Key takeaways
- Measure both hard and soft ROI to get a complete picture of customer experience testing value.
- Soft ROI drives long-term success through improved customer relationships, brand reputation, and employee satisfaction.
- Proactive monitoring reduces costs by identifying issues before they affect customers and minimizing troubleshooting time.
- Enhanced CX directly correlates with revenue growth, with customers willing to pay premiums for better experiences.
- Word-of-mouth from satisfied customers serves as free, highly trusted marketing.
Businesses frequently make substantial investments in their communication channels to better connect their employees with customers and prospects. The ROI of customer experience testing refers to the measurable value, both financial and non-financial, that organizations gain from systematically testing and monitoring their customer-facing communication channels. As widely recognized, the reliability and quality of these channels directly affect 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.
Key categories of soft ROI in customer experience testing include:
- Employee satisfaction and productivity
- Customer retention and loyalty
- Increased revenues
- Lower costs and free marketing
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.
Hard ROI vs. soft ROI
| Hard ROI | Soft ROI |
| Quantifiable, easily measurable financial returns | Less tangible returns that link to future financial gains |
| Examples: revenues, market share, customer numbers, labor turnover, cost savings | Examples: brand awareness, company reputation, customer experience, employee satisfaction |
| Captured through financial results, metrics, and calculations | Requires in-depth discovery and research to establish |
| Immediate and objective | May take longer to materialize and can be more subjective |
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 and 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, automated phone menus that route callers to the appropriate department or resource, 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 faster.
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 and retention
Validating 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, pperations and OSS manager, Vodafone
Increased revenue
Key statistics on CX revenue impact:
- 45% of inbound calls result in a new inquiry or sale.
- $393 billion in net new revenues generated in the UK alone from inbound calls.
- 16% premium customers are willing to pay for enhanced experiences.
- 8% revenue growth above market average for enterprises offering superior customer service.
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 and 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, the practice of continuously testing and monitoring customer-facing channels to ensure quality, as the soft ROI is often the most impactful.
Frequently Asked Questions
Measure ROI by tracking both hard metrics (revenue growth, cost savings, reduced ticket escalations) and soft metrics (customer satisfaction scores, employee productivity, brand reputation improvements). Compare these outcomes against your investment in testing and monitoring tools over time.
Soft ROI refers to the less tangible, harder-to-quantify returns from CX investments, such as improved brand awareness, enhanced company reputation, increased customer loyalty, and higher employee satisfaction. While not immediately calculable, these factors directly link to future financial returns.
Soft ROI is often the most impactful return from CX investments because it drives long-term customer relationships, repeat purchases, and word-of-mouth referrals—all of which contribute to sustained business growth and competitive advantage.
Hard ROI includes quantifiable fiscal measures such as generated revenue, cost savings, and market share. Soft ROI covers less tangible returns like brand reputation, customer loyalty, and overall customer experience, which are harder to calculate but often have a larger long-term financial impact.
Overlooking soft ROI creates blind spots in understanding the true value of CX investments. Soft returns like customer retention and word-of-mouth referrals directly contribute to future revenue and long-term organizational success.
Proactive monitoring reduces time spent troubleshooting, gives teams faster access to issue details, and enables agents to resolve customer inquiries more efficiently. Research shows higher worker satisfaction leads to increased productivity and lower employee turnover.
According to PwC, customers are willing to pay a 16% price premium for enhanced experiences, and Bain & Company found that companies offering superior customer service see revenue growth 8% above the market average.
Proactive monitoring allows organizations to identify and resolve issues before customers are affected, reducing the need for customers to report problems and significantly cutting the volume of costly ticket escalations to carriers and suppliers.
Delighted customers frequently share positive experiences with friends and family, generating word-of-mouth referrals that are widely considered the most trusted form of advertising and reduce the need for paid outreach.
Soft ROI, such as stronger customer relationships and repeat purchases, often represents the most impactful return from CX assurance investments, making it essential to measure alongside hard financial metrics for a complete picture.
