Accounting for a Great Customer ExperienceA CX leader’s guide to demonstrating economic value

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WHY THIS MATTERS

The total value of a great customer experience can be enormous, but it can also be difficult to quantify. This is because customer experience influences many aspects of a company’s overall performance, and its financial impact is often captured by different departments and across different financial statements.

In this report, we provide an organizing framework for CX leaders who wish to demonstrate the financial impact of their customer experience efforts. Using quanti-tative evidence from companies in multiple industries, we demonstrate the many ways a positive customer experience can influence a company’s top and bottom line. Customer experience (CX) executives can draw on these examples to create a strong business case for their CX investments and to evaluate the specific avenues through which these investments can enhance financial results in their own organizations.

KEY FINDINGS

Looking at 15 companies in nine industries, the Medallia Institute found that when companies provided their customers with a superior customer experience, financial performance improved, enabling companies to achieve:

• Higher revenues due to better customer retention, greater purchase volume, additional upselling or cross-selling, and higher referral rates

• Lower costs due to savings in customer acquisition and customer service

Our findings suggest that how customer experience impacts a company’s financial performance depends largely on its industry and business model. By understanding how CX influences financial performance in different industries and companies, CX executives can identify metrics relevant to their business and leverage lessons from other businesses more effectively.

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Linking customer experience to financial performanceIntuitively, every business leader knows that providing a great customer experience creates benefits that companies profit from. However, these same executives often struggle to demonstrate what a superior customer experience is worth and explain how it generates value.1

Given that most business leaders are reluctant to invest in things they don’t fully understand, researchers and practitioners have conducted numerous studies to help them understand the financial impact of providing a better customer experience.

Forrester, for example, estimated the value of CX by comparing changes in corporate revenue for CX leaders versus CX laggards. In four out of five industries, Forrester found that companies rated as leaders achieved compound annual growth rates seven to 30 percentage points higher than laggards over a four-year period. Forrester concluded that a superior customer experience significantly increases corporate revenue growth in industries where customers perceive a meaningful difference in CX among competitors and can switch easily among them.2

Other studies have tried to quantify specific elements of the CX-performance linkage. Bain & Company traced the value of CX by examining its impact on loyalty and subsequent customer spending. Customers with the best experiences were indeed more loyal, and Bain estimated that the lifetime value of the most loyal customers (i.e., NPS promoters) was six to 12 times greater than that of the least loyal (i.e., NPS detractors).3 When McKinsey & Company looked at the cost side of the equation, it estimated that companies that consistently deliver a superior customer experience across the full customer journey are often able to reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within the first two years.4

Despite the many studies showing that companies typically profit from delivering a better customer experience, the fact remains that CX leaders ultimately have to demonstrate that a superior customer experience generates value in their own business. Building a sound business case is necessary for making the customer experience a corporate priority and gaining support for CX investments.

Thinking like a CFOTo make a strong business case, CX leaders must carefully consider which customer behaviors and outcomes are likely to have the greatest impact on their company’s economics. In other words, CX leaders must think like a CFO, accounting for each CX outcome that can impact their company’s financial position.

In the telecom industry, for example, churn rates, service costs, and cross-selling tend to drive financial performance. A better customer experience can strongly influence each of these —more satisfied customers have fewer problems that escalate into service calls, buy more products and services, and are less likely to terminate their contracts. By carefully measuring and accounting for each outcome in relation to the customer experience, CX executives can create a more holistic picture of their program’s impact and a stronger business case for its value.

In this report, we provide an organizing framework for CX leaders who wish to demonstrate the financial impact of their customer experience efforts. Because every business is somewhat different, there are no hard-and-fast rules about

“CX execs must think like a CFO, accounting for

CX outcomes that impact a company’s financial position.”

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which outcomes will drive the most value for an enterprise or which outcomes will be most influenced by perceptions of the customer experience. Both depend on a company’s industry and business model.

To provide a broad perspective, we draw on examples from 15 companies across nine industries to describe how various CX programs have quantified the value of a superior customer experience. These examples provide substantial evidence that a positive customer experience influences multiple outcomes that collectively improve a company’s financial performance. Our evidence suggests that when CX leaders account for the financial value they create, they are better equipped to gain support from senior executives, build commitment among their functional peers, and play a bigger role in shaping their company’s strategic direction.

Financial accounting for customer experience

Among the companies we examined, most found significant returns to their customer experience initiatives, largely because they rigorously tracked and measured how changes in CX led to changes that impacted business results. In short, they accounted for their CX investments.

The first step in accounting for customer experience is analogous to building a CX balance sheet — that is, identifying the specific customer behaviors and related outcomes that build value for the business. Linking these to changes in customer ratings or to other measures of CX makes it possible to quantify how, and how much, a superior customer experience impacts the company’s top and bottom line.

The most effective way to begin the CX accounting process is by focusing on the two major pathways to profitability: revenue and costs.

Revenue: a great customer experience keeps customers coming back and multiplies sales

On the revenue side, customer experience leaders commonly track and measure four outcomes: customer retention, sales volume, upselling and cross-selling, and sales tied to referrals.

It helps to recognize that delivering an exceptional customer experience has both first- and second-order effects. First, a better customer experience helps to retain existing customers and motivates them to spend more. Second, when customers have a better experience, they are more likely to refer other customers. In addition, referred customers tend to spend more than customers who come to a company in other ways.5

Customer retention

A BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INCREASES RENEWALS AND RETURN VISITS

Delivering a great customer experience helps to retain customers. This is important because in many industries, it is easier to sell to existing customers than it is to generate new business.6 Retaining current customers can be an effective means to shore up or increase reve-nue. Subscription businesses, in particular, view customer retention as a key revenue driver.

Farmers Insurance, for example, believes customer retention drives value in its business, so much so that it shifted its focus from seeking out new customers to providing the best possible experience to existing customers. The $11.3 billion company retrained employees to make customer experience everyone’s job, adopting a customer-centric rather than an agent-centric strategy. As a

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result, Farmers saw its CX scores and customer retention improve significantly. “The single biggest financial lever we’ve been able to push is that as our Net Promoter Score has gone up, retention of our business has gone up — by about three points in the last three years,” CEO Jeff Dailey said. “That’s about $500 million annually in revenue.”7

Like Farmers, cable and internet provider Cox Communications identified customer renewal rates as a key value driver. When the company experimented with new ways of closing the loop (following up) with customers, it tracked renewal rates to assess the impact of its new practices. The outcome: closing the loop improved customer experience and led to double-digit increases in renewal rates.

Later, when Cox noticed that response times for customer issues varied widely across customer care specialists, it centralized its closed-loop processes, creating a dedicated Closed Loop Feedback Team to resolve issues and increase reliability across touchpoints. The centralized team resolved customer issues 24 percent faster, and customers who interacted with the team were significantly less likely to discontinue their service and more likely to renew than a control group. Tracking and measuring a key revenue driver provided a compelling case for change, and the results were used to validate the financial benefits of the improvement effort.

Sales volume

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE HAS A BIG IMPACT ON SPENDING

Customer spending is another outcome that is often influenced by changes in customer experience. Astute CX executives go to great lengths to identify exactly which aspects of the customer experience are most important to increasing future spending, and they target those areas for investment. As their customer experience programs become more robust, sales typically continue to increase as well.

One U.S. retail chain examined customer spending in relation to customer feedback to determine which elements of the experience drove customer satisfaction and greater spending. It discovered that specific behaviors at the frontline had a big impact. For example, when a sales associate reached out to greet a customer, that customer spent nearly 20 percent more on average.

Spending differences were especially pronounced when comparing the very best and worst experiences. When the retailer compared spending for its most and least satisfied customers, extreme promoters (likelihood to recommend = 10) spent nearly one-third more than extreme detractors (likelihood to recommend = 0). Looking at the extremes can sometimes reveal differences that make a strong statement to those who doubt the financial impact of customer experience.

The frequency of customer visits can also influence spending, so it is not uncommon for CX leaders to track the effect of CX on shopping frequency. As it found with the other outcome measures, this retailer demonstrated that when customers had a better experience, they shopped almost 10 percent more frequently over the next 12 months.

Based on these findings, the retailer retrained its sales staff to promote the behaviors that customers valued. In the three years that followed,

“As NPS has gone up, retention has gone up. That’s $500

million annually in revenue.”

“Astute CX executives identify exactly which aspects of the

customer experience are likely to increase spending.”

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customer satisfaction scores rose significantly (10 points on Net Promoter Score), and annual top-line sales rose by more than 3 percent. Being able to show the impact of the retraining investment on both customer satisfaction and sales helped to demonstrate the program’s value and build support for future CX investments.

The impact of customer experience is especially significant in competitive industries such as

finance and retail. The quality of even a single transaction has been shown to correspond with higher spending.

For instance, when financial services behemoth American Express examined the financial impact of its customer experience efforts, it found that customers with the best experiences (promoters) spent 10 to 15 percent more than those who reported the worst experiences (detractors). Customer retention was also closely linked to customer experience: promoters were retained at rates four to five times higher than detractors. In short, customers who encountered the best experiences stuck with the company longer, and they spent more relative to other customers over time.

Spending increases that result from positive customer experiences typically take place over time, so it is important to look at changes in spending aggregated across different intervals. For example, working with a global retail conglomerate with dozens of brands, Medallia found better customer experiences at a single touchpoint were not associated with changes in spending — until we looked at aggregate spending over the subsequent six months. At the six-month point, we began to see notable differences. Customers with higher likelihood to recommend scores spent 40 percent more over that period than customer with lower scores, because they shopped more frequently and made more transactions per customer.

When evaluating the financial impact of CX on either side of the profit equation, it is important to consider whether changes in outcomes are likely to take place in a single transaction or over time — and what interval is appropriate for tracing precisely how CX affects these outcomes. Changes in spending, for example, may be detected more rapidly in industries like retail, but they may take longer to detect in industries like insurance where purchases happen less frequently. We recommend looking at changes

Extreme Detractor (LTR=0)

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in key outcomes over different intervals to understand how CX improvements play out in a given business.

Upselling and cross-selling

A GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE CAN LEAD TO UPGRADES AND CONTRACTS FOR ADDITIONAL SERVICES

Financial metrics that show the number and value of customer upgrades and additional sales across lines of business can be critical to understanding how customer experience affects revenue. Robust customer experience programs continually monitor the impact of customer experience on these metrics, and many executives develop sophisticated tools to look across lines of business and in unexpected corners of a company’s operations.

One national health and fitness chain identified significant upsell opportunities by combining its customer experience, operational, and financial records. When it analyzed the data together, it discovered that more satisfied members continued their memberships for longer periods and expanded their spending to ancillary services like personal training. Promoters spent $45 more on personal training than passives, and $128 more than detractors, in the following year. The most satisfied members spent 194 percent more on these additional services than the least satisfied members did.8

Similarly, a B2B telecom firm was able to demonstrate that by enabling greater engagement with existing clients, a better customer experience ultimately increased revenue by tens of millions of dollars in a single year. Sales reps leveraged CX scores to identify the most satisfied clients as the best prospects for upselling additional services. This enabled them to engage in sales opportunities that penetrated further into those accounts, which swung the door wide open for upselling into higher-priced services.

Another outcome metric influenced by CX that can also be tied to revenue increases is cross-selling — when an exceptional customer

experience in one line of business spills over into revenue benefits for other, unrelated lines. Working with a large European telecom provider, Medallia calculated that promoters could generate 2.5 times as much revenue across product and service lines as detractors over the next 10 years. For example, mobile phone promoters subsequently subscribed to other lines of business, such as Internet and cable TV, at more than twice the rate of detractors. Further, not only were detractors more likely than promoters to discontinue their mobile phone service contracts, they also discontinued their other services 60 percent more frequently (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Promoters add new product lines more often...

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Sales tied to referrals

SATISFIED CUSTOMERS REFER VALUABLE NEW CUSTOMERS

Most executives know how valuable referrals are to a company’s top-line growth. Showing how a great customer experience influences referrals is another way to demonstrate that CX drives sales and revenue, especially in the longer term. Turning customers into referral engines is an especially powerful way to increase revenue in sectors such as hospitality, where online review sites drive business, and financial services, where trust is a key factor in sales.

When Medallia examined the revenue impact of customer referrals at Airbnb, our analyses revealed that promoters referred their friends 44 percent more frequently than detractors in the six months following a guest’s experience (see Figure 3). Working closely with Airbnb, Medallia estimated that if the company could convert its detractors to promoters by providing an outstanding customer experience, the incremental referrals alone could increase the company’s annual revenues by nearly 2 percent.

These CX-related revenue impacts often compound. For instance, research indicates that new customers who are referred by existing customers are often higher-quality leads who turn out to be more profitable customers. In a study of 10,000 German bank accounts, researchers found that over a three-year period, referred customers were 18 percent more likely to stay with the banks, and they generated 16 percent more in profits.9 Loyal customers made more referrals, and referred

customers were more loyal, creating more of what research firm Gartner calls “Loyads” (loyalists who also advocate). Loyads can be a company’s highest-value customers.10

Once again, by tracking the second-order effects of a superior customer experience, companies can successfully demonstrate a substantial financial impact, which often increases as referrals and other positive customer behaviors continue to pay off over time.

In short, while top-line performance (sales or revenue) is perhaps the most dazzling part of a company’s income statement, successful CX leaders know that demonstrating an impact on revenue requires looking several lines down on the income statement. Identifying the customer behaviors and outcomes that drive revenue growth is the first step in quantifying the impact of CX on financial performance. However, because many factors influence a company’s revenue, experienced CX professionals also know that isolating the unique impact of customer experience on performance requires a well-thought-out test plan — one that measures and controls for other revenue drivers that may not be affected by CX.

Effects controlling for: prior stays, ticket type, channel, business/leisure, interaction category, issue type, region,

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n = 600,000 observations; p<.01

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Figure 3: Promoters refer new customers more frequently

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“By tracking the second order effects, companies can

demonstrate a substantial financial impact, which often

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Costs: a great customer experience lowers acquisition costs and solves service problems If top-line performance is the flashy part of an income statement, costs are the backstage wiring.

Costs are often viewed as a necessary evil that should be driven down to an absolute minimum. If taken to extremes, this mindset can be shortsighted and get in the way of investing in a great customer experience program, which may ultimately reduce other costs. In a world where one angry tweet can torpedo a brand, the potential costs of a bad customer experience are impossible to quantify.11

Customer experience executives may not be able to fully quantify the costs of bad customer experience, but they can determine the cost savings of a great experience by tracking certain outcomes. The two types of outcomes commonly tracked are the costs to serve existing customers and the costs to acquire new customers. What these costs entail varies by industry and a company’s business model, but systematically reducing them inevitably creates value for the business.

Cost to acquire customers

REFERRALS AND EARNED MEDIA ATTRACT NEW CUSTOMERS AT LOWER COST

Referrals from current customers are an important cost-reducing outcome for many businesses. An excellent customer experience can motivate current customers to share their story with others. These referrals occur through direct messaging (word of mouth), public reviews (word of mouse), and participation in industry ratings (word of mass). Not only do referrals help to generate new revenue, but they also lower the cost to acquire

new customers. Referrals spurred by a great customer experience cost virtually nothing. Highly satisfied customers generate “earned media” — a word-of-mouth impression that experts estimate is worth anywhere from five to 100 times more than a paid media impression. Word of mouth can also amplify the effects of paid media by approximately 15 percent.12 Astute companies leverage their current customers for referrals and carefully measure and monitor the referrals process.

One regional health and fitness chain identified customer referrals as a powerful way to attract new members, so it experimented with various incentives to better understand the relationship between customer experience and actual referral behavior. The company found that promoters were nearly three times as likely to refer friends and family members to the gym as detractors were. More strikingly, compared to the baseline level of referrals, launching a targeted referrals campaign that used personalized referral rewards increased actual referrals by a factor of 20. The low-cost campaign increased the number of new members referred by existing members and dramatically reduced the average cost to acquire a new member.

For some companies, current customers’ participation in online review sites and industry research can reduce future costs to acquire new customers. After a European telecom provider invested heavily to improve the customer experience, the firm garnered valuable outside recognition, including service awards, customer satisfaction accolades, free media exposure, and credible marketing content from its strategic investment in customer experience. A U.S.-based auto insurance provider overhauled the customer experience and saw its J.D. Power ranking improve from third tier to top ten as a result.

“One angry tweet can torpedo a brand”

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Cost to serve customers

BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE REDUCES FUTURE SUPPORT REQUESTS AND LOWERS COSTS

For many businesses, the costs of serving customers strongly impact a company’s profitability. Clearly delineating how customer experience affects these costs can be vital to understanding how to manage them in the long term, even if providing great customer experience may appear to cost more in the short term. Delivering an excellent customer experience in an initial encounter reduces the likelihood that the customer will need support in the future. Getting it right the first time can reduce service costs substantially.

Based on customer feedback, U.S. communications provider Comcast narrowed service appointment windows and began responding faster to social media comments. After these efforts to improve the customer experience, the number of service calls fell by 14 percent, the success rate for solving a customer’s issue on the first call increased by 7 percent, and the need for a second tech-service visit declined by 6 percent.13 Focusing on getting it right the first time significantly reduced customer support costs and demonstrated the strong tie between customer experience and overall costs to serve.

As Comcast’s experience illustrates, CX initiatives often involve short-term investments that can, over the long term, bring down other costs, which offset the initial investment. It is important to recognize that cost savings can be more difficult to estimate and often take longer to become apparent.

Nonetheless, they tend to have more lasting effects and therefore can be worth more than revenue increases in the long run.

Putting it all together

McKinsey & Company has found that the most successful CX programs are self-funding — early wins remove costs from the system and simplify the business. Those savings can then fund medium-term initiatives to innovate, to change the trajectory of the customer experience, and to support more ambitious initiatives.14 Over time, CX gets woven into every aspect of the organization.

Relatively few companies have done this successfully, but one that stands out is Sunrise Communications. The Swiss telecom provider created tools to help its mobile phone customers report network connectivity problems, identify service issues, and provide other feedback on their experience. The feedback helped Sunrise allocate scarce resources to address the most critical coverage gaps and service shortfalls. By focusing its investment on the most important customer issues, Sunrise accelerated service improvements and reduced the volume of support calls, thereby reducing costs.

Taking it to the next level, the firm proactively communicated to customers what it had heard from them and what actions it had taken to address their concerns. Customer experience scores soon increased, customer retention improved, and the company’s reputation benefited. Customers were so delighted with the improvements and the firm’s receptivity to their feedback that Sunrise garnered several industry awards — valuable earned media that reduced the cost to acquire new customers.

“Getting it right the first time can reduce service

costssubstantially.”

“Cost savings tend to have more lasting effects...and can be worth more than revenue

increases in the long run.”

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Sunrise has made customer experience a core competence, and the company has outperformed its competitors as a result.

The bottom line: validating the CX value proposition sustains commitment and builds long-term capabilitiesTaken together, the results demonstrated by these 15 companies show that successful CX leaders take the time to account for their CX investment and the return on that investment. They do this by first identifying the customer behaviors and outcomes that underpin value in their business, then showing how a better customer experience affects those outcomes as well as the financial outcomes that result.

As CX leaders become more skillful at tracking and evaluating the impact of their investments —and integrate their evaluation practices

with other financial reporting and planning processes — they can begin to use customer data in more prescriptive ways. Understanding where and how a superior customer experience has the greatest impact on performance makes it possible for leaders across the business to make decisions about which investments will generate the greatest returns. In the best cases, the CX function becomes a valuable partner to the finance function, providing insights that can guide investment decisions about operational improvements, product and service changes that appeal to customers, and the expansion of successful CX initiatives to other parts of the business.

Ultimately, confirming the CX value proposition can build greater commitment to enhancing customer experience across the organization and can help sustain the company’s investment in CX as a critical capability.

(+) Spend volume

(+) Retention

(-) Cost to serve (-) Cost to acquire

(+) Referrals

(+) Upsell / Cross-Sell

Tracing the financial impact of an exceptional customer experience

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Recommendations How to make the case for investing in customer experience

To make a case for investing in customer ex-perience, CX executives must provide tangible evidence that customer experience improvements lead to better financial performance:

• Gather available data from other companies and industries to inform your approach

• Take a financial perspective to show all the ways that customer experience can create value for your business and enhance financial results

- Identify the customer behaviors and outcomes that impact revenue, cost, or both

- Determine the best ways to collect data on customer experience and identify key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and other CX outcomes

- Integrate and analyze customer experi-ence feedback together with operational and financial data

• Develop a well-designed test plan, with careful controls, to isolate the unique impact of cus-tomer experience on performance outcomes and financial results

• Quantify the impact of customer experience by looking for statistical rela-tionships and logical connections between customer experience and:

- Customer retention

- Sales volume

- Upsell/cross-sell results

- Actual referrals

- Customer acquisition costs over time

- Customer service costs over time

• Make the case to invest in those aspects of the customer experience that have the greatest impact on financial performance, using analyses from your own company reinforced by similar results from other companies

• Continuously track the effect of improvements (or declines) in customer experience on performance drivers and, ultimately, revenues and costs

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ENDNOTES1. Joel Maynes and Alex Rawson, “Linking the Customer Experience to

Value,” McKinsey & Company, March 2016.

2. Harley Manning, “Does Customer Experience Really Drive Business Success?” Forrester Research, July 2015.

3. Bain & Company, “Are You Experienced?” April 2015, http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/are-you-experienced-infographic.aspx. In the Net Promoter Score system, “promoters” are customers who respond to the survey question “How likely are you to recommend this company/product to a friend or colleague?” with a score of 9 or 10 (on a scale of 0 or 1 to 10). "Passives" record a score of 7 or 8, and “detractors” score between 0 and 6.

4. Joel Maynes and Alex Rawson, “Linking the Customer Experience to Value,” McKinsey & Company, March 2016.

5. Phillip Schmitt, Bernd Skiera, and Christophe Van den Bulte, “Why Customer Referrals Can Drive Stunning Profits,” Harvard Business Review, June 2011.

6. Paul W. Farris, Neil Bendle, Philip Pfeifer, and David Reibstein, Marketing Metrics That Matter: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance, Pearson FT Press, 2010. The estimated probability of selling to a current customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling to a new prospect.

7. “Farmers Insurance Group — Jeff Dailey, CEO” (Medallia video recording, https://vimeo.com/175901380).

8. Peter H. Kriss, “The Revenue Impact of a Great Customer Experience,” Medallia, 2014.

9. Phillip Schmitt, Bernd Skiera, and Christophe Van den Bulte, “Why Customer Referrals Can Drive Stunning Profits,” Harvard Business Review, June 2011.

10. Jake Sorofman, “How to Justify the Business Value of Your Customer Experience Investments,” Gartner Inc., 2017.

11. Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, “Empowered,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2010. https://hbr.org/2010/07/empowered

12. Word of Mouth Marketing Association, “Return on Word of Mouth Study,” 2014. https://womma.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/STUDY-WOMMA-Return-on-WOM-Executive-Summary.pdf

13. Charlie Herrin, “Progress Update on Customer Service,” Comcast Voices blog, Sept 27, 2016, accessed Jan. 24, 2017. http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/comcast-customer-service-update. “Comcast Experience: Change in Action,” accessed Jan. 24, 2017. http://corporate.comcast.com/images/Comcast-Experience-Innovation-Q2-2016-CX.pdf

14. Joel Maynes and Alex Rawson, “Linking the Customer Experience to Value,” McKinsey & Company, March 2016.

Medallia, the leader in Experience Management cloud technology, ranked #15 in the most recent Forbes Cloud 100 list. Medallia’s vision is simple: to create a world where companies are loved by customers and employees alike. Hundreds of the world’s largest companies and organizations trust Medallia’s cloud platform to help them capture customer and employee feedback everywhere they are, understand it in real-time, and deliver insights and action everywhere—from the C-suite to the frontline—to improve business performance. Medallia has offices worldwide, including Silicon Valley, New York, Washington DC, Austin, London, Buenos Aires, Paris, Sydney, and Tel Aviv. Learn more at www.medallia.com.

Emma Sopadjieva

Emma Sopadjieva is a Research & Analytics Manager at Medallia's CX Strategy Research group. Prior to coming to Medallia, she was a consultant for over five years at Deloitte's Financial Advisory practices in the US, UK, and Spain. She recently received her master's degree in International Economics and Management from the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD.

Carly Kontra

Carly Kontra is a Research & Analytics Senior Associate in Medallia's CX Strategy Research group. She completed her PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Chicago while studying the impact of motor experience on perception, learning, and wisdom.

Bernadette Doerr

Bernadette Doerr is a Research & Analytics Manager in Medallia’s CX Strategy Research group. Prior to joining Medallia, she conducted research on organizational culture and leadership while in the PhD program at the Haas School of Business and spent a decade in strategy consulting. She also holds a BS (Business) and MS (Foreign Service) from Georgetown University.

Beth Benjamin

Beth Benjamin is the senior director of Medallia’s CX Strategy Research group and has more than 25 years of experience conducting research on organizational strategy and practice. Prior to coming to Medallia, she held positions at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the RAND Corporation, and three management consulting firms. She has a PhD in business from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

We would like to acknowledge and thank Carolyn Egelman, David Lambert, and Peter Kriss for the valuable analyses and insights they contributed to this report.

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