A comprehensive guide to the RHI/PFI dual-index architecture — translating customer signals into business priorities with actual dollar values attached.
We are not ranking based on sentiment scores alone — we are ranking based on revenue opportunity and risk mitigation with real financial value attached to every customer segment.
Two complementary indexes that together reveal opportunities invisible when teams work in silos. One measures how customers feel. The other measures what they actually do.
Every customer in your portfolio occupies one of four quadrants. Each has a calculable value — and a specific strategic response. This is where CX becomes a business decision framework, not a satisfaction survey.
Customers who trust and like us but conduct their primary banking elsewhere. They like us — we just haven't earned their financial center of gravity.
Your best customers. High trust, primary relationship, deep product engagement. These are your advocates and most defended revenue base. Priority here is preservation and deepening, not conversion.
Low sentiment and low behavioral commitment. Without proactive intervention, they are most likely to exit quietly — and they rarely announce it.
Locked in with multiple products, but sentiment is deteriorating. When they finally unlock, they don't move one product — they move everything.
The dollar figures attached to each quadrant require transparent assumptions documented for CFO scrutiny. Build the assumptions model before the executive presentation.
The cost of inaction isn't abstract — it's quantifiable lost revenue and preventable churn. When CX is not connected to financial outcomes, every department optimizes for its own metrics while the customer relationship quietly deteriorates.
"We can spend $X to fix these friction points and protect $Y million in vulnerable revenue — or we can not invest and watch that revenue, and the 30–50% premium it carries, walk out the door."
The silo problem is real and customer-visible. This five-phase framework was developed specifically to eliminate fragmented experiences before they reach the customer.
Customers get irrelevant emails because marketing doesn't know sales just closed them on a different product
Applications abandoned because technology and marketing didn't align on data requirements
Customers contacted by multiple teams about the same thing because there is no shared view of the relationship
Before anyone builds anything — Marketing, Sales, and Technology map the actual customer journey together. Current state and desired future state. This is where silo-breaking begins.
Cross-functional build phase with the Journey Owner holding accountability for end-to-end experience. Systems, content, processes, and measurement developed in parallel with shared visibility into dependencies.
Technical and operational configuration. CRM, marketing automation, service systems, and analytics instrumented to capture the journey signals that feed back into RHI and PFI calculations.
Built-in quality gates mean you cannot launch until the customer will not encounter broken functionality. The gate belongs to the Journey Owner — not to IT or Marketing alone.
Controlled launch with active monitoring. Post-launch optimization is a defined phase — not an afterthought. RHI and PFI signals from the affected segment are monitored for 90 days post-launch.
Facilitated by the PM office. Journey performance reviewed against current RHI/PFI benchmarks, competitive landscape, and evolving customer expectations.
A named individual is accountable for the end-to-end customer experience. McKinsey research confirms organizations with journey-centric accountability consistently outperform touchpoint-optimized organizations.
Launch cannot proceed until the customer experience has been validated end-to-end. This is CX's equivalent of agile's definition of done.
Internal efficiency is a byproduct — not the purpose. Better customer experience was the end goal. Keep this framing visible in every stakeholder conversation.
The primary failure mode of CX programs is disconnection between CX measurement and business measurement. This four-tier cascade solves that structurally.
Delivering great customer experience requires coordination across all touchpoints. The shared dashboard changes the behavior of every function that sees it.
"You can't say my team hit its numbers when you are all looking at deteriorating customer health scores."
When marketing optimizes email open rates, product optimizes feature adoption, and sales optimizes pipeline velocity — all independently — the customer experiences the cumulative friction of three optimization functions that never coordinated. The shared RHI/PFI dashboard replaces department-level metric victories with a single shared view of whether the customer relationship is strengthening or weakening.
Organizations with the strongest financial services CX outcomes consistently share one structural characteristic: measurement silos were broken before experience silos could be addressed. The shared health dashboard is the prerequisite, not the outcome.
The Achilles heel of sophisticated CX architectures is sustainability when the champion moves on or when a cost cycle hits. Governance converts a smart framework into an institutional capability.
Methodology owner: A named individual who owns the RHI and PFI calculation methodology and is accountable for its integrity
Weight change protocol: Document who can modify index weights, what evidence threshold triggers a review, and what approval is required
Data source SLAs: Each component must have a defined data owner, refresh cadence, and quality threshold
Annual validation study: Link index scores to actual revenue and retention outcomes annually to maintain business case credibility
CX Council: Quarterly meeting of functional leaders reviewing shared RHI/PFI trends and OKR progress — a business performance meeting, not a CX team meeting
OKR dispute resolution: Define how conflicts between functional OKRs and CX health outcomes are escalated and resolved
Journey Owner network: Formal network with regular syncs, shared best practices, and accountability to CX Council
Successor planning: Document the framework so a new CX leader can adopt and operate it within 90 days
Phase 1 (0–90 days): Build the RHI/PFI model with available data. Produce first quadrant segmentation. Attach illustrative dollar values. Get executive sponsor
Phase 2 (90–180 days): Present to functional leaders. Co-create first generation of OKRs. Launch Journey Framework on highest-value opportunity segment
Phase 3 (180–365 days): Establish shared dashboard and CX Council. Document first revenue impact case study
Phase 4 (Year 2+): Full metrics cascade operational. Annual PM office reviews institutionalized. Framework becomes the operating system
Dollar figures without documented assumptions — a skeptical CFO will destroy the business case in one question. Build the model before the presentation
CX-imposed OKRs — if functional teams didn't help set the targets, they won't own them. Co-creation is a governance requirement, not a courtesy
In-flight journey degradation — journeys degrade over time via process drift and staff turnover. Build ongoing signal monitoring into the operating model
Causality confusion in the index — high-PFI customers may show high RHI simply because deeper relationships create more satisfaction surface area. Control for tenure before attributing movement to interventions
The framework synthesizes and extends established bodies of CX and business research. These are the authoritative sources that underpin each major design decision.
Emotion is the dominant driver of loyalty in financial services — consistently outweighing ease and success combined. RHI's 50% sentiment weighting reflects this hierarchy. Forrester also documents the sentiment-behavior gap as the central failure mode of NPS-only measurement programs.
Bain's work on "hostage" customers directly validates the Committed/Unhappy quadrant. These customers are retained through inertia — not loyalty — and represent latent churn risk that crystallizes during life events.
Organizations assigning end-to-end journey accountability consistently outperform those optimizing by touchpoint. The Journey Owner concept in the five-phase framework directly reflects this finding.
Customer effort — the friction customers must exert to complete journeys — is the single strongest predictor of disloyalty, exceeding delight as a retention driver. This is the empirical foundation for the Journey Framework's quality gate mechanism.
Primary bank relationships correlate with higher product depth, revenue per customer, and retention. The PFI model's emphasis on direct deposit and daily transaction behaviors reflects the behavioral signatures these research programs identify.
CX programs fail to secure executive support because CX metrics live in a different language than the P&L. The RHI/PFI system's core contribution — attaching dollar values to customer segments — directly addresses this translation problem.