Customer experience (CX) has rapidly become the primary battleground for competitive differentiation in banking. As digital-first challengers and fintechs raise the bar for seamless, intuitive, and emotionally resonant experiences, traditional banks are under increasing pressure to not only meet but exceed evolving customer expectations. Yet, despite significant investment, many banks struggle to rigorously measure the impact of their CX initiatives and to link those investments to tangible business outcomes such as customer growth, retention, and future usage.
To address this gap, Publicis Sapient has developed the Customer Experience Growth Index (CXGX)—a new, data-driven framework that enables banks to measure CX across all digital and physical touchpoints, understand which interactions drive business growth, and prioritize investments that deliver both customer satisfaction and measurable returns.
Historically, banks have relied on metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge customer experience. While NPS offers a simple benchmark for peer comparison, it lacks the nuance and actionability required to inform targeted CX investments. Many CX leaders within leading banks have voiced concerns that NPS is not a sufficiently nuanced metric to capture the complexity of modern customer journeys or to identify which specific improvements will move the needle on business performance.
Banks need a more sophisticated approach—one that goes beyond generic satisfaction scores to reveal which touchpoints and experiences truly matter to customers and, crucially, which are most predictive of future growth.
The CXGX framework, developed by Publicis Sapient, is designed to fill this critical gap. It provides a rigorous, granular, and actionable methodology for measuring customer experience and linking it directly to business outcomes. The framework is built on three core dimensions—the "Three E’s":
For each customer interaction—whether via mobile app, branch visit, live chat, call center, or other channels—CXGX captures responses across these dimensions and links them to one of 11 key touchpoints. This approach provides a channel-specific, emotion-rich view of the customer journey, allowing banks to pinpoint which interactions are memorable (positively or negatively) and which fall into the "Valley of Meh"—the vast majority of experiences that are quickly forgotten and do little to shape brand perception or loyalty.
What sets CXGX apart is its ability to correlate customer experience scores with future usage intention and actual customer growth. Publicis Sapient’s research with UK retail banks demonstrates a strong, positive correlation between a bank’s CXGX score and both customers’ stated intention to use the bank more in the future and net gains in customer numbers. Banks with higher CXGX scores consistently see greater customer growth, while those with lower scores risk stagnation or decline.
For example, neobanks and digitally advanced incumbents with top CXGX scores have outperformed peers in net new customer acquisition, while banks with lower scores have seen customer attrition. This predictive power makes CXGX a powerful tool for banks seeking to prioritize investments that will drive both customer satisfaction and business growth.
The CXGX framework enables banks to:
Consider a top-tier bank whose mobile app is its highest-performing touchpoint, but whose desktop website lags behind. By encouraging just 5% of desktop users to switch to the mobile app, the bank could see a measurable increase in its overall CXGX score. Similarly, if live chat outperforms the call center in both CXGX and cost efficiency, shifting customer service interactions to live chat can deliver a double win.
Unlike NPS, which provides a single, retrospective score, CXGX offers a multidimensional, forward-looking view of customer experience. It not only identifies which experiences are memorable and emotionally resonant but also quantifies their impact on future customer behavior and business growth. This enables banks to move from intuition- or tradition-based investment decisions to a data-driven, evidence-based approach.
To successfully adopt the CXGX framework, banks should:
As customer expectations continue to rise and digital transformation accelerates, banks can no longer afford to fly blind when it comes to CX investment. The CXGX framework provides a robust, research-backed methodology for linking customer experience to business growth, enabling banks to prioritize the initiatives that will deliver the greatest impact.
By adopting CXGX, banks can:
Publicis Sapient partners with leading banks to implement the CXGX framework, turning customer experience data into a strategic asset for growth. To learn more about how CXGX can help your bank accelerate digital transformation and outpace competitors, get in touch with our financial services experts.
About Publicis Sapient
Publicis Sapient is a global digital business transformation partner, helping financial institutions create and sustain competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving world. Our SPEED capabilities—Strategy and Consulting, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data—enable us to deliver meaningful impact through reimagining the products and experiences customers truly value.
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