More than just a buzzword, a good “customer experience” signifies income. At its most fundamental level, business is about providing customers with a service, and meeting their needs. That’s what business is all about, and that’s what the customer experience addresses.

The loyalty-based revenue from customers who have had a good experience range by industry, but Forrester (News - Alert) has estimated that it can be as high as $88 million for the consumer electronics industry and $3.1 billion for the wireless providers. That’s a lot of money at stake. But these are just two industries of the many that can drive revenue by better customer service.

“In all of the industries we modeled the revenue benefits of a better customer experience range from $31 million for retailers to around $1.3 billion for hotels and wireless service providers,” wrote Megan Burns, a principal analyst at Forrester Research (News - Alert) serving customer experience professionals.

“We've shown through both mathematical correlations and actual company scores that when your customers like the experience you deliver they're more likely to consider you for another purchase and recommend you to others,” she added. “They're also less likely to switch their business away to a competitor.”

Yet, many businesses do not have a way to measure and quantify the customer experience, nor effectively improve it.

Only 10 percent of decision-makers carefully monitor and act on customer experience information, according to research conducted by the Peppers & Rogers Group. Information trapped in organizational silos is a big reason for it; Peppers & Rogers found that 61 percent of organizations surveyed said they were not achieving the progress on customer experience they expected, and 34 percent blamed data that remained siloed.

That’s why customer experience management solutions are being touted so highly. They are tools that break down the silos and bring visibility to what customers are thinking and feeling about firms and their products.

“In the digital economy, companies have to rewire their businesses by focusing on customer inputs instead of company outputs to help gauge how customer experience drives loyalty and other business performance metrics,” wrote Judi Hand, chief sales officer at TeleTech (News - Alert), in a recent white paper.

Customer data needs to be collected from the contact center and may areas of the business and aggregated into metrics that can then be monitored and addressed.

A couple generations ago, businessmen had direct contact with their customers. But now, this interaction largely belongs to the contact center. Customer experience solutions help recapture this lost feedback loop.

And that can mean big business.