What can customer insights reveal about the value of CX?

How Virgin Media 02 and Hyatt Hotels leverage insights and analytics, the shift from leading to lagging metrics, and how Oura is measuring the value of AI in CX

What do customer insights reveal about the value of CX?

The first section of this report demonstrates that although it is often overlooked, the customer function has matured rapidly and can now drive tangible business results.

However, the businesses succeeding in this area are guided by evidence, not instinct. They know which investment choices, product refinements and operational enhancement will drive the strongest strategic outcomes, because they have the data to prove it.

At Virgin Media 02, commercial insights lead Jack Austin says a key role for any customer insight team is acting as the bridge between customer needs and business priorities.

“The challenge for insight teams has never simply been generating understanding of customers; it is ensuring that understanding translates into decisions the business can act on,” Austin says.

At a senior level, Austin says customer insight needs to connect with “the realities leaders are responsible for”, such as growth, revenue, retention, operational performance and long-term sustainability.

“That does not mean reducing every customer decision to a financial equation, but it does mean understanding the commercial context and helping leaders navigate the trade-offs involved,” he says.

For example, there may be decisions that create short-term commercial benefit but damage customer trust over time, or there may be customer improvements that are highly valued but simply are not commercially viable.

“Insight helps bring evidence and perspective into those decisions,” he says.

The first step is understanding what different stakeholders need from the insights.

Austin explains: “Not every audience requires the same output. Some decisions need a clear recommendation, some need a compelling customer story, and others require a direct connection to operational or financial metrics.”

This is where strong relationships with stakeholders and collaboration across the business becomes critical.

Austin says insight teams should work closely with their colleagues in areas such as analytics, modelling and commercial strategy to connect customer understanding with measurable outcomes.

“This means that to understand how changes in CX influence loyalty, churn or revenue, for example, you need to bring different perspectives and expertise together,” he says.

Collaboration is key to being able to link insights to commercial impact, something Austin’s role was designed to foster. He adds: “Ultimately, the goal is not to make customer insight more commercial by losing the customer perspective. It is to make business decisions better by ensuring commercial choices are informed by a genuine understanding of customers.”

Weaver says that to make a lasting impression on stakeholders, practitioners need to understand that executives rarely make decisions based on research findings alone. “Rather, they make decisions based on outcomes,” Weaver says.

“Every customer frustration creates friction somewhere in a journey, and every friction point has consequences. Sometimes those consequences show up as lower conversion, reduced loyalty, or lost revenue," he explains.

Our role is to connect those dots; not just to show that customers or users are struggling, but to help the organization understand what that struggle costs today, and what value could be created by solving it.”

Paul Weaver, VP of design, Hyatt Hotels Corporation

"Other times they show up as higher support costs, increased operational effort, longer training times, more errors, or complexity somewhere else in the business,” he adds.

“Our role is to connect those dots; not just to show that customers or users are struggling, but to help the organization understand what that struggle costs today, and what value could be created by solving it,” he adds.

By way of example, Weaver says that if a clinical workflow is confusing, the issue isn’t simply usability. It may affect speed, accuracy, confidence, adoption, and ultimately operational performance. Similarly, in hospitality, if a booking journey creates uncertainty for a customer, that is not just a design issue. It may affect conversion, revenue per visitor, loyalty behavior, or repeat engagement.

“When we can connect customer behavior to business performance, the conversation changes,” Weaver says. “It becomes less about whether to invest in experience, and more about how quickly we can remove the friction that is holding value back.”

The challenge for insight teams has never simply been generating understanding of customers; it is ensuring that understanding translates into decisions the business can act on.”

Jack Austin, commercial insights lead, Virgin Media 02

Healing the disconnect: The shift from lagging to leading metrics

CX has long attempted to communicate its value using lagging indicators, such as churn rate, NPS or lifetime value.

In many scenarios these metrics proved invaluable, giving a business a historic view of how customer retention or sentiment changed in relation to a new strategy or approach.

Today, however, retrospective views are no longer enough. Business decisions within and beyond CX are increasingly made on leading and predictive indicators; in the moment data that reflects what is happening at present and predicts what could happen next.

When conducting CXPA’s research, Jim Tincher, CEO and founder of Heart of the Customer, found one of the biggest opportunities for CX to prove its value is to align with the C-suite’s demand for leading indicators from all departments of an organization.

“In CX, we’re looking at customer outcomes, but executives are looking at growth. Both top and bottom line. If we look at data from XM Institute, CXPA, my own research, on average only 25 percent of practitioners can show any business value by using leading indicators. The others are talking about NPS,” Tincher says.

Monika Aufdermauer, VP of user success and leader of people and culture for Canadian fintech KOHO, agrees that predictive capabilities are one of the most impactful ways CX can prove its value – to the extent that she has briefed KOHO’s AI vendors to ensure they can support the business’s objectives in this respect in 2027.

She says: “We want to know the most likely reasons a customer will churn and the key things we can do to tune our algorithms based on customer behavior. That’s where I’m looking to make the biggest difference.”

Case study: How Oura created its own metric
to quantify value in the AI age

CX measurement is going to move from sampling to full population analysis, and that's what we're proposing with TCX.”

John Moses, VP of member experience, Oura

The Oura smart ring provides users with round-the-clock, real-time insights into their fitness, sleep patterns and even resilience to stress, allowing wearers to optimize their lifestyles and live healthier lives. When it comes to CX, however, the company behind the ring needed a new way to monitor its overall performance.

The resulting Total Customer Experience (TCX) score uses large language models (LLMs) to evaluate an interaction by reading the actual conversation through the lens of the member.

“Instead of asking members to rate an experience after the fact, TCX reads the actual conversation itself and evaluates what the member experienced,” explains VP of member experience (MX), John Moses (pictured opposite).
“We built TCX to provide real time, 100 percent population oversight across both human and AI interactions. That's really important because the QA calibrators weren't doing AI, it was left unchecked and we needed to have a similar model across both. We're then turning that added visibility into what we consider operational speed. We've reduced the time from problem to understanding to action, from weeks to days, if not hours,” says Moses (pictured opposite).

TCX intentionally ignores internal notes and backend data to focus on the individual member’s experience by receiving signals throughout a support interaction.

Because TCX reads the conversation itself, it makes no distinction between channels. An interaction that starts with Oura’s AI support agent is held to the same standard as one that starts with a human agent.

Each interaction is then scored against four AI classifiers:

Issue identification: Was the member's issue fully and correctly understood?
Frustration: Did the member express frustration with the support experience?
Resolution: Was the issue resolved or properly escalated?
Satisfaction: Was the member's sentiment positive after the solution?

These four judgments combine into a single score that Moses says is “more than a reporting metric”. It’s granular-level observability, which Moses says is “as important as the automation itself”.

Moses says insight at this level is so powerful that, as the business world pushes CX to demonstrate deeper and stronger value, his money is on observability becoming a top trend for the entire CX space in 2027.

“We need to be able to see if interactions are actually good. Customers are judging agents and saying which companies have bad service. They're going to be really quick to judge the AI from those companies as well, which means we’ve got to make sure those interactions are good,” Moses explains.

He adds: “CX measurement is going to move from sampling to full population analysis, and that's what we're proposing with TCX.”

The next section of this report looks at the top tools practitioners should be looking to invest in for 2027, with a focus on creating an integrated CX technology ecosystem. It also presents 11 questions to put to vendors and insights on creating a customer-first culture from Transport for Wales.