Category Archives: Customer Experience

Expanding Into a New Market? Audit the Journey Before Your Customers Do

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Market expansion plans get validated within an inch of their life on almost everything except the one thing that determines whether customers actually stay once they arrive: whether the experience you’re bringing with you was ever built for the people you’re about to bring it to. Product-market fit gets tested. Go-to-market strategy gets modeled and re-modeled. The actual customer journey — the thing a real person will move through from first contact to renewal — usually just comes along for the ride, unexamined, on the assumption that if it worked here, it’ll work there too.

The assumption that quietly undermines expansion

That assumption is rarely stated out loud, which is part of why it survives so many planning cycles unchallenged. Nobody in an expansion planning meeting says “we’re assuming our existing journey translates perfectly to this new market.” They just don’t say anything about the journey at all, because it’s not the part of the plan anyone’s job is to stress-test. The financial model gets scrutiny. The competitive landscape gets scrutiny. The experience a new-market customer will actually have moving through your funnel, your onboarding, your support process — that gets inherited wholesale from whatever already exists, on the theory that if the core offering is sound, the wrapper around it doesn’t need a second look.

Where the existing journey actually breaks

It rarely breaks in the obvious place — translated marketing copy, currency formatting, the things everyone remembers to check. It breaks in the places built around assumptions nobody remembers making. A support response-time standard that felt generous in your home market can feel slow against a new market’s expectations, if the incumbents there have trained customers to expect faster. A sales cycle built around how your existing buyers evaluate a purchase can stall completely against a new segment’s actual buying committee structure, if nobody mapped how decisions really get made there before launch. Payment norms, preferred channels, even how directly or indirectly customers expect to be communicated with — all of it can differ in ways that don’t show up as an error, just as a slightly worse experience that a new-market customer has nothing to compare it to except the local alternative they almost chose instead.

Why waiting for complaints is the expensive option

By the time these gaps show up as customer complaints, you’ve usually already spent a meaningful share of the expansion budget acquiring the customers who are now quietly churning, and you’re competing for the next wave of customers in a market where your early reputation is already partly set by the people who had the rough experience first. Word of mouth in a new market works both directions faster than people expect — the same network effects that could help an expansion take off quickly can just as easily spread a “their onboarding is confusing” reputation before you’ve had a chance to fix it.

Auditing before launch instead of diagnosing after

The alternative is treating the new-market journey as something to validate deliberately before launch, not something to inherit by default. That means building out validated personas for the new market specifically, rather than assuming your existing personas translate — buying committees, decision criteria, and expectations can differ enough that a persona built for one market actively misleads you in another. It means walking the journey the way a new-market customer actually would, ideally with someone unfamiliar with your existing assumptions doing the walking, so the things your team has stopped noticing about your own process get caught before a real customer catches them instead. And it means benchmarking specifically against the local incumbents and best-in-class examples a new-market customer will actually be comparing you to, not against your existing competitors back home, since “good enough” is set by whoever they’re used to, not by whoever you’re used to competing against.

Where to start

If you’re heading into a market or segment expansion and want to validate the journey before your launch budget is already spent finding out the hard way, a Customer Experience Audit scoped to the new market specifically is built for exactly this. And if you want a rough sense of what an undiagnosed gap could cost in early churn before you scope that engagement, the CX ROI Calculator is a fast place to start putting a number on it.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDF

Image Credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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Lack of Feedback is a Gift

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Lack of Feedback is a Gift

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: Are organizations paying attention to the feedback customers give and also to the feedback they unintentionally withhold?

There’s an old expression: Feedback is a gift. Whenever a customer is willing to take time to share feedback by talking to you, emailing you, or leaving an online comment, it’s a gift. It either validates that what you’re doing is working or points out opportunities to improve. Companies obsess over survey scores and online reviews, and that’s smart. But if you only focus on what customers are telling you, you might miss important feedback that’s unintentionally hidden in what they don’t mention.

With that said, I’m going to flip this around and say that sometimes the lack of feedback can be as important as the specific feedback a customer shares.

It’s best if I share an example, and this comes from when I was 12 years old and had a birthday party magic show business. On a good week, I was performing at eight to 10 parties. About a week after every show, I would call the parents who hired me to perform for their child to thank them again and ask, “How did you like the show?” The answer was almost always positive. My father suggested I take it a step further and follow up with, “What magic tricks did you like the best?”

My father told me that over time, I would hear the same tricks mentioned. While that’s nice, what’s just as important, if not more so, are the tricks that weren’t mentioned. This unintentional silence can be a signal. His point was that if people aren’t talking about the tricks, replace them with tricks they will talk about. At the age of 12, I was learning an important tenet of customer service and experience, which is not only to ask for feedback, but also to operationalize it. In this case, it was to create and deliver a better magic show by paying attention to what my customers weren’t saying.

In any business, there are processes and experiences that customers encounter. If we’re customer-focused, we assume that what we’ve created delivers a good experience. Often, we’ll ask for feedback. Sometimes it’s about the overall experience, and other times it’s about something specific. All of that feedback should be appreciated, and while we need to pay attention to what customers say, we should also diligently pay attention to what they don’t say. That unspoken feedback may be the best feedback, and what’s so cool about this is that the customer doesn’t even know they are doing it.

Silence can equal insight. When customers seldom or never mention parts of your experience, ask yourself why. Whatever the reason, that silence may lead to your next big improvement. Look for the feedback customers offer, and look even harder for the feedback they don’t.

Image Credits: Pixabay

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Auditing Customer Experience Before and After a Systems Migration

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Auditing Customer Experience Before and After a Systems Migration

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Every systems migration I’ve ever seen gets sold internally with some version of the same reassurance: “nothing will change for the customer.” I understand why people say it — it’s meant to calm nerves and keep the project moving. It’s also almost never entirely true, and the gap between that promise and reality is exactly where a lot of quiet, expensive customer experience damage happens.

Migrations are measured by the wrong success criteria

A CRM cutover, a new billing platform, a support tooling replacement — these get judged by IT and project management on a specific set of criteria: did the data migrate correctly, is uptime where it should be, did the go-live happen on schedule. Those are the right questions for a systems team to ask. They’re the wrong questions, or at least an incomplete set, for understanding whether the customer experience survived the transition intact. A migration can hit every technical success metric on the project plan and still quietly degrade the actual experience a customer has, because nobody on the technical side was specifically measuring for that.

The silent regression problem

The most expensive migration failures I’ve seen aren’t the dramatic ones — the outage, the data loss, the system that won’t come back up. Those get noticed immediately and fixed fast, precisely because they’re loud. The expensive ones are silent regressions: a new billing platform that technically works but changes the invoice format customers had built internal processes around, so now their AP department has to redo reconciliation manually every month. A new CRM that migrates the data correctly but changes how support reps see a customer’s history, so reps start asking questions customers have already answered before, over and over, without anyone flagging it as a problem because each individual instance looks like a minor inconvenience rather than a pattern.

None of that shows up in a migration status report. All of it shows up, eventually, in retention numbers that took a hit for reasons nobody traced back to the systems change that happened two quarters earlier.

Why you need a real baseline before you touch anything

You can’t know what changed for customers after a migration if you don’t have an honest picture of what their experience actually looked like before it — not the technical specs of the old system, but the lived experience of using it. That means validated personas, a current journey map across the specific touchpoints the migration will touch, and a firsthand walkthrough of those touchpoints as they exist today. This is the step migrations skip most often, because the old system is about to be replaced anyway and it feels like wasted effort to study something on its way out. It isn’t wasted — it’s the only way to tell the difference between “the migration caused this” and “this was already broken and we just never noticed.”

What to actually check after cutover

Once the new system is live, the audit isn’t finished — it shifts to verification. This means walking the same touchpoints again, deliberately, rather than assuming success because no one’s complained yet. Complaints are a lagging indicator; most customers adapt to a worse experience quietly before they ever formally report it. It also means comparing the same data points — response times, resolution rates, whatever mattered in the baseline — against the pre-migration numbers specifically, not just against general benchmarks, since the question that matters is whether this specific change made things better, worse, or invisible.

The teams that get this right treat it as one audit, not two

The most effective version of this isn’t a rushed pre-migration check plus a separate, disconnected post-migration review commissioned only if something goes wrong. It’s a single audit designed from the start to bracket the migration — same personas, same touchpoints, same evaluation criteria, measured before and after, so the comparison is actually apples to apples. That structure is also what makes the business case afterward credible: “here’s exactly what improved, what regressed, and what stayed flat” is a far stronger position than a vague sense that the migration “went fine.”

Where to start

If you have a systems migration coming up and want a credible before-picture while there’s still time to establish one, a Customer Experience Audit scoped to bracket the migration is exactly the right tool — and if you’re trying to build the case for why that baseline is worth the investment before the project timeline locks in, the CX ROI Calculator is a fast way to put a number on what a silent regression could actually cost you.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDF

Image Credits: Pixabay

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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The Secret to Creating the WOW Experience

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Start On The Inside

The Secret to Creating the WOW Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

As I write, I’m looking at a book I just read, Delivering the WOW by Richard Fain, chairman and former CEO of Royal Caribbean Group. If you’ve ever been on a Royal Caribbean cruise, you’ve most likely experienced some of the WOW Fain talks about in his book. That word especially applies to Icon of the Seas, which as of today, is the world’s largest and most spectacular cruise ship, able to accommodate 7,600 guests and a crew of 2,600 employees, coming in at a cost of $2 billion.

I had a chance to interview Fain about his new book where he shared his strategy for delivering WOW. However, before we go further, it’s important to know Fain’s background. Prior to joining RC, he worked for a shipping company. He described it as a commodity business. The customer needed a shipment of something to go from point A to point B. The price, as Fain said, “… [had] to be cheaper than the other guy,” and as long as it was and the shipments were delivered as promised (on time), the company earned repeat business.

However, cruise ships are part of the hospitality industry, where people have different expectations. While customers (passengers) may consider how much the trip costs, they also look at the value proposition for the money they spend. Done well, customers are less concerned about the money than about the experience. Fain said, “I found myself going from a commodity business (the shipping company) where price was all that mattered to a business where wowing the customer, exceeding their expectations, blowing them away and making them desperately interested in coming back and doing it again (was what mattered).”

While I thought I was going to learn specific ways Royal Caribbean delivered guest service, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Fain talk about the true secret to the WOW strategy, and that is to create the right culture. Fain said, “The ships are beautiful. I like architecture, the art and the design, and I’m very proud of the spectacular vessels. But it’s really the crew members who bring that to life and make it (the experience) exceptional.”

With that in mind, here are five of Fain’s strategies to WOW the customer.

It’s the Culture: Fain’s culture is about a dedicated team of employees who are never satisfied and always finding ways to improve. Fain said, “We’re looking for the kind of people who really feel passionate about their jobs. You need to love doing your job. I’m amazed at our crew members who seem like they’re the ones on vacation.”
Finding the Right People Is the Key to the Culture: When the culture is good, you’re going to attract the right people. Fain shared that the best way they find new employees is when current employees tell their friends, “This company is really amazing and working for them is exciting and fulfilling.” Just as you want customers to evangelize a brand, you want employees to do the same.
Create the Culture Where People Don’t Leave: Fain was excited to share that he’s had the pleasure of awarding employees for 50 years of service to the company, and that the senior executives have a tenure of more than 15 years. The point is, Fain says, “People don’t leave us that easily.” When you treat employees right, they stay.
The Defining Statement Aligns the Culture: I asked Fain if he had a mantra or credo for the company. His answer was simple. The WOW concept is the most common. It’s not just about providing a good cruise. Employees are expected to go above and beyond, and everyone understands (and is trained) in what that means. It’s not about an over-the-top moment, although it could be. Above and beyond can be as simple as a small gesture. Fain explains, “If you’re dealing with a child, you don’t just bend down, you get down on a knee and talk to that child. If someone asks where something is, you don’t just say, ‘Go down the corridor, turn left, then take your first right.’ You take them there.” In other words, do a little more than expected, sometimes just a tiny bit more, and you’ll be delivering an above-and-beyond experience.
Your North Star Gives You Direction: As I wrapped up the interview, I asked Fain to share one final tip from his book, Deliver the WOW. He said that a company’s defining statement becomes its North Star. This is the direction you are always headed. It’s physically thousands of light years away, and it’s impossible to actually get to the North Star, but that’s the direction you are headed. Fain shared his final comment: “Mariners navigate the ship by looking at where the North Star is. And we navigate our business by constantly thinking of our North Star.” His point was that his people are focused on what makes next month better and next year better. They are always looking to make a positive change. And not just modest incremental change, but big critical changes that make a real difference.

No matter what business you’re in, you need a North Star to guide every decision and every employee. It doesn’t matter if you call it WOW or something else. What matters is the relentless focus on getting better. That overarching strategy must be ingrained in the culture. People must make that happen. Without it, you risk staying where you are while a competitor improves and passes you by. Commit to constant progress, keep your team aligned and you’ll create an ever-improving experience that gets customers to say, “I’ll be back!”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credits: Pexels

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Why Net Revenue Retention Pressure Should Trigger a CX Audit

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Why Net Revenue Retention Pressure Should Trigger a CX Audit

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

If you’ve sat in a board meeting in the last few years and watched Net Revenue Retention go up on the screen, you’ve probably also watched the room’s mood shift with it, one way or the other. NRR has become the number investors ask about before almost anything else, and for good reason — it tells you whether the business you already won is actually getting bigger or quietly leaking. What it doesn’t tell you is why. That part gets left to whoever’s in the room to explain, usually on the spot, usually with less certainty than the number itself implies.

NRR is a symptom, not a diagnosis

Net Revenue Retention bundles together expansion, contraction, and churn into one tidy percentage, which is exactly what makes it useful to a board and exactly what makes it useless as a diagnostic on its own. A dip in NRR could mean your onboarding is failing, your support experience is fraying, your product isn’t delivering on renewal-time expectations, or three unrelated things happening in three different customer segments at once. The number tells you something’s wrong. It has nothing to say about what.

Why finance-driven pressure produces finance-shaped answers

Here’s the pattern I see constantly once NRR pressure shows up: the response comes from wherever the pressure originated, which is usually finance or the exec team, not from a customer-facing diagnosis. That means the first instinct is often pricing adjustments, packaging changes, or a renewed push on the renewal playbook — all reasonable moves, and all aimed at the revenue mechanics rather than the experience actually driving the number. You can restructure pricing all you want. If a customer’s day-to-day experience with your product is the real reason they’re not expanding, the pricing change just delays the same conversation to next quarter.

The expansion problem nobody’s diagnosing

Contraction and churn at least generate a paper trail — a downgrade request, a cancellation, a support escalation. Missed expansion is quieter and, in my experience, the more expensive half of an NRR problem. A customer who never asked about the add-on module, never expanded seats at renewal, never became the internal champion pushing for more — that’s not a data point anywhere. It’s an absence. And an absence born from friction they quietly worked around, or an onboarding that never got them to real product value, doesn’t show up in a churn dashboard. It shows up nowhere, until someone finally asks why expansion revenue has been flat for three quarters running.

Why the board wants a story, not just a fix

There’s a specific reason NRR pressure is a better trigger for a full audit than a targeted pricing tweak: a board that’s pushing on this metric usually wants to understand the mechanism, not just see the number move. “We adjusted pricing and NRR improved” is a fragile story — it invites the follow-up question of whether the improvement will hold once the pricing novelty wears off. “We diagnosed exactly where customers were hitting friction before expansion or renewal, and fixed the specific gaps” is a story that survives scrutiny, because it’s causal, not correlational. An audit is what gets you the second story instead of the first.

What this actually means to walk through

Diagnosing an NRR problem properly means treating it as a customer experience question first and a revenue question second: validating who your expanding customers look like versus your flat or contracting ones, mapping where the journey actually breaks down for each, and — critically — walking the onboarding and ongoing product experience firsthand rather than trusting a dashboard that was never built to explain expansion behavior in the first place. Benchmarking against what “good” onboarding and expansion experiences look like elsewhere in the market rounds this out, since a lot of NRR erosion in SaaS specifically comes from customer expectations that were set by a completely different product, not your direct competitors.

Where to start

If NRR pressure is the reason this is on your desk right now, the fastest way to get a real number to bring into that next board conversation is the CX ROI Calculator — it’ll give you a defensible estimate of what the underlying experience gaps are actually costing in retained and expansion revenue. And when you’re ready to find out exactly where those gaps live, a Customer Experience Audit scoped to your onboarding and expansion journey is how you turn “NRR is down” into an actual, fixable answer instead of another quarter of pricing experiments.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDF

Image Credits: Pixabay

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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Merging Two Customer Experiences After M&A

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Where to Start

Merging Two Customer Experiences After M&A

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Every M&A announcement talks about synergies, market position, and combined capabilities. Almost none of them talk about the fact that, on day one, you now have two customer bases who each learned to expect something different from the companies they chose — and neither of them signed up for the other company’s version of the relationship.

The assumption that quietly sinks post-merger CX

The default assumption in most integrations is that the better-resourced or larger company’s experience simply becomes the standard, and the other customer base adjusts. I’ve watched this assumption cost companies real customers, because it skips a step that matters enormously: nobody has actually compared the two experiences at the touchpoint level to know which one is genuinely better, versus just louder or more familiar to the leadership team making the call.

Two journeys, two sets of expectations, one deadline

Integration timelines are usually set by finance and legal milestones — closing conditions, systems cutover dates, reporting deadlines — not by how long it actually takes to understand two customer journeys well enough to merge them intelligently. That mismatch is where the damage happens. Support processes get unified before anyone’s mapped where they genuinely differ. Pricing and billing experiences get standardized before anyone’s identified which parts of each were actually working. By the time customer complaints start flagging the problems, the systems decisions are already locked in, and unwinding them costs far more than getting it right the first time would have.

Start by mapping both journeys independently, before merging anything

The instinct in an integration is to move fast toward one unified experience, because ambiguity feels risky to the deal’s momentum. I’d argue the opposite is true here: the riskiest move is unifying before you understand what you’re unifying. Mapping both customer journeys independently — validated personas, current-state touchpoints, the data each company has been collecting, and, critically, walking both journeys firsthand rather than trusting either side’s internal narrative about how good their own experience is — gives you an honest picture before any integration decision gets made instead of after.

Whose employees explain the friction matters as much as whose customers report it

In an acquisition especially, frontline employees from the acquired company often sit on institutional knowledge about their customers’ real pain points and workarounds that never made it into any deck during diligence. They also, often, feel like their side of the business is being absorbed rather than genuinely evaluated — which makes them less likely to volunteer that knowledge unless someone specifically goes looking for it. An audit that treats both organizations’ frontline teams as equally credible sources, rather than defaulting to whichever side is running the integration, tends to surface friction neither leadership team knew existed.

Benchmark both experiences against the market, not against each other

The other trap is treating this purely as an internal comparison — which company’s process wins. The more useful question is how each one stacks up against what customers in the combined market now expect, especially if the merger changes your competitive position or brings you into contact with a new set of competitors either customer base is now implicitly being compared against.

What this actually buys you

Getting this right doesn’t just avoid a bad integration story — it turns the merger into a genuine opportunity to build a better combined experience than either company had running independently, using the best of what each side was actually doing well. That’s a very different outcome than the default of one side’s process quietly winning by default and both customer bases losing something in the process.

If you’re heading into an integration and want an independent, evidence-based read on both customer experiences before any systems or process decisions get locked in, a Customer Experience Audit scoped to both organizations is exactly the kind of diagnostic this moment calls for. And if you want a rough sense of what experience misalignment could cost during an integration before you scope that engagement, the CX ROI Calculator is a fast place to start.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDF

Image Credits: Pexels

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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Why Going Above and Beyond Doesn’t Work

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Why Going Above and Beyond Doesn't Work

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: Should organizations aim to go above and beyond in every interaction, or focus on consistently meeting customer expectations?

This is a story about a disagreement I had with a client. I should mention, this was a friendly disagreement. His idea of an amazing experience was to go above and beyond, always exceeding the customer’s expectations.

His company is the one you call when a disaster, such as a flood, tornado, or fire, hits your home or office. The company specializes in cleanup and restoration. The owner believed it was important to go above and beyond in every interaction. So, I asked him for an example.

He said that when a customer calls – day or night, 365 days a year – someone will be there, and an emergency team will be dispatched immediately.

As nicely as I could, I told him that what he described was not an above-and-beyond example. No, what he described was what every customer expected. While the customer may be elated with how quickly the company responds to their emergency, that’s what his company is supposed to do.

Above and beyond experiences are reserved for unexpected moments. Not long ago, I wrote about the story Steve Wynn, the chairman of Wynn Resorts, a group of hotels and casinos, shared about how an employee helped a guest get medicine she had left at home. That was truly an above-and-beyond example.

It doesn’t always have to be something big.

However, it doesn’t always have to be something big. For example, the surprise piece of cake with a candle the server at a restaurant brings to the table, not because someone told him it was a guest’s birthday, but simply because he overheard the patrons talking about the birthday. He took advantage of that information and created the surprise-and-delight moment, another version of above-and-beyond.

But you can’t count on emergencies and birthdays to happen every time. You can take advantage of those moments when you know they’re coming, but if every day, in every interaction, you focus on giving the customer your best effort to meet, and even slightly exceed, their expectations, you’re operating in the zone of amazement.

Going above and beyond should never be the goal for every interaction. It’s not sustainable, and it’s definitely not a realistic goal. What is realistic is delivering consistent and predictable experiences that meet expectations every time and occasionally rise just a bit above them. The point is, customers don’t demand fireworks unless that’s the kind of experience you sell. What they want is reliability, ease, and empathy. When those are in place, the occasional above-and-beyond or surprise-and-delight moments become icing on the cake, not the foundation of your service. Do what customers expect, every time, and you’ll amaze them with your consistency. That’s what builds trust, loyalty, and the kind of reputation that gets customers to say, “I’ll be back.”

Image Credits: Pexels

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2026

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2026 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are August’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Time to Rethink Pitch Fests and Business Plan Competitions — by Arlen Meyers
What If You Could Prove the Government is Ripping Us Off? — by Braden Kelley
The Surprising Innovation History of the Bicycle — by John Bessant
Dead Actors Society — by Art Inteligencia
Amazon Connect Combines Human Empathy with AI to Redefine Service — by Shep Hyken
AI Will Create a More Human Future, Not a Less Human One — by Braden Kelley
Managing Your Work Friends — by David Burkus
Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit — by Braden Kelley
Customer Experience Audit vs. Customer Satisfaction Survey — by Braden Kelley
Case Study – Innovating Around a Disruption — by Jason Hauer

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in July that continue to resonate with people:

What Happens When AI Becomes Your Customer? — by Shep Hyken
How to Calculate the ROI of Customer Experience — by Braden Kelley
How to Keep Learning as a Leader — by David Burkus
Why Collective Intelligence is the New Scarce Resource in an Age of Abundant AI — by Braden Kelley
Why Conversations Are the New Digital Gold — by Braden Kelley

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last five years:

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Losing Deals to a Competitor’s Experience, Not Their Price

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Losing Deals to a Competitor's Experience, Not Their Price

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

There’s a specific kind of loss that stings more than losing on price, and it’s becoming more common: a deal you were competitive on, with a product that stacked up well, lost anyway — and the reason, when you dig into it, wasn’t the product at all. It was how easy the competitor was to do business with.

Why this loss is harder to see coming

A price loss shows up cleanly in a deal review. Someone quotes a lower number, the math doesn’t work, everyone understands what happened. An experience loss is messier — it rarely gets stated in those terms. The prospect says something vague about “fit” or “timing,” and the real reason (a confusing proposal process, a slow response to a technical question, friction in the trial) never makes it into the CRM note at all. Sales teams are generally good at capturing price objections and bad at capturing experience ones, because experience friction often isn’t recognized as the actual cause even by the prospect who felt it.

The tell that this is happening to you

If your win-loss reviews keep landing on soft, hard-to-pin-down explanations — “they went with someone who felt more aligned,” “the timing wasn’t right on our side” — that vagueness is itself a signal. A genuine timing or budget loss usually has a specific, nameable cause. A persistent pattern of vague ones often means the real cause is something nobody on your team experienced directly enough to name: the prospect’s experience of your process, compared to a competitor’s.

Where these losses actually happen

They rarely happen at the final pricing conversation. They accumulate earlier — in how quickly a technical question gets answered during evaluation, in how many people the prospect has to loop in to get a straight answer, in whether the trial or demo experience felt like something built for them or something generic run through for everyone. By the time price comes up, a prospect who’s had friction throughout the process is already primed to see a competitor’s slicker experience as the safer bet, even at a similar or higher price.

Why your team usually can’t self-diagnose this

The people running your sales and onboarding process are, understandably, not well positioned to evaluate whether that process creates friction — they’re used to it, they know the workarounds, and what feels like a minor extra step to someone who does it daily can feel like a real obstacle to a prospect experiencing it for the first time. This is a case where walking the actual prospect journey firsthand, the way an outside evaluator would, tends to surface friction that’s become completely invisible to the people running it.

What to do once you suspect this is the pattern

The instinct is usually to ask sales for more detail in win-loss interviews, and that helps, but it’s limited by the same problem — you’re asking people to accurately recall and report friction they may not have consciously registered as friction. A more reliable approach is auditing the actual buyer and evaluation journey directly: walking it the way a prospect would, mapping where friction lives at each touchpoint, and benchmarking specifically against how the competitors you’re losing to run their own process.

If this pattern sounds familiar — technically competitive deals lost for reasons nobody can quite pin down — a Customer Experience Audit scoped to your sales and evaluation journey, including direct benchmarking against the competitors you’re actually losing to, is built for exactly this. And if you want a rough sense of what those losses are costing before scoping an engagement, the CX ROI Calculator is a fast way to start putting a number on it.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDF

Image Credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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New CX Leader? Why an Independent Audit Belongs in Your First 90 Days

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New CX Leader? Why an Independent Audit Belongs in Your First 90 Days

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Walking into a new customer experience role — CX lead, CMO, VP of Customer Success — comes with an unspoken clock. You have a window, usually measured in months rather than years, where you’re expected to understand what you inherited and start showing you can improve it. Most new leaders spend that window doing exactly the wrong thing first.

The trap of trusting what you’re told

Every new leader inherits a story about the customer experience, told by the people who built it. It’s rarely dishonest — it’s just inevitably shaped by whoever’s closest to each part of the business, and by what the previous regime chose to measure and report upward. Spending your first quarter absorbing that story, then acting on it, means your first major decisions are built on someone else’s blind spots, not your own judgment.

Why independence matters more here than almost anywhere else

An internal review, run by your own team in your first months, has a structural problem: the people doing the reviewing often have a stake in what it finds, whether or not anyone intends that. A team that built the current onboarding flow isn’t the ideal group to independently evaluate whether it’s working. An independent audit doesn’t carry that conflict — it walks the journey and evaluates the data with no incentive to protect any particular decision that came before you.

It gives you a real baseline, not a borrowed one

Six months from now, when you’re reporting on what’s improved, you’ll want a credible “before” picture that isn’t just a set of dashboard screenshots someone else built. An audit run at the start of your tenure — covering validated personas, a current journey map, an honest read of the existing data, firsthand walkthroughs of the real experience, and a look at how you compare to competitors — becomes the fixed point everything else gets measured against. Without it, your progress reporting six or twelve months in rests on metrics your predecessor chose, defined, and possibly optimized for their own narrative.

It tells you where to spend your political capital first

New leaders get a limited amount of organizational goodwill to spend on change, and spending it on the wrong priority is one of the most common ways a promising tenure stalls early. A structured audit gives you a prioritized, evidence-based view of where the real gaps are — not the loudest complaint in the building, not the pet project someone’s been pushing for years, but where the customer data and the firsthand journey walk actually point. That’s a far stronger position to walk into your first big budget conversation from than “my gut says we should fix X.”

It’s a credibility move, not just a diagnostic one

There’s also a simple organizational-politics benefit that’s easy to underrate: commissioning an outside, objective audit early signals that you’re not there to defend the status quo or protect any particular team’s prior decisions. That reads very differently to a skeptical organization than announcing changes based on your own first impressions, however well-founded those impressions might be.

Where to start

If you’re inside your first few months in a CX role and want to see where an independent read of your team’s own current state stands, the Customer Experience Audit Checklist walks through the same five activities a full audit runs. And if you want a defensible number to bring into your first budget conversation, the CX ROI Calculator is a fast way to get one. When you’re ready for the real diagnostic, a Customer Experience Audit run in your first 90 days gives you the independent baseline every decision after that can stand on.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDFImage Credits: Pexels

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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