New Forrester research that examines the relationship between a company’s customer experience (CX) quality and its stock performance found there is a strong correlation between the two.
The top 20% of brands in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index) had higher stock price growth and higher total returns than a similar portfolio of companies drawn from the bottom 20%.
Key findings from the research include:
* Brand-by-brand correlation between stock performance and CX is weak. Forrester found a Pearson correlation of just under 0.4, right on the border between a low and moderate correlation. This shows that as CX Index scores increase, so does stock performance — but with a great amount of variability.
* The leader category contains different industries than the laggard category. Out of the nine industries represented in the leader category, which ranged from digital retailers to airlines to auto and home insurance providers, only one industry also contained brands in the laggard category.
* Within a single industry, leaders don’t always outperform laggards. Out of the 15 industries with more than one publicly traded brand, seven had CX laggards (health insurance providers, airlines, TV service providers, internet service providers, etc.) that outperformed the CX leader on total returns.