Most CX teams are trying to solve the wrong problem.
They’re chasing sentiment scores, NPS and satisfaction ratings. They’re building dashboards that show whether customers are “positive” or “negative”, detractors or promoters. They’re presenting these metrics to the C-suite as fluffy proof that CX drives business results.
But they can’t answer the one question that actually matters: which CX initiatives will protect or grow revenue?
This is the Experience Revenue Gap. CX professionals know their work impacts the bottom line. They just can’t prove it with hard numbers. So budgets get cut. Priorities shift. And CX stays stuck as a cost centre instead of a revenue driver.
The problem isn’t that CX doesn’t impact revenue. It does. The problem is what most teams are measuring.
Why Sentiment Analysis Won’t Close the Gap
Walk into most CX platforms and you’ll find sentiment analysis. It scans customer feedback, tags it as positive, negative, or neutral and often spits out a word cloud. Simple. Fast. And pretty useless.
Sentiment tells you someone used negative words. It doesn’t tell you how they feel or if they’re about to churn. It doesn’t tell you which issue costs you the most money. It can’t tell you whether to fix the checkout flow or the customer service response time first.
You can’t link sentiment to revenue because sentiment doesn’t predict behaviour.
It just counts words.
Some platforms have added basic emotion detection. They’ll tell you a customer is “angry” or “happy.” That’s better than nothing, but it’s still surface-level. Knowing someone is frustrated doesn’t tell you whether they trust you enough to stay.
Trust predicts behaviour.
Trust Is the Leading Indicator Everyone Ignores
Here’s what CX teams miss: trust predicts revenue.
Not satisfaction. Not sentiment. Trust.
The data proves it. PwC research found that customer trust explains 31% of the variance in profit margins (PwC, Trust & Performance: Translating Trust into Business Reality). Nearly a third of the difference between high-margin and low-margin companies comes down to trust levels.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth most executives don’t know:
- 87% of business leaders believe consumers highly trust their company.
- Only 30% of consumers agree (PwC, 2022 Trust in US Business Survey).
That’s a 57-point perception gap.
CX teams are making decisions based on trust levels that don’t exist!
This matters because trust causes the behaviours that drive revenue.
Deloitte research found that 88% of customers who highly trust a brand will buy from them again. Trust comes first. Loyalty, retention, and sustainable, long-term revenue follow.
Bain & Company research backs this up. Industry loyalty leaders (those with high Net Promoter Scores, aka NPS, driven by trust) grow at more than two times the rate of their competitors.
Forrester’s CX Index research shows the same pattern: brands that excel in customer experience increase revenue at twice the rate of those that lag.
Two times. Not 10% faster. Double.
The retention economics are even more stark.
Bain found that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Trust drives retention.
Retention drives profit.
But you can’t improve Trust if you can’t measure it.
And you certainly can’t measure Trust by counting positive and negative words.
Trust Lives in Emotion, Not Sentiment
Trust isn’t something customers say directly. It’s something they feel. And it shows up in how they talk about their experience.
When customers trust a brand, they give it the benefit of the doubt. They accept changes and even mistakes. They provide honest feedback instead of just leaving. These are the behaviours PwC identified in their loyalty triad: reduced churn, adoption of new offerings, and willingness to share voice.
When customers don’t trust a brand, they interpret every mistake as confirmation they should leave. They shop for alternatives.
You can’t detect this by checking whether a review contains the word “disappointed” or “excellent.” You need to understand the emotion and context behind what customers are saying.
This is where most CX platforms fail. They’re built on sentiment, not emotion. They can’t measure Trust because they’re not measuring what creates it or destroys it.
It’s understandable: measuring emotion is much more difficult than sentiment. Complex emotions like Trust, even moreso.
You see, Trust isn’t a standalone basic emotion; it’s a complex learned sense of safety and confidence in others, built from emotion, experience, and judgment.
The CX Revenue at Risk You Can’t See
Here’s what the Experience Revenue Gap actually costs you.
You have thousands of survey responses and reviews. Buried in that feedback are the issues that will cause customers to churn. But you can’t tell which ones matter most. So you prioritize based on volume (how many people mentioned it) or gut feel (what seems important).
Both approaches are wrong.
Volume doesn’t equal impact. Ten people complaining about a minor UI issue doesn’t cost you as much as three people losing trust in your billing practices. But if you’re counting mentions or tracking sentiment, you’ll find it very difficult, time-consuming or impossible to tell the difference.
The questions CX teams need to answer are:
- Which customer issues are breaking trust?
- What’s the revenue impact of each issue if we don’t fix it?
- Which problems should we tackle first based on actual dollars at risk?
You can’t answer these questions with sentiment analysis. You need to:
- Analyse feedback for themes and specifics (what customers are actually talking about)
- Measure the emotional context (what they feel about each theme)
- Calculate trust levels (whether those emotions indicate trust or broken trust)
- Link each theme to revenue impact (the dollar value of customers at risk)
This gives you a ranked list of what to fix based on Revenue at Risk, not guesswork.
Side note: You need to use an exploratory analysis process/platform; categorical won’t cut it— if you’re tagging and categorising and feeding themes to your analytics tool, it’s only ever looking for what you already know exists.
From Metrics to Money
The CX teams that close the Experience Revenue Gap do three things differently.
First, they stop treating all feedback as equal. They analyse open-text responses to understand emotional intensity and context, not just word counts. They connect what customers say to how they feel.
Second, they measure Trust as a leading indicator. They track it with the same rigour as NPS or CSAT. They know trust predicts behaviour, and behaviour predicts revenue.
Third, they quantify the business impact of every issue. They assign dollar values to problems based on Revenue at Risk. This turns CX from a cost centre into a revenue function because now you can prove which initiatives protect or grow revenue.
When you can walk into a budget meeting and say, “fixing this issue protects $2.3M in annual revenue” instead of, “customers seem unhappy about this,” the conversation changes. CX gets funded. Priorities shift. You become strategic instead of reactive.
Why This Matters Now
Customer acquisition costs keep rising. Loyalty keeps declining. Every lost customer costs more to replace.
The organisations that win aren’t the ones acquiring faster. They’re the ones retaining better.
And retention comes from Trust.
But most CX teams are flying blind. They’re measuring sentiment when they should be measuring emotion. They’re tracking satisfaction when they should be tracking Trust. They’re reporting these ambiguous scores to the CFO and board when they should be reporting Revenue at Risk.
The evidence is clear. Trust predicts revenue. Emotion reveals trust. And the CX teams that understand this will outperform those that don’t.
The Experience Revenue Gap isn’t closing because CX is ineffective. It’s staying open because most teams are measuring the wrong things.
Fancy seeing how Adoreboard can help you? Book a 15 or 30 minute demo here.
Sources:
- PwC, Trust & Performance: Translating Trust into Business Reality
- PwC, Trust in US Business Survey
- Bain & Company, The Economics of Loyalty / Loyalty Rules
- Forrester, CX Index
- Deloitte, The Four Factors of Trust
