Customer Experience 
According to our recent survey of customer experience leaders, CX investments are easier to secure than just five years ago. Plans to increase spending on AI tools, analytics, data management, and more in 2025 point to a critical inflection point in CX—if you’re not asking for more budget, you could fall behind.
Most executive leadership already recognizes CX as a value driver, but it takes more than that to get a healthy CX budget approved. If you’re hoping to invest in new technology or do more hiring in the coming year, you’ll need to present CX stakeholders with a compelling business case and ROI calculations.
Follow these six steps to help build your case to invest in and scale your CX program.
1) Benchmark Your Current CX Efforts
First, find your starting point to present a clear path to ROI.
Consider the problems you already know you want to solve, like low satisfaction scores or high call center costs. Take note of your current revenue, retention, and growth goals at the company-wide level, then gather any detailed data available on your CX-specific metrics.
Try to find data on:
- Engagement and conversion rates for each channel
- Retention, lifetime value, and churn metrics
- Customer satisfaction scores
- LTV to CAC ratio or CAC payback period
- Purchase frequency or repeat purchase rate
- Resolution time
- Upsell and cross-sell rates
It may be obvious where to make your investments. If it’s not, look to other companies in your space to see what they’re planning. In our CX survey, respondents overwhelmingly planned increases in investments in the following:
- AI capabilities
- Analytics and reporting
- Employee upskilling
- Data integration and management
- Internal employee tools
- Customer-facing technologies
- Adding or integrating CX channels
- Hiring and retention
📈Related: What Call Center Benchmarks Should You Target In 2025?
2) Focus on a Few Key Areas of Innovation
There are many use cases for greater investment in CX technology, from using AI to capture customer sentiment to automating quality management across all channels. You can combine these use cases into key areas of improvement or innovation, identifying specific technologies and spending categories that will deliver the most business value.
Consider each touchpoint along the customer journey, from a prospect’s website interactions to support requests from paying, repeat customers. You may also have internal use cases, like reporting and compliance, that aren’t necessarily part of the customer journey but still impact customer outcomes.
Here are some examples of how you might group recommended improvements as you develop your business case:
- Deploy an AI-powered contact center: Invest in AI chat and voice technology, agent assist tools, smart call routing solutions to improve the outcomes of contact center interactions. This also entails training employees to use AI and balance it with human intervention.
- Enable self-service, omnichannel support: Get prospects and customers the information they need through new AI agents, AI knowledge bases, and automated resolution paths that drastically cut time spent with human reps.
- Improve real-time analytics and reporting: Unify data on one platform, automate reporting and use AI analytics to better understand CX conversations and activity.
- Accelerate QA and compliance: Use tools like AI sentiment analysis and risk detection to automate compliance and privacy protections.
- Increase CX team productivity: Make stronger CX hires, better train existing employees, invest in tools for automation, and improve oversight of customer engagement channels.
3) Quantify the Impact of Each Use Case
Once you’ve decided on your use cases, identify the costs and ROI associated with each. For the contact center example, your costs might include the costs of a contact center platform with AI capabilities, plus a number of hours dedicated to training sessions.
Here’s what ROI might look like:
- A reduction or more efficient deployment of staff through automation
- Lower costs due to shorter call durations and faster resolution times
- An increase in upsell activity due to agent assist
- More purchases and referrals as a result of improved customer satisfaction
These are just a few possibilities. Read this guide on customer experience ROI for a detailed breakdown of ROI calculations and considerations.
4) Set Clear Milestones
Not all CX investments deliver ROI overnight (though some do). Include milestones by quarter, year, and over the lifecycle of your proposed investments so stakeholders can confidently track and celebrate progress.
Quick wins are a must. You can immediately quantify the ROI from some investments, like AI tools for summarization and transcription, by calculating the time saved per agent from day one.
Other investments take longer. For multi-year ROI calculations, give leadership an idea of what to expect at each interval and explain how savings in other areas will offset shorter-term losses.
Beneath the surface of these projections, ensure you have a firm grasp of the metrics and levers driving the customer experience and the business.
🎥 Get Inspired: Visit the Nextiva Customer Success Hub to see how Nextiva customers have delivered CX results and ROI.
5) Calculate the Cost of Inertia
Don’t forget to include the cost of doing nothing.
Most companies plan to increase CX spending this year, experimenting with technology that slashes waste and accelerates automation across almost every channel. Explain how company KPIs might be negatively affected as customers get used to highly personalized, AI-driven interactions with your competitors and other brands.
To compel organizations that tend to resist change, illustrate the cost of inaction.
For instance, in virtually every industry, companies embrace AI to manage the first stage of customer interactions, freeing up their staff to focus on higher-touch customer interactions. These efforts culminate in higher customer satisfaction ratings, shorter sales cycles, and greater brand awareness.
After talking with many CX stakeholders, I’ve found that most aren’t aware of the challenges of using disparate customer management tools. While some integrations exist, many report significant challenges in viewing a unified, holistic view of the customer. If you know this is the case, document it and work it into your CX improvement plan to tackle these obstacles.
6) Stay Open to Phased Implementation
If you’re worried about selling your CX business case to leadership, consider breaking the investment into smaller phases. Start with the use case you expect to produce the fastest ROI, then use that momentum to gain approval for the next phase.
It’s tempting to solve every customer experience gap right away. You’ll encounter some surprises along the way – but in a phased approach, you’ve accounted for the most beneficial customer experience enhancements to your business.
Don’t forget about celebrating your CX wins. Whether it’s a raving fan customer review or an agent who genuinely had every tool they needed to serve a customer in one call, you’ve got to include these qualitative wins with stakeholders, too.
Quantify the value of your next CX investment
See how Nextiva drives ROI and drives company-wide growth in a personalized demo.
Tool Consolidation and Cost Reduction on a Unified Platform
Consolidation is a hot topic among CX leaders looking to boost productivity and margins. On average, CX teams use at least six tools, with over 81% looking to reduce that number.
Unifying CX data and capabilities on an enterprise platform can add tens of thousands to your yearly margins. To learn more or get help strengthening your business case, check out these additional resources or contact us directly.
