“What is the return on investment of the customer experience?” Is a question similar to "What is the ROI of innovation?" Which of these questions has an answer?

It all depends on what you do and how you do what you do! The important point is that nobody says, "Let's see if there is a return on investment from innovation before we innovate!" And the same goes for customer experience: if you're serious about it.
After all, customer experience is not a choice, there is always customer experience, whether you want to manage it or not. Customer experience ROI is simply about the return gained from investing in the customer as a source of value, just as we would from a product or service.
Customer experience feedback is also a bad question! Customer experience is after all an enabler; the customer experience gives the company strategic options. Which brings us to a better question: not “What is the ROI of customer experience” but “What is the ROI derived from different ways of doing customer experience?” And what is the best way? »
However, before we get into the nitty-gritty, to make customer experience commercially we need to appreciate a fundamental principle: By adding value to the customer, they will add value to us, through additional sales, more use, more expense and longer life.

What is the ROI derived from different ways of doing customer experience? And what is the best way?

Let's see which types of experience offer the highest return. These can be divided as follows:
0- The effectiveness of the product or service: This is the lowest level (you should do this anyway if you want customers.)
1- Excellence of the product or service: After efficiency, excellence (The customer would pay more for that.)
2- Innovation on the product or service: Then we have the search for new axes that increase innovation on current products and services.
3- Innovation on the experience: Higher up we have the search for new axes that innovate the experience beyond the products and services currently offered.

We can highlight 3 key words:

Efficiency: which means that we focus on enabling a connection between the outside and the company. This is the layer where we manage the “non-experience”. This is the starting point for getting customers.
Product Excellence and Product Innovation: Which means we focus on providing good service at all times. By ensuring marketing doesn't rip us off, we have a visibly good signal, a visibly seamless UX, and customer service is responsive and empathetic. This is a layer where we start creating the customer experience.
Customer Experience Innovation: Here, the company offers experiences that positively affect customer perceptions (both conscious and unconscious). Here, customer experience becomes its own economic offering, integral to something that goes beyond service delivery, like giving the feeling of “we care.” And also something that is noticeably different from the competition.

We can see that we add value to the customer's account only if we add value to their subjective, personal and memorable experience; without denying, of course, that we can lose customers if efficiency (a paradigm of quality of service) is not maintained!

Efficiency is therefore only the entry ticket to the game; we avoid loss aversion, but we don't move the subjective dial.
Once the effectiveness of your product or service begins to be trivialized, you must move on to excellence and innovation on the product, which will then mark the starting point of the customer experience.
Second, merchandising excellence and product innovation must lead the company to build experiences that deliver the best return because they target the deepest, conscious and unconscious drives (needs) of the consumer.
Successful companies are then those that can manage this cycle over time by integrating a customer experience approach into the way they manage and measure experience: understanding that experience is not just a question efficiency, unless they want to be the cheapest supplier.