticoX. Tell us a little bit about at a high level, how do you approach this topic?
Absolutely. In fact, if you would allow, I would probably take a bit of a historical view into because I've been around in the consulting space, working with organizations for more than two decades at this point in time. Back in the days, it used to be a topic that felt very foreign in certain ways in the organization. And we had to really bring in that lens to talk about it.
But over the years, I would say particularly in the last decade or so, it has become a thing that the organizations know that they need to be focused on. In fact, they have real big functional areas created for those. They have folks on the table who have titles that have experience embedded all over. In fact, at this point in time, I would say that it's...
A lot of times for us, it's the other way around where we have to almost like dig in deeper to understand, do you really own experience or do you have a title around experience?
It's a very popular word.
It's a very popular word. So you would see a lot of, for instance, customer service centers and organizations that call themselves as customer experience centers. I appreciate the notion of it.
I do think like when we think about the responsibilities within the organization around who is carrying the charter of driving that discipline within the organization versus who is the front bearer of the experience that you're delivering to the customers, they're different. For us, a lot of times it starts with the stakeholder with whom we are talking.
So if we are talking to folks who are manifesting a lot of these disciplines, what I would call at the enterprise level to make it real for the customers and employees, we talk to them in a different way around like, hey, how are you thinking about driving the value with the efforts that you're putting and how is that translating into real world experiences that you're creating?
Versus when we are talking at the center and a lot of times like the enterprises have functions like chief experience office and chief experience office is essentially like a lot of times like a view of not necessarily the folks who are delivering the experience at the center.
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Chapter 4: How Do Leadership and Experience Connect?
Chapter 5: What Are the Key Metrics for CX Investment?
Absolutely. In fact, if you would allow, I would probably take a bit of a historical view into because I've been around in the consulting space, working with organizations for more than two decades at this point in time. Back in the days, it used to be a topic that felt very foreign in certain ways in the organization. And we had to really bring in that lens to talk about it.
But over the years, I would say particularly in the last decade or so, it has become a thing that the organizations know that they need to be focused on. In fact, they have real big functional areas created for those. They have folks on the table who have titles that have experience embedded all over. In fact, at this point in time, I would say that it's...
A lot of times for us, it's the other way around where we have to almost like dig in deeper to understand, do you really own experience or do you have a title around experience?
It's a very popular word.
It's a very popular word. So you would see a lot of, for instance, customer service centers and organizations that call themselves as customer experience centers. I appreciate the notion of it.
I do think like when we think about the responsibilities within the organization around who is carrying the charter of driving that discipline within the organization versus who is the front bearer of the experience that you're delivering to the customers, they're different. For us, a lot of times it starts with the stakeholder with whom we are talking.
So if we are talking to folks who are manifesting a lot of these disciplines, what I would call at the enterprise level to make it real for the customers and employees, we talk to them in a different way around like, hey, how are you thinking about driving the value with the efforts that you're putting and how is that translating into real world experiences that you're creating?
Versus when we are talking at the center and a lot of times like the enterprises have functions like chief experience office and chief experience office is essentially like a lot of times like a view of not necessarily the folks who are delivering the experience at the center.
at the forefront of it, but are the ones who are curators of discipline, are the curators of, call it like the energy within the organization to drive those on the front line. We work and talk to them in a different way to kind of talk about like, how do you cascade that discipline and energy within the organization itself?
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Chapter 6: How to Diagnose Organizational Maturity?
Chapter 7: What Are the Dimensions of Experience Management?
So if we are talking to folks who are manifesting a lot of these disciplines, what I would call at the enterprise level to make it real for the customers and employees, we talk to them in a different way around like, hey, how are you thinking about driving the value with the efforts that you're putting and how is that translating into real world experiences that you're creating?
Versus when we are talking at the center and a lot of times like the enterprises have functions like chief experience office and chief experience office is essentially like a lot of times like a view of not necessarily the folks who are delivering the experience at the center.
at the forefront of it, but are the ones who are curators of discipline, are the curators of, call it like the energy within the organization to drive those on the front line. We work and talk to them in a different way to kind of talk about like, how do you cascade that discipline and energy within the organization itself?
And I'm curious to know, you know, one of the biggest things that I find as I work with companies on their experience, both their employee experience and their customer experiences, is it's not always easy to tell what is the ROI of investing in this. We know inherently that if a customer has a great experience, they're more likely to come back.
We know inherently that if an employee has a great experience at their job, they're more likely to stay. But it's not always easy to be able to say, if we do this, we will have this revenue impact. And I'm sure that your customers wonder this. So how do you approach that topic?
Absolutely. I would draw the parallel is how do you essentially impress the CFO that this is an important initiative? This is an important set of initiatives. So this is an important anchor in your set of initiatives that you need to be driving towards. ROI in itself is like a well-accepted term, as you can imagine, in the organizational world. So everybody is looking for it.
I, along with a few of the colleagues in the past, have come up with a concept called return on experience, pretty much to kind of head and answer exactly the question that you're asking. We nickname it as rocks. So ROX is a holistic approach that considers the broader value of customer experience, such as brand loyalty, think about customer retention, think about advocacy.
How do you bring all of that together into not necessarily a singular metric, but a singular view of all of these metrics together?
It really focuses, while the ROI, in my opinion, gets very unidimensional, in my opinion, around thinking about monetary returns, ROX is a dynamic company-wide metric that connects necessarily customer experience to employee experience and considers the investments in relatively what I would call intangible initiatives or the initiatives that a lot of times have a difficulty in proving the ROI.
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Chapter 8: How Can Leaders Drive Experience Initiatives?
immediately, like organizational culture, sometimes even aspects of analytics and technology that are necessarily more like the enablers of what you are driving versus the end result of what you are driving. Rocks ultimately really indicates that the customers are satisfied or not, how likely are they to recommend the brand, how are the customers engaging positively or not so with you.
In particular, I would add that there is like this whole notion of experience management sub-industry. within this, which has been very popular and particularly it has become popular because of some of the technologies that have been out there in the market that have been bringing it on the forefront, which is around like, how do you measure experiences?
How do you manage those by disseminating the insights within the organization and driving a lot of that? That has created an opportunity for a set of these measures and metrics
under the larger umbrella of return on experience rocks that can really help the organization in getting the right pulse on what is going right, what is going wrong, where do I fine tune certain drivers of what matters and connect those to financial goals ultimately. So I don't want to lose that. So the ultimate outcomes, how do you connect those?
And once you connect those, now you are able to create an engine and run the engine fueling different parts of the engine so that everybody gets a good understanding of why they are investing in certain initiatives to improve certain metrics, which ultimately helps in improving the monetary outcomes that we are looking for.
But not necessarily just looking at monetary outcomes, in my opinion, in vacuum, but without understanding the implications and connections to some of these other measures. Yeah.
Well, the thing about experience in general, whether it is inside the organization or outside of the organization, is it is complex in nature. And it is also emotional. It is not something that we can draw a direct line to revenue as we can if we say, we're going to have X number of sales calls this month, and that's going to drive X amount of revenue. It's not a simple equation.
And so I think it's really fascinating how you're acknowledging the complexity, but also the fact that we need transparency in seeing where our efforts are going and how they are driving the business forward and the ways the business wants to grow. And I think it's one of the reasons why experienced leaders, one, tend to be quite siloed, but two, have a difficult time really communicating the
to the key stakeholders in the business, why it's important to invest in more experience led initiatives or human led initiatives that we all know will help the business, but it's just hard to draw that direct line.
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