Introducing the CX Equal Weight Index

The idea of an index to track CX company stocks has been brewing in my head for some time.

The stock market has tons of indices tracking anything from the broader market performance (like the S&P 500) to a specific industry segment (like finance or semiconductor). They’re just another dataset for investors, observers, and the general public to look at to gain additional insights into publicly-traded companies or particular sectors.

So why not something for CX companies? After all, customer experience is all the rage these days. Even the Biden administration wanted to tackle the issue of poor CX.

With the help of Google Docs and Datawrapper and several cups of coffee, I created the index with an uninspiring name: CX Equal Weight Index.

Twelve company stocks were chosen: Amazon, Cisco, Sprinklr, 8x8, Five9, LivePerson, Microsoft, NICE, RingCentral, Twilio, Verint, and Zoom. It’s an interesting collection since there are a few mega tech companies in the mix and a few small players. However, each is equally weighted in the index.

Obviously, the index will get updated with any M&A activity, IPO, or privatization. All possible scenarios in the CX market landscape if you’ve been an observer long enough.

Something like this may or may not be of interest to you, but I believe it offers another view of the broader CX market based on their stocks. And these are all public companies which means their financial data are readily available for everyone to view and analyze.

By looking at the chart, we can see the peak in the 2021 timeframe was in line with the surge during the pandemic when most of the world worked from home and required CX tools to be productive. Then there was a noticeable decline in the post-pandemic years after companies trimmed their workforce as CX demand diminished. Starting around 2023 there were a few “humps” which I attribute to CX companies adopting and working out the wrinkles with generative AI (OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022).

I hope you share my curiosity to see how this index trends in the intermediate and long term. The CX market has seen its share of changes with entrants and exits, with innovations and disruptions. Now with the velocity of AI added to the mix, who knows how the CX landscape evolves…