Customer experience teams live in a world of scores. NPS, CSAT, CES. All useful for tracking progress, but useless for answering the one question finance actually cares about: “Which problems cost us real money?”
Revenue at Risk (RaR) finally bridges that gap.
It transforms customer feedback into clear financial projections, showing exactly how much revenue sits at risk from specific experience issues.
Why Traditional Metrics Miss the Mark
CSAT tells you if customers are satisfied. NPS shows who might recommend you. But try building a budget case with either one.
“Our NPS dropped three points” doesn’t get you funding.
“Login issues with the iPhone app put £2.3 million in revenue at risk this quarter” absolutely does.
The problem with traditional metrics is they measure basic sentiment and rarely connect them to business outcomes.
You know customers are unhappy, you might even have a fair idea about why, but you don’t know which unhappy experiences matter most to your bottom line.
The stakes are real.
Forrester research shows that improving customer experience can drive more than one billion dollars in revenue for large companies, while Harvard Business Review consistently demonstrates that retaining customers costs far less than acquiring new ones.
Yet most organisations still can’t pinpoint which specific experience issues threaten actual revenue.
How RaR Works
RaR takes three steps to turn emotion (not sentiment!) into revenue projections:
Step 1: Emotional Analysis
Adoreboard’s AI reads customer comments, scoring not just positive or negative sentiment, but specific emotions like frustration, trust, anger, and satisfaction. This goes far beyond basic keyword counting.
Step 2: Risk Modelling
The platform calculates how likely emotionally at-risk customers are to churn or reduce spending, using models calibrated for different industries. A frustrated airline passenger will have different risk model than an angry telecom customer.
Step 3: Financial Translation
By multiplying churn probability by customer lifetime value, RaR converts emotional risk into projected revenue loss. The result? A clear view of which experience issues threaten actual money.
The Adoreboard platform comes with three pre-loaded risk models for quick RaR insights
Real Results: The 1% Accuracy Story
One major telecoms company tested Adoreboard’s RaR against 20,000 customers, tracking feedback against actual churn and spend over 12 months.
The model predicted RaR within 1% of actual losses.
Watch out for the RaR litepaper case study coming soon!
Airport Spending: An Example
Consider how this plays out in airports. A passenger has a frustrating arrivals experience. Long baggage wait, confusing signage, unhelpful staff. They can’t easily switch airports for their next trip, especially if it’s international, but they can definitely switch off their wallet.
That negative emotion changes behaviour. Next visit, they skip the restaurants, avoid browsing shops, buy nothing beyond necessities. One bad experience at arrivals can suppress commercial spending across multiple future visits.
It’s not all about complaint volume: RaR captures this hidden risk.
Experience issues that generate relatively few complaints can still represent millions in lost retail and service revenue because they are emotionally intense and create lasting negative associations.
These are often lost in traditional CX analysis.
Pop Quiz: What risk model would in international airport likely fall into?
(Answer at the bottom of this post!)
Making CX Investment Decisions Simple
With RaR, you stop guessing which problems matter most. Instead of saying “customer service needs improvement,” you can say “customer service issues represent £4.2 million in revenue at risk over the next 12 months, especially large baggage checkins at £2.7M.”
This changes everything about how you prioritise and fund CX initiatives.
Resources go to the problems that actually threaten revenue, not just the loudest complaints. Board presentations become business cases with clear ROI projections.
The Adoreboard platform handles the complex analysis automatically. Upload your feedback data, add a few numbers and RaR shows you where your revenue risks really sit, complete with dashboards and reports designed for customer experience teams AND board directors.
Example of an Adoreboard ‘Espresso’ Snapshot: 3 Key Insights (based on your requirements/metrics)
Beyond Guesswork
RaR doesn’t replace existing metrics. It gives them financial context. You still track NPS and CSAT, but now you know which movements in those scores translate to real money.
For CX teams tired of fighting for budget with sentiment scores, RaR provides the business language that actually gets heard in boardrooms.
Ready to see which customer issues are costing you real revenue? Book a demo and discover what RaR reveals about your business.
Pop Quiz Q&A
Question: What risk model would in international airport likely fall into?
Answer: Low
Whilst there are always exceptions, in most cases Airports, especially International Airports, would use the low risk model as churn is less likely than high risk industries such as retail.
