Key Findings

As part of Qualtrics XM Institute’s 2023 US Consumer Study, we asked 10,000 consumers to rate their recent interactions with brands across the three dimensions of customer experience – success, effort, and emotion – and how likely they are to perform four loyalty activities afterward: trust the brand, forgive the brand for a mistake, recommend the brand to others, and purchase more from the brand. From our analysis, we learned that:

  • Emotion has the largest impact. Consumers with a high emotion rating are the most likely to exhibit each of the four loyalty behaviors compared to consumers with high success or effort ratings. On average across all industries, high emotion scores are most likely to coincide with high likelihood to purchase more.
  • Effort and success also have positive effects on loyalty. On average across all industries, effort and success have a strong positive impact on all loyalty behaviors. As with emotion, these customer experience components have the strongest relationship with likelihood to purchase more. Seventy-eight percent of respondents who give a high effort rating say they are likely to purchase more, while only 18% with a low effort rating say the same. These numbers for success are 77% and 19%, respectively.
  • Airlines benefit the most from strong customer experiences. Of the 22 industries, airlines’ success and emotion ratings have the strongest relationship with each the four loyalty behaviors. On average, consumers who give an airline high emotion ratings are 8.3x more likely to have strong loyalty than those with low emotion ratings, while those with high success ratings are 5.3x more likely to exhibit strong loyalty behaviors.
  • Consumer payments loyalty is least affected by customer experience. Consumers with high success ratings are, on average, 37 points more likely than those with low success ratings to recommend, forgive, trust, and purchase more – the smallest gap across all 22 industries. Consumers with high effort ratings are 41 points more likely to exhibit these behaviors, while high emotion ratings leads to a 48 points gap – each the smallest gap present for the component.

Figures

Here are the figures in this data snapshot:

  1. Customer Experience and Loyalty Measurements
  2. CX and Loyalty Connections – All Industries
  3. CX and Loyalty Connections – Airline
  4. CX and Loyalty Connections – Auto
  5. CX and Loyalty Connections – Banking
  6. CX and Loyalty Connections – Car Rental
  7. CX and Loyalty Connections – Computer/ Tablet Makers
  8. CX and Loyalty Connections – Consumer Payment
  9. CX and Loyalty Connections – Electronics
  10. CX and Loyalty Connections – Fast Food
  11. CX and Loyalty Connections – Food Takeout & Delivery
  12. CX and Loyalty Connections – Grocery
  13. CX and Loyalty Connections – Health Insurance
  14. CX and Loyalty Connections – Hotel
  15. CX and Loyalty Connections – Insurance
  16. CX and Loyalty Connections – Investment
  17. CX and Loyalty Connections – Parcel Delivery
  18. CX and Loyalty Connections – Retail
  19. CX and Loyalty Connections – Software
  20. CX and Loyalty Connections – Social Media
  21. CX and Loyalty Connections – Streaming Media
  22. CX and Loyalty Connections – TV/Internet Service Provider
  23. CX and Loyalty Connections – Utilities
  24. CX and Loyalty Connections – Wireless
  25. Methodology