Research Finds the Quality of the Customer Experience Affects a Company's Stock Price

What’s the value of providing an excellent customer experience? We know it increases customer loyalty and repeat buying. It helps with word-of-mouth referrals to new customers from existing ones. Overall, it boosts sales and revenue. It may also help with a company’s stock value.

According to new research from the XM Institute at Qualtrics, companies with the best customer experience ratings outperformed their industry peers’ stock performance between 2019 and 2022 and doubled their lead over companies that provide poor customer experiences.

To understand how customer experiences may impact business performance, XM Institute identified the large, publicly traded companies with the highest and lowest-rated customer experiences using data from the Qualtrics XM Institute Q2 2019 Consumer Benchmark Survey, a representative study of 10,000 U.S. consumers. The analysis tracked these companies’ quarterly stock performance, adjusted for industry-wide changes, and compared it against corresponding industry indexes, before, during and after the recession caused by early COVID fears.

The study concluded that companies with top-rated customer experiences drove greater shareholder value than peers within their own industries. The difference between stock prices of top-rated companies and their S&P industry index doubled between the end of 2019 and the end of 2021. On the flip side, the stock performance of organizations with poorly rated customer experiences underperformed compared with their overall industry, lagging by 21 percentage points at the end of 2021.

There is also evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic widened the gulf between the highest performers and the lowest. The difference between the stock performance of the companies with the highest and lowest-rated customer experience saw the biggest quarterly change between Q4 2019 and Q1 2020, just as COVID-19 began to impact the U.S.

“Today’s customers have high expectations from the brands they do business with, and these statistics show that investing in the customer experience and meeting those expectations can really pay off,” said Bruce Temkin, head of the Qualtrix XM Institute. “Organizations that get it right can address customer feedback in a quick and meaningful way to differentiate themselves in uncertain times.”

Edited by Greg Tavarez