The new Deloitte eXperience index (DXi) and our barometer benchmark study for South Africa

The importance of Customer Experience (CX) has grown and continues to grow, and what it takes to sell value to customers (as opposed to price) has drastically evolved over the past few decades. This has evolved from producing quality products to identifying a niche and, finally, to tailoring your brand to customer needs. In the current competitive climate, customer experience is strongly correlated to growth through churn reduction, additional purchases, and word of mouth recommendations. This is even more true in emerging market environments.

However, as the CX discipline has grown in maturity over the past decade, CX measurement has not evolved at the same rate. Many existing CX measurement solutions do not take into account the most recent CX best practices – including the role of emotion in CX, design thinking methodologies, and ethnographic research techniques. As such, existing CX measurement solutions do not tick all of the boxes that are increasingly required by companies and CX practitioners.

The Deloitte eXperience Index (DXi), which is Deloitte’s recently created CX barometer, has been designed with the above in mind. It incorporates both current CX best practices and Deloitte’s unique intellectual property (IP).

Our approach

The DXi has been developed to help companies measure their CX performance per touch point, perception metric, and customer segment across customer journeys and enables benchmarking against competitors’ performance. Each industry barometer has been developed using a robust methodology that includes ethnographic research to uncover customer needs as well as quantitative research with a representative sample of South African consumers. The DXi also leverages Deloitte’s deep industry expertise.

The DXi consists of both a diagnostic of root causes as well as a set of ongoing measurement tools. It is an overarching indicator, whilst also encompassing the correct level of granularity to identify each change required. Finally, and most importantly, the DXi can be correlated to revenue.

How the DXi is different

The DXi has been developed to provide a CX measurement solution that fits market needs (identified over 10+ years of experience). As such, it is:

• Granular – It offers insights per touch point, channel, and perception metric; thereby enabling root cause analysis
• Segment-specific – It offers insights per customer segment. Segmentation is done by socio-demographic criteria and is determined by customers’ experience needs
• Benchmarked – It provides a local, South African benchmark that enables companies to compare their DXi scores to competitors as well as other industries
• Customisable – It can easily be customised per company as well as operationalised within the organisation to enable ongoing measurement
• Outcome-focused – It can be linked to outcome metrics (including revenue growth)

Additionally, the DXi is an integrated measurement model that combines different levels of measurement, both qualitative and quantitative. The DXi also uses data analytics and correlation to financial results to ensure that the model stays relevant and measures real customer behaviour.

The DXi methodology is a unique piece of IP developed by Deloitte South Africa and is the first significant piece of CX IP developed by Deloitte locally.

Contact us

If you have an inquiry related to your organisations’ customer experience journey or would like to learn more about our services, please email us for more details.

Thought Leadership

Customer experience – the new differentiator

With headlines dominated by downgrades and a challenging economic climate, differentiating your business from competition is more important than ever.