Actually, many CX leaders risk investing where it doesn’t earn loyalty. That’s because traditional prioritization of journey drivers ignores that customers don’t stay loyal because you’re doing well. They stay loyal when you are doing better than competitors in the things that matter.

This blog is part of a series how customer journeys drive loyalty (scroll to the end for all resources).

Competitive Context Changes The Investment Decision

Looking only at your own performance answers “Where are we weak?”. But weakness is not the same as competitive disadvantage. CX leaders must answer more urgent questions: “Where are we losing?” and “Where do we need to invest to differentiate?”.

Let us prove it to you using data from Forrester’s Journey Benchmarking Study 2025. Below you’ll see data for one large incumbent bank, showing the seven most important drivers of loyalty in “Getting a new product or service” journeys.

The difference is simple. Instead of asking how well the bank performs on each driver, the analysis asks how well it performs relative to competitors (y-axis).

  • “Easy login” requires work despite being only the 4th-most important driver. Why? Because the bank underperforms competitors.
  • ”Relevant information” needs urgent work – not just because it is quite important but also because the gap to competitors is quite large.

Scatterplot showing the importance of journey drivers to loyalty versus the bank's performance relative to competitors in a new-product journey. The x-axis shows driver importance from lower to higher. The y-axis shows competitive performance from worse than competitors to better than competitors. Drivers include easy login, relevant information, useful tools, technical terms explained, help availability, sustainable option, and competitive pricing. Easy login and relevant information are highlighted because, despite being important loyalty drivers, the bank underperforms competitors on them. The chart indicates that relevant information requires urgent action and easy login requires improvement when competitive gaps are considered.

Without Competitive Context You May Fix The Wrong Problems

Had we relied on a traditional importance-performance matrix, we would have concluded that neither issue required immediate investment. Relevant information would have fallen into the “maintain” quadrant and easy login in the “potential overkill” quadrant. The bank would likely invest in the wrong place and deprioritize issues where competitors have a meaningful advantage.

Importance-performance matrix for a bank's new-product journey. The x-axis shows driver importance and the y-axis shows the bank's performance. Four quadrants are labeled potential overkill, maintain, low priority, and focus here. Drivers include easy login, relevant information, useful tools, technical terms explained, help availability, sustainable option, and competitive pricing. Easy login falls into the potential overkill quadrant because performance is high despite only moderate importance. Relevant information falls into the maintain quadrant because both importance and performance are above average. The chart illustrates how a traditional importance-performance approach would not prioritize either driver for investment.

Put Competitive Prioritization In The Context Of Your Strategy For Each Journey

Competitive context is the key ingredient to be able to Treat Journey Investments As Portfolio Management:

  • Start with your strategy for each journey: Is it a hygiene journey that you want to stabilize, a table-stakes journey where you want to match competitors, and or a signature journey where you want to race ahead of competition? .
  • Then, benchmark journey-level drivers to identify whether you perform on par, below or above competitors in key loyalty drivers.
  • Finally, decide what to improve based on that information. For example, when you are trying to match competitors for table stakes journeys, focus on those drivers where you are behind.

What should you do next?

Don’t stop at combining journey strategy and benchmarking at the journey-driver level. Dive into our other key findings and recommendations for improving journeys in ways that drive loyalty:

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