2026 Research Report
The State of Customer Value
New research across ASX-listed companies finds no organisation disclosing customer lifetime value in practice, and a persistent disconnect between CX measurement and economic outcomes. Read the findings.
Read the report
I started Revlence because I believed most organisations could not tell you what their customer relationships were actually worth. Behind that belief was something more personal: customers were suffering for it, with their problems rarely getting solved.
This report tested that belief against two sources: what Australian enterprises report publicly, and what the senior leaders running CX inside them say directly.
The public data showed the gap in measurement. The executive interviews showed something more uncomfortable: the gap is known. The leaders we spoke to understood the problem clearly. They could name it, describe it, and in several cases had been trying to close it for years. What they could not do was make the financial case that would move capital toward solving it.
That is where the system breaks. Not at the point of caring. At the point of proof.
Without a credible financial number attached to a customer problem, the argument loses. Every time. The organisation moves on to the next priority, the problem persists, and the revenue consequence accumulates invisibly until it shows up somewhere downstream as churn, or a number nobody can quite explain.
This report makes those consequences visible. Not as a warning, but as a starting point. The CX industry is not beyond recovery. What is required is a financial case, and the measurement infrastructure to support it: the ability to say, with precision, what customer relationships are worth, where value is bleeding, and what to do about it.
This is the first edition of what Revlence intends to publish regularly. The methodology will deepen. But the question at the centre of it will not change: are Australian enterprises governing customer value, or merely describing it?
In 2026, the answer is clear.
We hope it will not always be.
Harrison Deck
Founder and CEO, Revlence
Customer value is treated as a performance signal, not as a financial asset to be governed.
Customer value is not a feeling. It is an economic fact: the revenue a customer relationship generates over time, net of the cost to serve it. Australian enterprises know this. Ask any CFO or Chief Customer Officer what a customer is worth and they will describe it in economic terms. Retention, tenure, balances, product depth, profitability.
Then look at what reaches the board. NPS. Active customer growth. Complaint volumes. Metrics that describe the customer relationship but cannot quantify it. The gap between how value is understood and what gets reported is not incidental. It reflects a structural condition in which the measures available to leadership are insufficient to build a financial case for CX investment. The argument for meaningful resource allocation cannot be won on sentiment alone.
Customer Value is largely framed as
Rarely as
- How many customers are acquired
- How customers feel
- How much economic value customers generate over time
- How durable customer relationships are
Practitioners could name the gaps, describe them, and in several cases had been trying to close it for years. What they couldn't do was make the financial case.
The consequences are practical. If you cannot measure what a customer relationship is worth, you cannot know whether it is growing or eroding. You cannot identify which customers are at risk before revenue falls. You cannot govern the response. You are navigating by sentiment. This report shows how widespread that is, and gives you a way to locate yourself within it.
0%
of companies disclose CLV in an operational, reproducible form.
13%
of companies can connect a CX outcome to a financial result.
17%
of companies disclose any retention metric. (Churn/Retention)
The gaps between knowing and governing.
Eight findings from the quantitative analysis and executive interviews. They point at the same problem from different directions.
Customer value is defined financially. It is reported experientially.
Companies prioritise acquisition metrics above all else. Experience metrics follow, signalling relationship quality without ever quantifying it. The economic measures that would quantify what those relationships are worth trail significantly behind.
Prevalence by metric category
% of companies disclosing at least one metric · ASX-listed companies, cross-sector
Customer growth
New customers, growth rate
CX proxies
NPS, CSAT, complaints
Unit economics
Revenue, margin, cost to serve
Retention metrics
Churn, tenure, retention rate
Customer lifetime value
CLV / PLTV
No company in the dataset
The State of Customer Value 2026 · Revlence
Most companies report CX and financial performance as parallel narratives. Only 13% disclose both in a way that enables even a partial connection. Against the McKinsey benchmark of CLV measured against customer acquisition and retention costs, the figure is 0%.
The Linkage Problem
Companies that can connect CX proxies to financial outcomes · ASX-listed companies, cross-sector
Against the McKinsey benchmark, the figure is 0%.
Without linkage
87% of companies cannot demonstrate whether CX investment generates financial return.
McKinsey benchmark
The CLV-to-CAC ratio is the fundamental test of whether customer investment is generating return. Without CLV, it cannot be computed.
The State of Customer Value 2026 · Revlence
The practitioners running these organisations describe customer value in economic terms: retention, tenure, balances, profitability, product depth. Their boards govern on NPS, active customer growth, and complaint volumes. Both positions belong to the same organisation, held simultaneously, and never reconciled. Customer experience is reported as an outcome to celebrate. The link to economic value is never drawn.
Detection and governance cadence operate at different speeds.
Across every organisation interviewed, the same pattern emerged without exception: issues surface at the operational layer within days through voice-of-customer signals and frontline escalation. Formal governance, resource allocation, and executive decision-making operate on monthly reporting cycles. The speed advantage of early detection is absorbed by the reporting cadence before it translates into a governed response.
Two-Speed Measurement
Detection speed vs governance cadence
The State of Customer Value 2026 · Revlence
Operational decisions are driven from customer examples
Practitioners named verbatim feedback as the most useful source of customer insight in their organisation, and confirmed it rarely reaches senior leadership. Qualitative signals carry weight operationally, where teams act on what customers say. But they cannot be treated as evidence at the executive level, where leadership requires data. So what gets presented upward is the CX proxy: NPS, CSAT, complaint volumes. The result is an organisation operating on two separate information standards. Operationally, decisions are made from examples. At the leadership level, decisions are made from metrics that practitioners themselves consider the least meaningful.
What practitioners act on
“She’s a loyalty member, shops weekly, average basket around $180. Had a click-and-collect order go missing two months ago. Refund took three weeks. She hasn’t been back since.”
Store operations escalation, large retailer
Monthly
board report
What leadership governs on
44
NPS · up 2pts month-on-month
The insight exists at both layers. Only the score travels upward.
The State of Customer Value 2026 · Revlence
Interviewees reveal a common thread: NPS persists because it enables comparison against competitors and is easy to present to a board. Many believe it is not the most meaningful metric. It is retained as a communications tool rather than a decision-making one.
Organisations are moving in the right direction.
Across every organisation interviewed, executives described active work to improve how customer value is measured. CLV models are in development. Customer-level scoring is on the roadmap. Survey-based measurement is being phased out in favour of feedback captured directly from customer interactions. Real-time data integration is being scoped and prioritised. Data infrastructure, integration capability, and financial linkage are the remaining barriers. The direction is clear.
The measurement gap has a cost. It compounds.
The findings in the previous section document a condition. This section documents what that condition costs. These are not hypothetical risks. They are the structural consequences of managing customer portfolios without a credible measure of what those portfolios are worth.
Silent churn
Nearly half of companies disclose CX proxy metrics. Fewer than one in five disclose any retention metric. The result is a fundamental visibility gap: organisations monitor how customers feel but not whether they stay. Revenue decline becomes the first observable signal of attrition. By that point, corrective action is reactive. The window for prevention has already closed.
Practitioners interviewed identified retention risk as a known blind spot, acknowledged that current measurement is insufficient to detect it early, and then characterised the gap as manageable. The commercial consequence of that framing is that attrition accumulates invisibly until it is large enough to appear in financial results.
Misallocation of CX investment
When CX measurement is disconnected from economic outcomes, organisations cannot determine whether experience investment generates proportional financial return. Investment decisions default to sentiment improvement rather than value creation. Resources are deployed toward visible metrics rather than toward the issues most predictive of lifetime revenue.
Only 13% of companies can draw any connection between a CX outcome and a financial result. For the remaining 87%, CX investment operates on the assumption that better experience produces better economics. That assumption is never tested.
Over-servicing low-value cohorts
Without customer-level economic segmentation, service intensity is implicitly treated as uniform across the customer base. High-cost service interactions with low-value customers erode margin. High-value customers at risk of attrition may not receive proportionate attention because the organisation has no mechanism to identify them as high-value in the first place.
Only 39% of companies disclose unit economics. Only 13% disclose both CX and economic metrics. The majority are allocating service resource without the economic foundation to know whether that allocation is rational.
Lagging indicators masking revenue risk
CX proxies are significantly more prevalent than retention or economic metrics across the dataset. The reporting landscape emphasises past sentiment over forward-looking signals of commercial sustainability. By the time financial performance reflects customer decay, in the form of reduced revenue, increased churn, or declining product depth, the governed response is already late.
The operational layer detects issues within days. The governance layer responds on a monthly cycle. That gap is not a process failure. It is a structural condition in which the speed of detection and the speed of action are permanently misaligned.
Where does your organisation sit?
Five questions drawn from the measurement dimensions in this research. Select the answer that most accurately reflects your organisation today, not where you aspire to be.
How does your organisation primarily measure customer value?
A. We do not have a formal customer value measure.
B. We track NPS, CSAT, or complaints as our primary measure of customer health.
C. We measure revenue per customer or product holdings alongside CX metrics.
D. We model customer lifetime value and connect it to retention and financial outcomes.
What dominates your leadership customer performance conversation?
A. We do not have a regular, structured customer performance review.
B. Sentiment scores and customer growth numbers.
C. A mix of CX metrics with some unit economics or segment profitability.
D. Customer value segmentation with retention, profitability, and lifecycle data.
Can you connect a customer experience outcome to a revenue impact?
A. No. CX and financial data are managed separately.
B. Directionally. We believe the relationship exists but cannot quantify it.
C. Partially. We can link some interactions to financial outcomes.
D. Yes. We can attribute CX investment to measurable revenue outcomes.
How do you know when a customer is at risk of leaving?
A. We typically find out when they have already left.
B. We monitor NPS drops or complaint spikes as early signals.
C. We track tenure and churn patterns across customer segments.
D. We model retention risk at the customer level with early intervention triggers.
How long does it take for a customer issue to trigger a governed response?
A. It may not. There is no structured escalation path.
B. Weeks. Issues surface in monthly reporting cycles.
C. Days. Fast signals reach operational teams quickly.
D. Hours. Automated triggers route issues to governance in near real-time.
Your result
Mostly A
You are at the starting point. Customer value is not formally measured and revenue risk is invisible until it appears in financial results.
Mostly B
You are measuring experience but not value. NPS and CSAT tell you how customers feel. They do not tell you what those customers are worth or whether that worth is growing or eroding.
Mostly C
You have the building blocks. The opportunity is connecting them into a governed system that links CX investment to financial outcomes and surfaces retention risk before it becomes visible in revenue.
Mostly D
You are ahead of most organisations in this research. The question is whether your CLV model is operational and embedded in governance, or still a framework that has not yet reached board-level reporting.
Customer Value Maturity Ladder
Where does your organisation sit? · The State of Customer Value 2026
Tier 4
True lifetime value
Absent from datasetCLV is operational, embedded in governance, and reported at board level.
Ahead of the entire dataset.
Tier 3
Economic foundation
Both retention metrics and unit economics are present, even if incomplete.
Strong position. The question is whether CLV is next.
Tier 2
Partial economics
Either retention or unit economics disclosed — not both.
Building blocks exist. The gap is connecting them into a governed system.
Tier 1
Proxies only
NPS, CSAT, complaints, or growth metrics — no retention or economic data.
You know how customers feel. You don't yet know what they're worth.
Tier 0
No disclosure
No meaningful customer value metric measured or reported.
Revenue risk is invisible until it appears in financial results.
The State of Customer Value 2026 · Revlence
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