Category Archives: Customer Experience

Compliance-Driven Customer Experience

What Financial Services and Healthcare Teams Need to Know

Compliance-Driven Customer Experience

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

In most industries, a bad customer experience (CX) costs you a customer. In financial services and healthcare, it can also cost you an exam finding, a complaint to a regulator, or a line item in an audit report that someone on your compliance team now has to explain. That’s a meaningfully different kind of pressure, and it changes what a customer experience audit is actually worth to these two industries specifically — not just as a commercial tool, but as something that can double as genuine regulatory evidence.

A caveat before I go further: I’m not a lawyer or a compliance officer, and nothing here is regulatory advice. What I am is someone who’s watched CX and compliance teams operate as two separate functions inside the same organization, often documenting the same customer touchpoints in two different ways, for two different audiences, without either one fully benefiting from what the other already knows.

The silo that’s costing you twice

Here’s the pattern I see constantly in regulated industries: compliance runs its own fair-treatment reviews, complaint trend analysis, and documentation processes, built specifically to satisfy an examiner or auditor. CX, separately, runs its own journey mapping and improvement work, built to satisfy customers and the business. The two teams are frequently looking at the exact same touchpoints — the same loan application flow, the same patient intake process, the same claims experience — and producing two different, uncoordinated pictures of it, often without either team knowing in detail what the other found.

That duplication isn’t just inefficient. It means your compliance documentation and your actual customer experience improvement work rarely inform each other, and the organization effectively pays twice for insight into the same process it could have gotten once, more thoroughly, if the two efforts were designed together from the start.

What regulators in these industries are actually looking for

Across financial services and healthcare, the regulatory expectation increasingly isn’t just “treat customers fairly” as an outcome — it’s evidence of a systematic, ongoing process for finding and fixing where you aren’t. Fair lending and UDAAP-related reviews in financial services look for documented, proactive self-assessment, not just a clean complaint log. Patient experience standards in healthcare increasingly tie directly to things like CAHPS-style measurement and documented quality improvement processes, not just satisfaction scores reported upward once a year. In both industries, accessibility requirements for digital experiences — online banking, patient portals — are under increasing scrutiny on their own. What all of this adds up to is a consistent theme: proof that you looked, systematically and on a defensible cadence, matters as much as what you found.

Why a well-run CX audit produces exactly this kind of evidence

This is where the overlap gets genuinely useful instead of just theoretically interesting. A properly structured audit — validated personas, real journey mapping, an honest evaluation of existing complaint and service data, firsthand walkthroughs of the actual touchpoints, and benchmarking against what good looks like elsewhere — is, almost incidentally, precisely the kind of systematic, documented, dated process that compliance functions in these industries need to be able to point to. The commercial insight and the compliance evidence aren’t two different projects. They’re two outputs of the same rigorous process, if that process is designed with both audiences’ needs in mind from the outset rather than retrofitted afterward.

Timing matters more here than almost anywhere else

In most industries, a CX audit can happen whenever budget and bandwidth allow. In financial services and healthcare, timing it ahead of a scheduled exam or review changes its character entirely — it becomes proactive evidence of a mature process instead of a reactive scramble after a finding already landed. I’ve seen the difference in posture this creates firsthand: walking into a regulatory conversation with “here’s the systematic process we run and here’s what we found and fixed” is an entirely different position than walking in after a finding, trying to explain what you’re doing about it now that someone else noticed first.

Where to start

If your organization is in financial services or healthcare and hasn’t yet connected your CX and compliance efforts into a single, well-documented process, a Customer Experience Audit designed with both your commercial goals and your documentation needs in mind can serve both functions at once — worth coordinating with your compliance and legal teams on scope from the start. And if you want a sense of what unresolved experience gaps could be costing commercially, separate from the compliance conversation entirely, the CX ROI Calculator is a good place to start putting a number on it.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDF

Image Credits: ChatGPT

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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Customer Experience Without Exceptions

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Customer Experience Without Exceptions

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: How can organizations deliver consistently excellent customer service even when customers are difficult, rude, or unappreciative?

Last year, I wrote an article on a “rule” in customer service that I called the Reality Rule: Treat customers well, regardless of how they treat you. This was inspired by a book I read, Give Hospitality by Taylor Scott. In the article, I talked about four rules.

So, first a little review:

The Golden Rule: We all know this one. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It shows up everywhere, from religion to leadership to customer service training.

The Platinum Rule: My friend Dr. Tony Alessandra came up with this one. Do unto others as they’d like done unto them. I’ve always loved this spin on the Golden Rule, because not all customers want the same experience.

The Employee Golden Rule: I came up with this years ago. Again, it’s a spin on the Golden Rule, but it’s focused on how employees are treated. Do unto employees as you want done unto customers. You can’t expect great customer service to come from employees who aren’t treated well by their managers, leaders, and colleagues.

The Rosa Parks Rule: In Scott’s book, there is a quote attributed to Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, defying the racial segregation laws: Nothing in the Golden Rule says that others will treat us as we have treated them. It only says that we must treat others in a way that we would want to be treated.

I’m bringing all of this up again, because it’s worth doing so. And I have more to say about this.

If Rosa Parks’ words were to apply to business, they remind us that great customer service is unconditional.

By the way, this isn’t easy. I’ve seen great customer service reps go to great lengths to help customers, only to be met with indifference, rudeness, and a lack of appreciation. This can cause even the best of us to think, “Why should I care if they don’t?”

There is an answer: It shouldn’t matter!

How you respond is always your choice. Creating an amazing experience isn’t just for customers who say please and thank you. It’s for every customer, even if they are angry, rude, or difficult to please. By the way, abuse is never acceptable. There is always a line that should not be crossed.

The point is this: when you remove expectations, you stop being disappointed, you stop being resentful, and you start delivering consistent and intentional experiences that get customers to say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credits: Unsplash

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When a Bad Review Goes Viral

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Turning a PR Moment Into a Real Fix

When a Bad Review Goes Viral

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

The moment a bad customer experience goes viral, an organization snaps into a very specific and very well-rehearsed mode: crisis response. Legal gets looped in. Communications drafts a statement. Someone reaches out to make the customer whole, quickly and visibly. All of that is necessary, and none of it answers the only question that actually matters once the immediate fire is out: was this a genuine one-off, or is it the first time anyone’s noticed something that’s been happening quietly for a while?

The PR response and the real diagnosis are two different jobs

Here’s the trap I’ve watched organizations fall into repeatedly: the PR response feels like it resolved the problem, because from the outside, it did. The story dies down. The affected customer is satisfied, or at least quiet. Leadership moves on, understandably relieved. But making one visible customer whole and understanding whether the underlying failure is systemic are two completely different exercises, and only one of them actually happened. The apology addressed the symptom that became public. It said nothing about whether the same failure is quietly happening to other customers who simply didn’t have a large enough platform for anyone to notice.

The customer who went viral is rarely the only one it happened to

This is the part that gets lost in the relief of a crisis passing: the customer whose complaint went viral usually isn’t unique in what happened to them. What’s unique is that they had an audience willing to amplify it. For every customer with the platform and inclination to make a bad experience public, there are likely dozens or hundreds who had the same experience, said nothing beyond a quiet complaint or no complaint at all, and simply left — or stayed, resentfully, waiting for a better alternative to come along. A viral incident isn’t the problem. It’s a visibility event for a problem that was probably already there, silently costing you customers who never made noise about it.

Why this moment is actually a rare opportunity, if you use it right

There’s an uncomfortable but useful truth about the period right after a public incident: it’s often the single easiest moment to get real budget and leadership attention for a genuine diagnostic effort. The urgency that made the crisis painful is the same urgency that can get a proper audit approved in days instead of the usual months of internal advocacy. Most organizations waste this window by spending it entirely on the public-facing fix and the internal postmortem meeting, then let the appetite for deeper investigation fade along with the news cycle. The smarter move is using that same window to actually find out whether this was a true outlier or a known category of failure hiding in plain sight.

What the diagnosis actually needs to answer

A proper look at this needs to walk the exact touchpoint that failed, the way the customer who went viral actually experienced it — not the documented process, the real one, with whatever gaps and workarounds have accumulated around it. It needs to check the existing data for any pattern of similar complaints that never individually rose to leadership’s attention, because a string of quiet, unconnected complaints about the same root issue often exists well before one of them goes public. And it needs a clear-eyed read on whether this really was a rare edge case, because overcorrecting an entire process based on a single dramatic incident carries its own cost — reacting to n=1 with organization-wide policy changes can create new friction for the vast majority of customers who never experienced the original problem at all.

Turning a bad week into a real fix

The organizations that come out of a viral moment genuinely stronger aren’t the ones with the best-worded apology. They’re the ones that used the moment’s unusual clarity and unusual leadership attention to actually find out whether they had a true one-off or a systemic gap, and fixed the right thing instead of just the visible thing.

If you’re in or just past this kind of moment and want an honest answer to which one you’re actually dealing with, a Customer Experience Audit scoped to the failed touchpoint is built for exactly this kind of diagnosis. And if you want a fast sense of what a silent, unaddressed version of this problem could be costing beyond the one visible incident, the CX ROI Calculator is a good 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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Have You Achieved Your 2026 Customer Experience Resolutions?

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Have You Achieved Your 2026 Customer Experience Resolutions?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

In January many people (and companies) take time to reset and prepare to kick off the new year. Many even make a plan. How well have you done to achieve these twelve New Year’s resolutions in the form of what you should STOP doing! (By the way, earlier in the year I wrote a similar article featuring five of these for Forbes. Read the article here.)

Before we get into the list, I went back over a year’s worth of articles, looking for the concepts I said we should do for our customers. Then I flipped them around and, instead of creating a list of resolutions to do, made a list of what to stop doing. So, here are a dozen resolutions that begin with the word stop:

Stop trying to WOW every customer: To WOW the customer at every interaction is impossible. Instead, focus on consistent, predictable experiences that build trust and confidence with your customers.
Stop wasting your customers’ time: Wasting a customer’s time sends the message that you don’t respect them. A generic example of this is when you call customer support and, while waiting on hold for an unreasonable period of time, you hear a message repeated: “Your call is important to us.” Obviously not!
Stop thinking AI is the answer: The company that thinks they can eliminate the customer support department with AI-fueled customer service is quickly finding out they can’t. AI is an answer, but not the answer. It takes a balance between AI and humans to create the best customer service experience.
Stop making customers repeat themselves: Pay attention to what the customer is saying the first time. Take notes, so if they call back or talk to someone else, there’s a record, and the customer doesn’t have to start over.
Stop hiding behind company policy: It still surprises me to hear employees say, “That’s company policy.” When used the wrong way, those three words are customer loyalty killers. The policy should be to find ways to ensure customers come back.
Stop treating customer service as a cost center: When done well, customer service keeps customers coming back again and again. That’s marketing. When the ROI of your customer service reduces churn and adds to the bottom line, it’s a revenue generator.
Stop using acronyms and company jargon: Using initials and words used on “the inside” of a company may make customers uncomfortable. When they don’t understand or are confused because of what you say, you have to work hard to earn back their confidence.
Stop thinking surveys give you the best feedback: I’m a fan of surveys when done the right way. They get your customers’ feedback, but perhaps a better source of that important information is your front line. So, recognize frontline employees as a valuable source of customer feedback.
Stop thinking “We’ve already put our employees through customer service training”: Customer service training is not something you did. It’s something you do. It takes ongoing reinforcement of your original training to keep good employees customer-focused.
Stop thinking loyalty programs create loyalty: There are a few loyalty programs that create true customer loyalty, but realize that loyalty programs are usually marketing programs focused on getting customers to come back. There’s nothing wrong with that, but remember that repeat customers aren’t always loyal customers.
Stop assuming that if your customer doesn’t complain, they have nothing to complain about: Customers don’t always complain to you, but they will complain about you to their friends and colleagues. Silence does not necessarily mean happiness.
Stop solving problems, and start solving customers: I recently interviewed David Fuhr, the chief sales officer at Sweetwater, for an upcoming episode of Amazing Business Radio. When we were discussing problem-solving and complaints, he said, “We solve the customer.” He went on to say that you first solve the customer, as in resolving the issue and winning back their confidence, and then you work with the team to find out why there was a problem and how it can be prevented from happening again. That’s a perfect example of being customer-focused.

And there you have it. Twelve ideas of what to stop doing. There are many more, and not just from articles that I’ve written. Take a look at the processes that impact your customers. What do they complain about? Create your own list of what to stop doing. It’s not just what you do. Sometimes it’s what you don’t do that gets customers to say, “I’ll be back!”

Image Credits: Pixabay

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

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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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