Estimate The ROI Of A Better Online Customer Experience In Six Steps

Proving the business value of a better online experience is a top priority for Web customer experience leaders. To help, we've identified a six-step process that lets even financial novices model the ROI for Web customer experience projects: 1) document the improvements you want to make; 2) define how you expect those improvements to change customer behavior; 3) assign a financial value to each behavior; 4) estimate best- and worst-case scenarios for how far the needle will move; 5) estimate the cost of the project; and 6) plug the data into a spreadsheet and run "what if" scenarios to arrive at a realistic range of potential ROI. To improve their estimating skills, customer experience professionals should track actual ROI from each project they do and use info about what they got right and what they got wrong to hone future projections.