Forrester TEI Survey Documents 156% ROI for CMX

The stock market has had a pretty good run during 2017. Lucky investors have seen returns of more than 15 percent when, historically, anything greater than 8 percent is considered good. So what would you think of a 156-percent return? You wouldn’t be alone if you thought such an astronomical rate is only a teaser for the latest Ponzi scheme. But that’s exactly the ROI that Forrester found when they surveyed several Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences customers about their actual returns.

Forrester is well known for their Total Economic Impact, or TEI, studies. In these financial studies, Forrester interviews customers, wades through the business outcomes and expenses and determines an expected rate of return. During the second half of 2017, they interviewed several Connected Mobile Experiences, or CMX, customers and asked about the revenues and expenses they’d seen as a result of their CMX deployments.

CMX is a little different animal than most solutions evaluated by Forrester. First, it’s not a single solution but a group of indoor location solutions that deliver a wide range of capabilities—from indoor wayfinding to personalized customer engagement and HVAC analytics. To add even more complexity, this breadth of product can take different shape to match the needs of the industry. For instance, customer engagement in hospitality looks very different than engagement in education.

To address this wide range of solutions and industries, Forrester used a representative entity called a “composite organization.” This composite organization is a mash up of all the organizations interviewed.

So what economic benefits did the composite organization see as a result of their CMX deployment? They saw:

Five-fold increase in co-branded credit card revenue to $2.4 million.
$340,000 savings by providing wayfinding via a mobile application rather than a kiosk.
Seven percent increase in food and beverage spending to $1.3 million.
Energy savings of 5 percent to $123,000.

The end result, after all associated fixed and variable costs, was a net present value of $2.5 million for this composite organization. And that doesn’t even count the expected additional value that interviewed organizations expect to see as a result of increased dwell time, contextual marketing, improved customer satisfaction.

But don’t take my word for it. Read the full report here.

You see that, given the many ways that CMX can impact revenues, a return of 156% really isn’t a big surprise.