Embedding ESG in Customer Experience

A call to action

Only a small majority of citizens (57%) are confident business is acting on climate change — and the internal picture is starker. Just 36% of CX professionals strongly agree their company maintains sustainable practices.

Expectations are clear: 68% agree that businesses failing to act now are failing their employees and customers. Beyond being right, doing this well is rewarded.

Adding value, not just cost

Treating ESG purely as compliance underestimates its value. Inclusive recruitment builds a workforce more empathetic to diverse customers; reducing waste drives operational efficiency; fair pay lifts engagement. Sustainability initiatives can strengthen the customer relationship in ways that are easy to overlook.

Belonging builds relationships

Ipsos’ Forces of Customer Experience identifies the dimensions that predict emotional attachment. Belonging — feeling an organisation cares about the greater good and connects to your values — is the one most relevant to ESG.

Customers who feel Belonging are far more likely to say an experience was "better than promised", and the relationship holds across every sector studied.

Customers who feel a sense of belonging are far more likely to say their experience was better than promised.

A return on ESG investment

For a leading telco, Ipsos combined survey and behavioural data through ROCXI modelling. Perceptions of social responsibility lifted Belonging (+6%), Fair Treatment (+3%) and Certainty (+3%) — which in turn drove advocacy and retention, an 8-point NPS gain and roughly €65m in cost savings.

Being able to prove ESG strengthens relationships and moves financials is a powerful way to unlock further investment.

Three principles

Go beyond the fundamentals. Reducing waste and using renewable energy are fast becoming hygiene factors, not differentiators. Deliver on promises. A gap between what a brand says and does violates expectations and breeds dissonance. Ground ESG in experience. Concrete commitments tied to the core offer are far more impactful than remote, generic claims.

Designing the experience of the future

Health, societal, environmental and economic pressures keep reshaping what customers expect. CX Service Design and journey mapping let organisations find where to embed the right practices — and demonstrate them — to drive retention, share of spend and advocacy while doing right by people and planet.