More and more companies are developing formal customer experience (CX) programs to help provide their organization with strategic insights they need to expand their book of business.
Before we get into why your company should have a formal CX program in place, let’s quickly discuss the what.
CX research measures a customer’s journey through multiple touchpoints. It is more than measuring a single transaction or relationship. A customer experience program, therefore, is more than one survey or focus group.
CX market research utilizes various studies to map out a customer’s journey and understand what impacts motivations, engagement, and loyalty.
Our customer experience market research company shares three reasons every organization needs a formal CX program in place.
A customer experience program is more than a one-off initiative or a nice customer service upgrade. At its core, it’s a company-wide, structured approach designed to consistently deliver excellent experiences at each touchpoint, from first awareness through purchase, post-purchase support, and renewal.
For companies looking to partner with a market research firm, a CX program provides a framework to gather real customer feedback, translate it into meaningful insights, and drive improvement. It means aligning people, process, and technology so your brand promise is experienced reliably by customers.
Customer experience is not just the job of customer service or marketing. It spans operations, product, sales, HR, IT and sometimes even logistics. An effective CX program ensures each of these groups understands their role in delivering the experience you promise.
Too often companies treat customer experience as a short-term project. They may run a survey this quarter, a service improvement that year. But leading organizations treat the CX program as a strategic capability. It’s built into their business model, measured regularly, and evolves over time.
Having a program in place also means shifting from reactive service fixes to proactive experience design. Rather than responding only when things go wrong, a well-built CX program uses research and data to identify friction, anticipate needs, and embed improvement into how your organization operates every day.
As referenced above, a customer experience program involves more than one single qualitative or quantitative market research study. It involves continuous outreach to customers in order to collect the most accurate and current data.
With customer experience programs, feedback and data are collected on a regular and ongoing basis. This allows your organization to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction as you are able to measure both positive and negative changes over time.
A benefit to continuous market research is that companies are able to react to poor customer experiences in real-time. It helps alleviate a negative situation and turn detractors into promoters. A customer experience program also allows companies to stay up to date with consumer trends and fill any gaps in the market before competitors.
An important aspect of developing a CX program is implementing channels to distribute the information to your entire organization. The insight collected through customer experience market research will not only help the marketing team but also accounting, human resources, product development, and so on.
For example, a manufacturing company executes a regular customer experience program with a full-service market research company such as Drive Research. Over time there has been a rise in customer complaints with their brand of washing machines.
The manufacturing company learns that there is little longevity of the product and works to build a model that can last through wear and tear. Customers who reported poor experience with their washers are given a discount on the new model or have the option to receive a free maintenance repair.
Listening to customer concerns and complaints, then acting quickly to resolve the situation is the best thing any organization can do to establish customer loyalty. A formal customer experience program makes this possible.
Acting on your customer experience data and implementing customer-facing changes or internal changes, will allow your company to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. Together, these improvements will ultimately increase business profitability at your organization.
Don’t ignore customer experience data. In fact, it costs less money to improve customer experience than it does to ignore it. Talk to our CX research company about how we can help your organization today.
Building a strong customer-experience program means more than one-off surveys and hearing comments from customers. It means choosing the right metrics, tracking them consistently, and aligning them with your business outcomes. Below are the key metrics a good market research partner will help you measure.
CSAT measures how satisfied customers are with a particular interaction, product, service or overall brand experience. Typically, you’ll ask a question like “How satisfied were you with your experience today?” on a scale (for example, 1-5 or 1-10) and then calculate the percentage of high ratings.
This metric is straightforward and easy to understand, which makes it a great base. A high CSAT score (which can be measured at different customer journey points) gives you a clear indication that you’re meeting expectations. Conversely, a low CSAT flags specific touchpoints for improvement. When your research partner sets up your CX program, they’ll help you define when to measure, include well-written questions, and help you track trends over time.
NPS is a metric that indicates customer loyalty and advocacy by asking: “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague?” on a 0-10 scale. Then you classify respondents as Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), or Detractors (0-6) and subtract the percentage of Detractors from Promoters to get your score.
In the context of a customer experience program, NPS is valuable because it aggregates how your brand is perceived overall (not just that one interaction). It offers a high-level view of loyalty, which correlates with retention, referrals, and long-term revenue. We help our clients interpret their NPS, benchmark it against industry or competitor standards, and identify the root causes behind the numbers via follow-up questions.
CES gauges how much work your customers must do to achieve a goal with your organization. One example of that might be something like, “How easy was it to get the information you needed today?” on a scale from “very difficult” to “very easy.”
High effort experiences are often invisible until they cause friction or churn. By tracking CES, your CX program can identify those friction points before they escalate. A good market-research partner can design your survey flows so that when someone gives a low CES, they’re routed to follow-up questions to dig deeper. That way the program becomes diagnostic, not just descriptive.
Beyond satisfaction and effort, your program should track how experiences translate into behavior. How many customers stay with you, how many leave, and how many expand or refer others? Metrics like retention rate, churn rate, and referral rate help you tie customer-experience improvements to business outcomes
Your research partner can help link survey-based experience data with operational KPIs (for example renewal rates, average order value, repeat purchase rates) so you can see the impact of CX investments. It’s one thing to know customers felt better, but another to measure that feeling turning into retention or increased spend.
Drive Research is a customer experience (CX) market research company. Our team works with clients across the country in a variety of industries to build out custom market research and CX programs. Reach out to us below.
