How experience determines business growth
Businesses with strong customer experience strategies grow revenue 1.5 times faster than their competitors. Not marginally faster - nearly twice as fast (Forrester).
Over time, that's the kind of gap that separates the businesses that scale from the ones that plateau. And yet for most industrial businesses, experience remains something that only gets attention when something goes wrong rather than something that's part of a wider strategy. In a market more saturated and more competitive than ever, that's an increasingly costly oversight.
Buyers have more options, more information and higher expectations than they did a decade ago. Referrals and recommendations carry more weight than almost any other form of marketing. Reviews - good and bad - travel fast and stick around. The experience a business delivers isn't just a reflection of how well it operates. It's one of the most powerful commercial levers it has.
Experience shapes every relationship your business depends on
Experience isn't a single thing. It's the cumulative quality of every interaction across every relationship - before someone becomes a customer, while they are one, and in every touchpoint in between. The businesses that get this right don't treat it as a customer service initiative. They understand that experience is shaped by how well their operations are connected, how freely information flows and how equipped their people are to deliver at every stage.
Here's four areas where this shows up the most:
New Customers
The experience a potential customer has of your business starts long before any direct interaction. How easy is it to find information? How consistent is the message across different channels? How quickly does someone respond when they reach out?
Existing Customers
For existing customers, experience is built and eroded in the everyday interactions - order updates, query resolution, delivery reliability, the ease of getting a straight answer when something goes wrong. When systems are connected and information flows freely, these interactions are faster, more accurate and more consistent.
Employees
Employee experience is inseparable from customer experience. The quality of service a business delivers externally is a direct reflection of how well equipped its people are internally. When employees are working with fragmented systems, managing manual processes or spending time reconciling data that should be connected, they're not just less productive, they're less able to deliver the kind of responsive, informed service that builds customer relationships.
Suppliers
Supplier relationships are often treated as purely transactional, but the experience suppliers have of working with a business shapes how those relationships perform under pressure. Clear processes, reliable communication and fast response times build the kind of trust that means a supplier goes the extra mile when it matters.
Why most businesses are leaving this on the table
The reason experience so often falls short isn't a lack of intention. Most businesses genuinely want to deliver well across all of these relationships. The gap tends to exist because experience is treated as something separate from operations - a front-line issue rather than a structural one.
In reality, experience breaks down at the seams. The handoff between systems. The point where one team's process ends and another's begins. The moment where information should be available but isn't. These are operational problems, and they have operational solutions.
Forterro's European Industrial Midmarket Research found that more than 60% of industrial businesses rate their digital transformation progress as poor or only adequate. In practical terms, that means the majority of businesses are operating with the kind of fragmented, disconnected foundations that make consistent, high-quality experience genuinely difficult to deliver - regardless of how much effort goes into it at the front line.
Experience as a compounding advantage
Every positive interaction builds on the last. Every referral, every renewed contract, every employee who stays and gets better at their job, these are the returns on getting experience right. They compound over time in ways that are hard to measure individually but transformative in aggregate.
The businesses pulling ahead in competitive industrial markets aren't doing it on product alone. They're doing it because the experience of working with them - as a customer, an employee, a prospect or a supplier - is consistently better than the alternative. And that consistency isn't accidental. It's the result of operations that are connected, mature and built with the full picture of experience in mind.
