Why you should be measuring Return On Experience (ROX)

For businesses looking to measure their marketing efforts or the impact of a new feature, product or service, the go-to method is to calculate Return On Investment (ROI). However, in today’s marketplace where brands operate across multiple touchpoints on a variety of different channels, it’s increasingly important to consider Return On Experience (ROX). While much more difficult to calculate, this metric offers a panoramic view of your entire business, revealing how separate functions are interlinked and allowing you to understand the true value that your brand’s experiences generate.

What is Return On Experience (ROX)?

Return On Experience (ROX) is a metric which allows marketers to examine how consumers interact with their brand and measure how their investments in customer experience are impacting their bottom line. Calculating your ROX score is essential to get a holistic understanding of how your consumers perceive and interact with your brand and to highlight what steps you need to take to build more meaningful relationships with your target audience

ROX vs ROI

While ROI is a simple metric that allows you to directly measure cost against value generated, ROX is much more intangible and calculating it will force you to consider a number of factors across your product, services, marketing campaigns and even internal company policies. Because of this, working out your ROX score can be more challenging than with ROI. However, the process can help you understand how your users interact with your brand and the value they receive from it, providing a clearer roadmap of where you should focus your future investments and marketing efforts.

How to measure Return On Experience (ROX)

Calculating your ROX score requires an assessment of the numerous ways your users interact with your brand, the different ways those interactions generate revenue and an understanding of the impact that different features of your product have on user experience. Translated into an equation, it would look something like this:

ROX [%] = net value of improvements to user experience / cost of investment x 100

In order to work out the net value of improvements to user experience, you must first build an ROX framework that focuses on your customer touchpoints and identifies how your product, services, company culture and IT infrastructure feed into the most important and emotionally engaging customer and employee experiences. Salesforce recommends that IT companies measure the following factors in order to calculate their overall ROX score:

• Customer Effort Score: This measures how intuitive and fast your services are and includes everything from how quickly your mobile app opens to the ease at which new customers can create an account.
• Time to Market: How quickly can your business launch a new product, service or feature? Agility is essential in reacting to your customer’s needs and ensuring your brand experiences remain competitive.
• Acquisition Cost: How much does your business spend to acquire new users? Improving customer experience can potentially mean your app grows through word-of-mouth or organically, rather than relying heavily on paid promotion.
• Engagement: This metric measures how engaged your users are and can help you understand what pain points are causing your users to stop engaging with your brand.
• Cost to implement: What is the cost of improving your customer experience? Does it require an investment in new technology or training your employees?
• Customer Satisfaction: How satisfied are your users with your brand experience? This metric should be measured across all of your channels so you can understand which interactions work and which ones require improvement.
• Click-Through Rate: This measures how successful your calls to action are.
• Conversion Rate: This metric measures the number of users that ultimately make the desired action of a particular campaign, such as making a purchase or creating an account.

Improving your score for one of these metrics can positively affect others. For example, by improving your Customer Effort Score, you’ll not only create a more seamless and simple experience for your existing customers but may also remove roadblocks that could improve your conversion rate and directly impact your revenue.

What are the benefits of measuring ROX?

More than ever, experiences drive purchases. Consumers crave brands that offer them experiences beyond the product, this is why so many businesses focus on building a brand persona that can foster relationships with their target audience.

While ROI can give you a snapshot of the value generated by a single investment, ROX allows a business to see how changes to a customer experience positively impact customer lifetime value.

In their Global Consumer Insights Survey 2019, PwC outlined how measuring ROX can establish a “virtuous cycle” that amplifies your brand’s value. The cycle consists of five factors: pride, influencers, behavior, value drivers and outcome.

By focusing on these five elements, your business can build a framework for measuring and understanding the experiences you provide and eventually the return on these experiences. With these insights in mind, planning a strategy for growth and deciding where to invest next is much clearer.

It doesn't really matter what type of experiences your users crave, whether your app is for language learners, shoppers, a lifestyle app or game — measuring ROX can uncover how to improve those key moments that mean the most to your target audience and can unlock measurable value for your brand.

If you found this guide useful, you may also be interested in our article on user experience in apps which provides actionable steps to improve your app’s UX. We also have resources on how you can define and reach your app’s target audience.