Businesses frequently make substantial investments in their communication channels to better connect their employees with customers and prospects. As widely recognized, the reliability and quality of these channels directly impacts upon business performance. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to strategically invest in continual improvements. It’s also imperative to diligently understand the return on investment (ROI) from any such expenditure.
Learn how Cyara helps businesses improve CX quality with continuous, end-to-end customer experience monitoring solutions.
Organizations are constantly battling to demonstrate the ROI from decisions concerning personnel, finances, and resource allocations to their senior leadership and finance teams. Typically, employing ROI metrics is best to clearly demonstrate the value achieved. It also helps to ensure that businesses make well-informed and objective decisions grounded in logic.
However, businesses often narrowly perceive ROI as just the quantifiable fiscal measures resulting from investments, such as generated revenue or cost savings. These are commonly referred to as hard ROI. Unfortunately, businesses too frequently overlook the additional and often much larger soft ROI derived from these same investments.
What is Soft ROI?
Traditional hard ROI includes quantifiable measures, such as revenues, market share, customer numbers, and labor turnover. While these metrics are crucial for organizational success, overlooking the softer, less tangible ROI will inevitably result in blind spots.
Soft ROI, although not easily calculable, often directly links to future financial returns. Examples include brand awareness, company reputation, and customer experience. Each of these are imperative for an organization’s long-term future. They also contribute to a more positive and holistic experience for customers and employees.
Cyara offers organizations an opportunity to invest in easily enhancing their customer experience offerings. The Cyara platform proactively monitors all communication channels, ensuring that global infrastructure performs to the highest standards. It also ensures that where issues do occur, they can be promptly and efficiently resolved.
Many of Cyara’s customers have reported unexpected soft ROI from monitoring their customer experience infrastructure. These returns have commonly been instrumental in shaping organizations and enhancing their business offering.
Employee Satisfaction & Productivity
Investing in improving the communication networks within an organization achieves significant enhancements. This may include improvements to audio quality, more efficient and intuitive interactive voice response (IVR) systems, or greater capacity on channels. Customer inquiries are also typically routed much more efficiently. This in turn enables agents to better assist callers and resolve issues quicker.
Additionally, research shows that higher worker satisfaction leads to a dramatic increase in employee productivity. This translates to lower levels of turnover and reduced training costs for organizations. Furthermore, monitoring provides peace of mind for businesses and their teams. It also minimizes time spent troubleshooting and addressing issues.
“[Cyara] offers a quicker detection of issues and faster turnaround times that require less human resources.”
— Alain Rodriguez, Technical Support Lead, Global Call Forwarding
Customer Experience & Retention
Ensuring ease of interaction for consumers and prospects significantly enhances customer satisfaction. Consequently, brand reputation improves, fostering customer loyalty and reducing churn. Additionally, enhanced capabilities undoubtedly lead to quicker resolution times and fewer complaints.
Research conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) details how companies gain measurable advantages simply by making their customers feel appreciated. Technological and network improvements contribute to this by increasing the speed and convenience of interactions. Positive customer experiences also result in callers feeling more heard, understood, and valued by the organization. These effective and uninterrupted exchanges help reduce friction and foster a stronger, longer-lasting relationship between the business and its customers.
“If you are serious about customer experience, if you’re serious about proactive monitoring, then these are the right solutions for you.”
— Phillip Moore, Operations and OSS Manager, Vodafone
Increased Revenues
Research conducted in the United Kingdom indicated that, on average, 45% of all inbound calls result in a new inquiry or sale. In the UK alone, this leads to net new revenues of $393 billion. PwC also suggests that customers are willing to pay a 16% premium for enhanced experiences.
Bain & Company details that enterprises offering superior customer service tend to see revenue growth of 8% above the market average. While this revenue impact may not initially be attributable to specific investments, diligent investigation frequently uncovers the true source of the ROI. Many of our customers have found that such growth was attributable to more effective and efficient customer experiences. And these improvements were a direct result of their investment in the testing and monitoring of their communication channels.
“My engineers get alerts and the technical details they need to resolve the problem quickly, while my executives get a roll-up to understand the big picture and business performance.”
— Richie Gass, Sr. Manager of Telephony and Teleconferencing Services, IT, Blue Cross Blue Shield of California
Lower Costs & Free Marketing
Continuous optimization of customer experience offerings often initiates a multiplier effect for existing sales and marketing efforts. Delighted customers frequently share their positive experiences with friends and family. This is great for any business, as word of mouth is often seen as the most valuable and trustworthy form of advertising. Additionally, it serves as a discrete form of free marketing. Positive word of mouth also reduces the need for intrusive targeted ads or cold calling to increase sales.
Moreover, costs are significantly reduced as less employee time and resources are allocated to troubleshooting issues. Proactive monitoring enables organizations to swiftly identify and address issues before they impact customers. It also means they are no longer simply waiting for customers to report problems, as they are immediately made aware of issues.
Where issues are identified, Cyara provides full insights and comprehensive reports to the relevant personnel. This expedites root cause analysis and troubleshooting significantly. In addition, there is a notable reduction in the need to raise tickets to carriers and suppliers. This is a huge positive for many businesses as ticket escalation is typically a very costly process.
“A lot of the time we relied on customers coming to us to report an issue about one of our phone numbers via another channel.”
— David Conway, Lead Systems Engineer, Salesforce
Conclusion
To accurately determine the ROI achieved through customer experience testing and monitoring, organizations must not only measure the hard ROI, but also the soft, less quantifiable returns.
Soft returns, in particular, significantly correlate with the development of positive customer relationships. This leads to additional benefits, including repeat purchases and word-of-mouth referrals. Such exposure is vital for ensuring the success of organizations and their brands.
While capturing hard ROI can be easily achieved through financial results, metrics, and calculations, establishing soft ROI takes longer and demands a commitment to in-depth discovery and research. Even then, it may remain more vague and subjective than traditional hard ROI. However, understanding it is crucial for establishing the true ROI of expenditure. And this is especially true when it comes to validating investments in customer experience assurance, as the soft ROI is often the most impactful.