Why does experience matter?

The reason experience matters is simple: better experiences benefit everyone. When experience works well, the benefit reaches every audience: the people who work for an organisation, the customers who buy from it, the partners who work with it, the people who shape how it is perceived, and the communities it affects. And it returns to the organisation itself, in the talent it attracts, the trust it earns, the loyalty it builds, and the resilience it accumulates over time.

The benefit to the organisation

The case that better experience produces better organisational performance is among the most thoroughly evidenced propositions in management. The evidence is deepest for customers and employees, where measurement is most developed. For partners, influencers and society it is thinner, and where it exists it points the same way.

• Employees: Gallup's Q12 meta-analysis finds that business units in the top quartile of employee engagement achieve 23% higher profit than those in the bottom quartile. Gallup's separate State of the Global Workplace survey puts engagement at 20% of workers worldwide, the lowest level since 2020.
• Customers: Forrester's 2024 research found customer-obsessed organisations reported 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better customer retention. Its State of Customer Obsession Survey, 2025 put the share of genuinely customer-obsessed companies at 6%.  
• Partners: In addition to the Working Relations Index mentioned earlier, McKinsey found that among more than 100 large organisations across several sectors, those that collaborated with suppliers as a regular practice outperformed their industry peers on growth, operating costs and profitability. The study measured how often firms collaborated rather than how suppliers experienced the relationship, but the two point in the same direction.
• Influencers: Nielsen’s study of more than 40,000 people found that recommendations from people you know are trusted above any other channel, around 50% more than the paid formats below them. What an organisation gets from this audience depends on credibility it does not own and cannot buy.
• Society: Direct measures of how society experiences an organisation are limited, and the clearest commercial signal comes through consumers. A 2023 McKinsey and NielsenIQ study of five years of US sales across 32 consumer packaged goods categories found that products making environmental and social claims averaged 28% cumulative growth, against 20% for products making none, and grew faster in two-thirds of categories. Brands earning more than half their sales from such products also had higher repeat purchase rates, at 32 to 34% against under 30%. McKinsey is explicit that the findings are correlational and that it did not test whether the claims were true. What the study does show is that products carrying these claims grew faster, and brands built around them were bought again more often.

Most of this evidence comes from commercial organisations, because that is where the measurement of experience is most developed. But the relationship beneath it is not unique to the private sector. For a public body, it is in the quality and reach of the services it delivers and the trust of the citizens it serves. For a non-profit, it is in the donors it retains and the mission it advances. For any organisation, it is in its ability to attract talent, earn loyalty, and endure.

The benefit to society and beyond

Experience shapes the lives of everyone an organisation impacts, and increasingly it shapes the social and environmental conditions they share. How an organisation treats its employees, how it deals with its partners, how it conducts itself in the communities it operates in, and the footprint it leaves on the environment are all part of the experience it delivers to the world, and all part of how it is judged.

When an organisation treats the people it employs well, they carry that home. When it deals fairly with its partners and the communities it operates in, those relationships strengthen. When it takes seriously the environment it shares, the benefit extends to people who will never buy from it or work for it. These are benefits to society itself, and they hold whether or not they appear on a balance sheet.

Employee wellbeing is the clearest example, and it is measurable. Gallup's global meta-analysis finds that the most engaged teams report 70% higher wellbeing than the least engaged, measured as the proportion of employees genuinely thriving in their lives, not just at work. The quality of a person's experience at work is closely linked to their health, their relationships, and their capacity to show up for the people who depend on them. An organisation that gets this right improves lives well outside its own walls.

This is part of performance. Consumers say they reward organisations that share their values and withdraw from those that do not. In Edelman's 2024 research across 15 countries, 84% said they need to share values with a brand in order to buy it. The social and environmental value an organisation creates, and the trust it earns, feed directly into how it performs. An organisation that delivers well for the people and the world around it builds something that compounds: a reputation, a licence to operate, and a durability that no single campaign or investment can manufacture.

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The Introduction has set out what experience is, how audiences form it, how wide the gap between intention and delivery has become, and what closing it is worth. What it has not yet answered is why the gap has proved so durable. Two decades separate Bain's finding from Zendesk's, and customers are still telling researchers the same thing. The surveys measure different things, but both point to a wide shortfall, despite the investment, the dedicated disciplines, and the specialists organisations have put behind it. That question is where Part One starts, and the answer points to something organisations have the power to change.