Why does experience matter?

The reason experience matters is simple: better experiences benefit everyone. They benefit the people and organisations that buy from, work for, work with, and are affected by an organisation. And they benefit the organisation itself, in the talent it attracts, the trust it earns, the loyalty it builds, and the resilience it accumulates over time. The evidence for both runs across every audience and points consistently in the same direction.

The benefit to the organisation

The case that better experience produces better organisational performance is among the most thoroughly evidenced propositions in management. The quality of the experience an organisation delivers has a direct, measurable effect on how well it performs, and the evidence spans every audience.

• Employees: Gallup's meta-analysis finds that business units in the top quartile of employee engagement are 23% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile, yet only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, 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%. Forrester also found that customer obsession can deliver a return on investment of at least 700% over a twelve-year period, depending on company size and customer type. 
• Partners: In a McKinsey survey of more than 100 large organisations across multiple sectors, companies that regularly collaborated with their suppliers showed higher growth, lower operating costs and greater profitability than their industry peers.
• Influencers: Influencer spend produces measurable engagement, and most brands are leaving value on the table. Analysing 5,835 sponsored posts from 2,412 influencers, Leung and colleagues found that the brands in their data could raise consumer engagement by 16.6% on average by reallocating the same budget across influencers more effectively, evidence that this audience is being managed sub-optimally.
• Society: Audiences back their stated preferences with their spending. A 2023 McKinsey and NielsenIQ study of five years of US sales data, covering 600,000 products and $400 billion in annual revenue across 44,000 brands, found that products making environmental and social claims averaged 28% cumulative growth over the period, against 20% for products making none. The pattern held in two-thirds of categories and across income levels, ages and geographies. The loyalty effect is stronger still: brands earning more than half their sales from products making these claims saw repeat purchase rates of 32 to 34%, against under 30% for brands below that threshold. McKinsey is explicit that this shows correlation rather than causation, and that it did not test whether the claims were true. What it does establish is that societal commitments show up in what audiences buy, and keep buying.

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 follows them beyond it: into 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 not separate from performance. It is part of it. Audiences increasingly reward organisations whose conduct matches their values, and withdraw from those whose conduct does not. So the social and environmental value an organisation creates, and the trust it earns, are not a cost set against performance but a source of it. 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 the shortfall has barely moved in that time, 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.