From purely transactional to personalized and unique, customer experiences can extend far beyond the exchange of goods. Companies often focus on functional and transactional experiences because they’re the easiest to understand. However, a large part of purchase behavior is subjective and occurs in the context of the emotional relationship between companies and their customers.

Together, Wharton Customer Analytics (WCA) and C Space explored and quantified the strength of this customer-company relationship while identifying the commercial benefits of customer-centricity. Using the simple clustering method, k-means, WCA led the process of identifying discrete levels of customer-centricity, and C Space augmented the analysis with new data on 160 companies.

Together, WCA and C Space observed a significant relationship between the measure of a company’s customer-centricity and its performance. In addition, this study proposed a novel company journey framework, in which companies evolve from having a highly transactional customer relationship to one that is emotionally relevant and, crucially, provides the levers for improving customer-centricity. The framework also links this journey to the more typical customer satisfaction metric, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and other measures of word-of-mouth (e.g., Earned Advocacy Score, or EAS).

Download the full report to discover our framework for quantifying and understanding the emotional relationship customers have with a company, how to locate your company’s current level of customer closeness and how to chart a path forward, with proven results.