Customer Experience is a Growth Lever for C-Suiters

For many executives, customer experience (CX) is often equated with customer service, the operational support involved with customers’ orders, returns and complaints. But CX is far more than a back-office function. It is the strategic thread that ties together brand promise, operational execution and financial performance. And in today’s AI-driven environment, its complexities, nuances and importance have never been greater.

Customer experience experts will tell you that CX is the totality of all customer interfaces and interactions. CX is about the brand and the company’s vision and mission. It actively shapes how the customer feels at each step of the product lifecycle, and the effect is inherently cumulative. Importantly, CX has a profound impact on the bottom line across diverse sectors — from tech giants to energy, from healthcare and pharma to food, from retail to banking and many more — enabling businesses to reap compelling and substantial ROI by focusing on the customer experience.

For example, a Deloitte study on wealth management companies found that those with a distinct customer focus were 60% more profitable than those that weren’t. Watermark’s 2024 CX survey, now in its 17th year, most recently revealed that the stock value of companies identified as Customer Experience Leaders generated a total return more than 260 points higher than the broader market’s S&P 500 Index.

These aren’t abstract numbers. They are proof that investors and markets reward companies where CX is a C-suite priority. Leaders who treat CX as a growth lever consistently outperform peers in profitability, shareholder return and brand loyalty.

Align Strategy with Communications 

The goal for companies should be to foster a corporate culture where decision-making, the analysis of new opportunities, and general problem-solving puts the customer squarely at the center.

As Rob Schipul, VP of lifecycle experiences at IntelyCare, underscores, “Anytime a brand is fighting for attention, CX is how you get someone’s attention and meet their needs in a meaningful way.” For executives, this isn’t just a marketing insight — it’s a mandate to align strategy, operations and communications around customer needs at every turn.

As you are formulating your CX program, you should be asking yourself every day:

• Will our policies and practices make things simpler for the customer or harder?
• Will they bring the customer joy or annoyance?
• What impacts can I reasonably anticipate that my CX programs may have on the customer, now and in the future?

Just as with your sales and marketing programs, communications and public relations must also be centered on the customer and their needs. Internally, there are many opportunities to instill in your teams the importance of this mindset; for example, by bringing in customers via Zoom to headline company town hall meetings or amplifying their voices in internal newsletters. If possible, make customer data and analytics accessible to all departments; this transparency allows every team member to see the direct impact of their work on key metrics like satisfaction scores and retention.

Externally, you should have your PR team select customer success stories for members of your C-suite to tell every chance they get — with the media, on investor calls, and at all speaking engagements — just as you should with all internal communications.

Stickiness versus Getting Stuck 

What has AI wrought? Pre-AI, customer relationship management (CRM) practitioners would collect and analyze customer information, segmenting customers into groups according to their personality traits or buying habits. This approach, outlined in the archives of the Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Complaining Behavior, considers each grouping as its own entity and programs for them en masse.

How the world has changed! Schipul describes how, instead of compartmentalizing people into segments, AI can now enable hyper-personalization at lightning speed, zeroing in on individual customers’ activities and even their predicted responses.

Yes, AI can save a great deal of time; however, machine learning has inevitably cut out the spark of creativity. As Schipul puts it, “the drummers are now emulating the drum machines,” meaning that the AI feedback loop creates an echo chamber where truly new ideas often aren’t able to surface.

For leaders, the lesson is clear: don’t let algorithms dictate your brand voice. Your CRM managers must be on their toes, engineering your CX programs so that human imagination and empathy always take the lead.

Strategy-Driven CX

Looking at the big picture, CX must be more than just checking boxes, Shawn Nason, of the Nason Group and a former Disney Imagineer, counsels. “There has to be a framework, a process around it and a strategy around it — the why behind the customer experience.” For CEOs, this means embedding CX into corporate strategy, not delegating it to a single function.

Nason lays out three core principles that should guide your fundamentals of customer acquisition and retention as well boardroom discussions and determine how you set your CX KPIs:

1. Know your customer. This is where AI can be very helpful but remember to avoid bias at every prompt to ensure you’re thinking out of the box and avoiding an AI echo chamber.
2. Surprise your customer. Offering unexpected value shows the customer that they matter, a kind of relational competence folks crave in a Big Box world.
3. Make it easy. You must be creative so that your customer doesn’t have to leap hurdles to interact with your brand.

For Bloomingdale’s CEO Olivier Bron, this means thinking beyond just selling products. He recently told McKinsey & Co. that his mission is to create immersive environments where customers discover, connect and remember the brand. That’s the C-suite mindset: viewing every interaction as brand theater, not just a transaction. Bron feels he has done his job when customers are surprised to find products that they hadn’t expected and when they can experience a variety of dining options, in-store events, augmented reality tools, or unique store designs that create a memorable brand immersion. In this way, Bloomingdales becomes the customer’s brand of choice rather than just a point of purchase, a feat Bron has already pulled off during his career with other retailers in France.

Customer Experience Builds Brand Credibility 

The principles of engaging customers and improving their perception of a brand are universal: from B2B to B2C to B2B2C. In this era where so many interactions are often fast and digital, customers still judge all aspects of their experience, and they are loyal to products, services and brands when they can make an emotional connection to them. “Of course, every customer wants their particular needs met, regardless of financial resources or familiarity with your brand,” Nason explains. “However, leaders can be instrumental in generating same or similar feelings about your brand in terms of quality and the sense of being valued.”

By strategically aligning PR and CX, companies can proactively build and strengthen connections by utilizing earned media to educate current and potential customers, ultimately leveraging the third-party credibility of the news or social media to foster greater trust and loyalty. As C-suite leaders tell customer stories in the media, on investor calls, and at internal town halls, they don’t just promote products — they demonstrate that the organization values the customer, is listening, learning and delivering. That credibility compounds across every stakeholder group.

Customer needs are changing faster than ever. Meeting them requires a mix of people and technology, creativity and data, communication and introspection, vision and execution. Today’s — and tomorrow’s — C-suite leaders need to strategically put the customer at the center of every strategic decision, hold their teams accountable for the outcomes, and communicate to stakeholders how you are investing in this area. When you surprise, delight and value your customers consistently, the ROI is undeniable — in loyalty, in growth and in brand resilience.

Written by Ivy Cohen. Have you read?
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