Category Archives: Customer Experience

How to Calculate Employee Experience ROI (+ Free Calculator)

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How to Calculate Employee Experience ROI (+ Free Calculator)

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Most executive teams already believe that employee experience matters. Ask them in a planning meeting and you’ll get nods all around the table. Then ask the harder question: what is a specific improvement to the employee experience worth, in dollars, next year? The nods stop.

That gap is why so many worthwhile investments in people stall in budget season. A manager development program, a fix for a broken onboarding process, a serious attempt to remove the daily friction that wears people down: each of them competes with projects that arrive with a number attached. If you can’t attach one, the project usually loses to something that can.

This article walks through how to attach one. It’s built on the same approach as my customer experience ROI calculator, applied to the people on the other side of the experience, and it comes with a free tool so you can run your own numbers.

What the research does and doesn’t say

There’s a lot of research connecting employee engagement to business results, and the best-known source is Gallup. In its comparison of top-quartile and bottom-quartile engagement teams, Gallup reports that the most engaged teams show about 23% higher profitability, 14% higher productivity and 78% less absenteeism. Turnover is 51% lower in low-turnover organizations and 21% lower in high-turnover ones.

Gallup also puts the cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times the person’s annual salary, and reports that 52% of employees who leave voluntarily say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent it.

Those are striking numbers, and I want to be careful with them, because they’re easy to misuse. They compare very different teams, so they show a strong association, not proof that raising your own score by ten points will produce a particular result. They also aren’t per-point rates, so you can’t take “78% less absenteeism” and apply it to a modest improvement. Treat the research as evidence that the connection is real and large enough to be worth modeling, then model it with your own numbers and cautious assumptions.

The value chain: from a score to a dollar

The idea behind the calculator is a four-step chain.

  1. An experience metric. Engagement, eNPS, or a pulse score: whatever you already track.
  2. A behavioral outcome. People who have a better experience at work tend to stay longer, miss less work and contribute more.
  3. A financial outcome. Each of those behaviors has a dollar value: avoided replacement cost, recovered working time, more output from the same payroll.
  4. An intervention. The specific change that moves the metric in the first place.

The fourth step is the one people skip. Plenty of engagement initiatives improve a survey score without changing anyone’s behavior, so they never reach the financial outcome. A credible business case names the intervention, explains how it changes what people actually do, and then estimates what that behavior change is worth.

What the calculator measures

The EX Value Ledger estimates three kinds of value from an improvement in your experience score:

  • Avoided turnover cost. Fewer people leave, so you pay for fewer replacements. This is usually the largest and most defensible line.
  • Recovered absence time. Fewer unplanned absence days means more paid time spent working.
  • Productivity value. More output from the same payroll. It’s the softest of the three, so the calculator shows it separately and leaves it out of the total unless you choose to include it.

You enter your headcount, average salary, annual turnover rate, replacement cost as a percentage of salary, absence days per employee, your current experience score and the improvement you expect. If you have a program cost, add it and the tool also shows net value and a return multiple.

Starting points when you don’t have your own data

Not everyone has clean turnover figures at their fingertips. The calculator includes three starting profiles you can load and then overwrite. These are illustrative starting points, not industry statistics:

Illustrative turnover profiles used as starting points in the EX ROI calculator
Profile Annual turnover Notes
Lower-turnover environment about 12% Stable workforce, longer tenures
Typical environment about 20% A reasonable midpoint to start from
High-turnover environment about 45% Gallup uses 40% as its line for “high-turnover” organizations

For replacement cost, Gallup’s one-half to two times salary range is wide, and where you land depends on the role and how much knowledge walks out the door with the person. The calculator defaults to 100% of salary, so adjust it to what you know about your own hiring and ramp-up costs.

A worked example

Here’s what the tool produces with its default settings, so you can see how the pieces fit. Suppose a company has 250 employees at an average salary of $75,000, 20% annual turnover and five unplanned absence days per person. It runs a program expected to raise its experience score by ten points.

The calculator’s conservative defaults assume that a ten-point gain cuts turnover by about 5% in relative terms, so a 20% turnover rate drops to 19%. That’s roughly two and a half fewer departures a year. At a replacement cost of 100% of salary, that’s about $187,500 in avoided turnover cost. Add about $18,000 in recovered absence time, and the estimate comes to roughly $205,000 a year, or about $616,000 over three years on a simple, non-compounded basis.

The productivity line adds another estimate on top, shown separately because it’s easier for a skeptic to challenge. That’s the point: you lead with the number you can defend, and present the rest as upside.

This is an illustrative model, not a forecast. Change the inputs to match your organization, and the answer changes with them.

Turning the number into a business case

A number on its own doesn’t win a budget argument. A few habits make the difference.

Use your own figures first. The strongest estimate always starts with your real turnover rate, your real salary data and your real absence numbers. Starting profiles are for getting unstuck, not for presenting to a CFO.

Separate what’s established from what’s estimated. Be clear about which parts come from published research and which come from your own assumptions. A CFO will trust a model more when it shows where the soft spots are.

Model a range. Run a conservative case, an expected case and an optimistic one by changing the sensitivity assumptions. A range signals honesty, and it protects you if results land a bit below the middle.

Tie it to a specific initiative. “Improve employee experience” is not a project. “Redesign onboarding for the first 90 days” is. Attach the estimate to the thing you’d actually do, and say how it changes behavior.

Lead with the defensible lines. Turnover and absence are measurable and familiar to finance. Productivity is plausible but harder to prove. Present them in that order.

Where a score comes from

A calculator can tell you what a better score is worth. It can’t tell you what’s dragging yours down. That requires looking at how work actually gets done: the tools that slow people down, the approvals that add nothing, the handoffs where things fall through, and the frontline knowledge that never makes it up the chain.

That’s what an experience audit is for. It replaces internal assumptions with an accurate picture of what people really experience, and it gives you a prioritized view of where to invest first. Used together, the calculator sizes the opportunity and the audit finds the specific friction behind it.

If you’re also looking at the customer side of the equation, the CX ROI Calculator works the same way for revenue retained and cost to serve, and the two make a useful pair when you’re building the case for a broader experience investment.

Try it

The Employee Experience ROI Calculator is free and requires no signup. Enter your numbers, adjust the assumptions, and use “Copy summary for a slide” to bring the estimate straight into your next budget meeting. If you’d like the full research behind the numbers, the page also offers the EX ROI Benchmark Report by email.

And if you’d like help applying it to your organization’s specific situation, or finding out what’s actually driving your experience score, get in touch for a no-obligation conversation about an Experience Audit.

Sources

Get the EX ROI Benchmark Report — the full industry benchmark table with sources, the EX Value Chain framework, and answers to the five objections a CFO is most likely to raise. Enter your email and we’ll send it straight to your inbox.

Image Credit: Braden Kelley

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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What You Actually Receive From a Customer Experience Audit

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What You Actually Receive From a Customer Experience Audit

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

There’s a fear that sits underneath almost every conversation about hiring someone to audit your customer experience, and it rarely gets said out loud. It goes like this: I’ll spend the money, wait a few weeks, and get back a very handsome document that tells me what I already suspected, in a font I can’t quite read, with a recommendation to “improve the customer journey.”

It’s a reasonable fear. Plenty of reports like that exist. So let me do something that most descriptions of this work avoid, which is to tell you plainly what you actually end up holding when an audit is finished, and what you can do with it on the Monday after.

It’s not one document. It’s five things that fit together.

A complete Customer Experience Audit runs through five integrated activities, and each one produces something you can point at. Here’s what comes out of each.

1. Validated personas: who your customers really are

The first activity identifies your distinct audience segments and checks each one against current reality. What you receive is a set of validated personas: who each segment is, what they need, what they expect and where their experience hurts.

The word that matters is *validated*. Most organizations already have personas, built years ago, laminated and half-forgotten. The value of this step is finding out where the picture in your head no longer matches the people actually showing up. That mismatch is often the first surprise, and it changes how every later finding gets read.

What you can do with it: Stop designing for customers who’ve changed. Use the validated personas to settle internal arguments about “what our customers want” with evidence instead of volume.

2. Journey maps: where the experience goes right and wrong

For each persona, the audit produces a journey map: the key touchpoints from first contact onward, across every relevant channel, with the pain points, the emotional highs and lows, and the improvement opportunities marked along the way.

A good journey map shouldn’t read like a flowchart. It should read like the customer’s afternoon. You see where confidence rises, where it sinks, and where someone nearly gave up. Because it’s persona-based, you can see the same journey through different eyes, and notice that a step that’s trivial for one segment is a wall for another.

What you can do with it: Put it on a wall and walk your team through it. Almost everyone who sees their own journey drawn out this way spots something they’ve been living with and never questioned.

3. A data evaluation: what your numbers are hiding

Your existing metrics, such as NPS, CSAT and sentiment data, get analyzed for patterns, gaps and insights that routine reporting doesn’t surface. What you receive is a read on what your data is and isn’t telling you: where the scores mask a problem, which segments are quietly slipping, and where you have data in one system that explains a mystery in another.

This is often the step that makes the rest of the audit easier to believe, because it connects the findings to numbers your leadership already trusts.

What you can do with it: Re-read your dashboards with new eyes, and close the measurement gaps so next year’s data answers the questions you actually have.

4. Firsthand findings: what it’s really like to be a customer

This is the part I consider the heart of the engagement, and the one a desk review can’t replicate. Key touchpoints get experienced directly: the retail location, the digital channel, the service call, the sales cycle. What you receive is a set of findings from someone with no muscle memory of your process, who encountered it the way a newcomer would.

These are the findings people tend to remember. The extra approval step nobody noticed after the tenth year. The phone tree that quietly loses people. The confirmation email that confirms nothing. They’re rarely dramatic on their own, and they’re expensive in aggregate.

What you can do with it: Fix the small, specific things quickly. Some of the best early wins in any audit come from firsthand findings that cost almost nothing to repair.

5. Competitive benchmarking (when it’s in scope)

Where included, your experience gets compared against select competitors and best-in-class examples. What you receive is a picture of where you stand and how far you are from where you need to be, in the terms your customers actually use to compare you.

This step is optional, and worth including when you’ve been losing deals to experience and not to price, or when you need to know how you look next to the alternatives your customers are weighing.

What you can do with it: Decide where to match the market, where to lead and where to leave well enough alone.

Then the part that makes it usable: the gap analysis and roadmap

Five sets of findings are interesting. They aren’t yet a plan. The step that turns an audit into something you can act on is pulling it all together into two things:

A gap analysis. A clear view of the distance between the experience your customers have now and the experience they need, organized so you can see which gaps matter most. This is where findings from different activities start reinforcing each other: the journey map shows a pain point, the data confirms it’s costing you, and the firsthand walk-through shows precisely why.

A prioritized roadmap. A sequenced set of recommended actions, ranked by what’s likely to matter most to customers and to the business, and by how hard each is to do. The aim is to hand you a short list of what to fix first, and not forty things to feel bad about.

If the audit has a single test, it’s this one: could you hand the roadmap to your team on Monday and have them start?

What it won’t be

I’d rather set expectations than have you discover them later.

  • It won’t be a survey. An audit is a different instrument. It combines your existing data with fieldwork and analysis, and the difference between that and a satisfaction survey is covered in this article on audits versus surveys.
  • It won’t be the fix itself. An audit finds and prioritizes. The doing is yours, or someone else’s. The independence is part of the point: the person telling you what’s true has nothing to sell you afterward.
  • It won’t be the same in every case. The depth of each activity depends on your scope: how many audiences, how many touchpoints and channels, how much data you have and whether benchmarking is included. A single-journey audit and a multi-segment, omnichannel one produce the same kinds of output at very different depths.

    How to know it’s worth it

    Before you commit to anything, put a number on what friction is currently costing you. The CX ROI Calculator will give you a real figure in a few minutes, and if that number is larger than the cost of an audit, you have your answer about whether the conversation is worth having. If some of the terms in this article are new to your team, the Experience Design Glossary will get everyone speaking the same language.

    See the whole thing

    The Customer Experience Audit page explains how an independent engagement runs from start to finish, and I’m glad to walk through what the deliverables would look like for your situation.

    The bottom line is simple. An audit that leaves you with a handsome report and a vague recommendation has failed. An audit that leaves you with validated personas, honest journey maps, a clear read on your data, firsthand findings, a ranked gap analysis and a roadmap your team can start on right away has done its job. Ask for the second kind, and ask to see what it looks like before you sign.

    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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10 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Customer Experience Audit Firm

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Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Customer Experience Audit Firm

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’ve already decided you need an outside look at your customer experience, and you’re now at the awkward stage of comparing the people who offer one. Proposals have arrived. They all use similar words. Every one of them promises “actionable insights,” a phrase that has been used so often it now carries about as much information as “best wishes.”

So here’s something more useful than another brochure: a list of questions that will tell you what you’re actually buying. Ask them of anyone you’re considering, including me. A good provider will be glad you asked. If a question makes someone defensive, that’s information too.

1. “Who will actually do the work?”

This is the question I’d ask first, because it’s the one most often answered with a shrug.

In many firms, the person who sells the engagement and the people who deliver it are different people. That isn’t automatically a problem, but you should know it going in. Ask who will conduct the research, who will do the fieldwork and who will write the findings. Ask what their experience is. Ask how much of the work the person you’re talking to will personally touch.

An audit depends on judgment: noticing what’s strange, what’s missing, what an experienced eye catches that a checklist doesn’t. If that judgment sits with someone you never meet, you’re paying for a process, not for insight.

2. “Do you actually walk the journey, or review it from documents?”

This question separates a real audit from a desk exercise.

There’s an enormous difference between analyzing the materials a company provides and experiencing the journey the way a customer does: visiting the location, going through the digital channel, making the service call, sitting through the sales cycle. The materials show you what the organization believes happens. The fieldwork shows you what actually happens, and in my experience that’s where the most valuable surprises live.

Ask exactly which touchpoints will be experienced firsthand, in which channels, and by whom. If the answer is mostly interviews and dashboards, you may be buying a more expensive version of what your team could already produce.

3. “What, specifically, will I receive at the end?”

“A report and a presentation” is not an answer. Ask for specifics.

You want to know what the deliverables actually contain: validated personas, journey maps with pain points and emotional highs and lows, an evaluation of your existing data, findings from the fieldwork, a gap analysis, a prioritized set of recommendations. And ask the question that matters most: will I be able to hand this to my team on Monday and have them start?

Better yet, ask to see an example, anonymized if need be. A provider who can’t show you what the output looks like is asking you to buy on faith.

4. “How independent are you?”

This one is subtle and important. An audit is only as credible as the independence of the person doing it.

Ask whether the provider also sells the solutions the audit might recommend: software, implementation services, a platform, ongoing consulting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a firm that sells both, but it’s a structural conflict, and a recommendation that happens to match the provider’s product line deserves a raised eyebrow.

An independent audit has one job: to tell you what’s true. If the provider has nothing to sell you afterward, that changes the quality of the advice in ways you’ll notice.

5. “How do you decide which problems matter most?”

Any decent audit will find a lot of friction. Your customers don’t need a list of forty problems. They need to know which five to fix first.

Ask how the provider prioritizes: by customer impact, by cost, by effort, by revenue at risk? Ask whether they’ll connect findings to money. A recommendation with a rough sense of what it’s worth and what it costs gets funded. A recommendation that says “improve onboarding” gets a polite nod and a lifetime on a to-do list.

(If you want to size the problem before you talk to anyone, the CX ROI Calculator is a good way to put a number on what friction is currently costing you.)

6. “How do you handle benchmarking, and is it optional?”

Comparing your experience with competitors and best-in-class examples can be extremely valuable, particularly when you’ve been losing deals to experience, not to price. But it isn’t right for every engagement.

Ask whether benchmarking is included, how the comparison set is chosen, and what you’d lose by skipping it. A provider who treats everything as mandatory may be padding the scope. One who treats everything as optional may not be helping you decide.

7. “What does scope depend on, and what would change the price?”

Be wary of anyone who quotes a number before asking you a single question about your business. Costs in this work tend to follow the depth of the engagement: how many audiences, how many touchpoints across how many channels, how much existing data there is to evaluate, how many places need to be experienced in person, and how quickly you want it done.

A good scoping conversation will ask about all of that. It will also tell you which choices drive cost and which levers you can pull to bring it down. If the quote arrives without that conversation, you’re probably looking at a package, not an answer to your situation.

8. “How long will it take, and what do you need from us?”

Ask for a realistic timeline and for what the provider will need from your side: access to data, access to people, access to places. Audits stall when the client’s side isn’t ready. A provider who tells you plainly what they need from you, and when, is likely one who has done this before.

9. “What happens after the report?”

Some audits end with a handoff. Some include help with next steps. Neither is wrong, but you should know which you’re getting. Ask whether the provider will walk your team through the findings, whether there’s a way to ask follow-up questions as you plan, and how the recommendations are meant to be turned into action. The worst outcome of any audit is a thoughtful report that nobody acts on.

10. “Can I talk to someone you’ve worked with?”

References still matter. Ask for a conversation with a past client, ideally one with a situation similar to yours. And ask that client the question that gets the most honest answer: “What would you do differently if you were hiring them again?”

A short scorecard

If you’d like to keep this simple, you can rate each provider on five things:

  1. Who does the work: the people you meet are the people who deliver.
  2. Fieldwork: the journey is experienced, not just reviewed.
  3. Deliverables: you can describe what you’ll receive in specific terms.
  4. Independence: the provider has no stake in what you buy next.
  5. Prioritization: findings are tied to impact, cost and effort.

A provider who scores well on all five is rare enough that you should probably hire them before someone else does.

Hold me to the same standard

I’d be a hypocrite if I wrote this list and didn’t invite you to apply it to my own work. The Customer Experience Audit page explains how an independent engagement runs, from audience research and persona validation through journey mapping, data evaluation, firsthand fieldwork and optional competitive benchmarking, and I’m glad to answer every question on this list directly. If a few of the terms are new to your team, the Experience Design Glossary is a quick way to get everyone speaking the same language before the conversations start.

Whoever you choose, ask the hard questions first. The audit you hire is only as useful as the questions you asked before you hired it.

Customer Experience Audit Checklist

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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The Customer Service Department is Not Broken

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The Customer Service Department is Not Broken

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: How can leaders fix broken customer service systems that create friction and frustration, even when they have good people on the front line?

I’ve been monitoring my customer service experiences with the brands I do business with a little more closely than usual. And I’ve made numerous calls to airlines, mobile phone carriers, electronics companies, and more. I’ve found that people are typically friendly and do their best to support me. To clear my conscience, I admit that my recent call to my cable provider was tense due to my frustration with a faulty router, but that tenuous conversation was my fault, not theirs. I was obviously upset with the product, but my rep remained calm and did everything in her power to resolve the issue. She gets an A for effort, attitude, and knowledge.

It’s not the people. It’s the system.

My point is that I hear so many people complaining about customer service, but in many cases, it’s not the people. It’s the system. Some of the reasons customers complain about customer service or experience due to broken or poorly created systems are:

  1. Hard-to-find contact information for customer support – While most websites provide information about customer support, sometimes it’s not clearly visible. When a customer wants to contact you, don’t add to their frustration by making it difficult.
  2. Inability to connect with someone from customer support – Some companies are still betting that a 100% AI-fueled self-service option can replace live agents. In almost every case, they are wrong!
  3. Self-service options are not provided – Just as some companies make the error of going “all in” on digital self-service support, some companies don’t provide any self-service options. There is a percentage of customers who demand the option, or they will choose to do business elsewhere.
  4. Self-service options are provided, but they don’t answer the question or offer a solution – While this alone can be frustrating, imagine if the self-service is not working and the company makes it difficult or impossible to connect to a live person. This is adding fuel to the fire.
  5. Long wait or hold times without the option of a call-back – In this day and age, it is very inexpensive to add a feature that informs the customer how long their hold time will be, with an option for a return call when it’s their turn.
  6. Nobody will return my message – If one option for customer support is to leave a message, the expectation is that the company will respond to the message. And, I’ll add that it should be done in a timely manner.
  7. Poorly trained reps – One might argue that poorly trained reps are a people problem, not a system problem, but I disagree. A lack of training or poor hires is a function of how the company operates, not the fault of customer service agents trying to do their best.

Here’s your assignment:

Sit down with your team. Then use this list to ignite a brainstorming session to discover if your organization is guilty of these or other “system failures.” This first step is about awareness. From there, take action and fix what’s broken. In summary, most bad experiences are caused by internal friction and broken or poorly designed systems, not front-line behavior.

Image Credits: Pexels

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Most Customer Experience Strategies Fail

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Because They’re Written For Customers, Not Employees

Most Customer Experience Strategies Fail

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

I was recently asked by an executive, what’s the biggest mistake leaders make when rolling out a customer experience (CX) strategy? My answer was simple. Most leaders think about the customer first.

For years, I have preached, “Customer service is not a department. It’s a philosophy to be embraced by everyone, from the CEO to the most recently hired.”

At some point, the phrase customer service was changed to customer experience. There is quite a bit of crossover between the two. Customer support and any frontline interactions customers have with employees (customer support, sales, etc.) and is part of the overall customer experience, which includes every touchpoint the customer has with a company, from browsing a website, receiving email updates, the unboxing of merchandise, and more. Regardless, both must start with a philosophical approach that the success of a CX strategy begins on the inside of the company with employees. In other words, it’s about the culture.

Employees Are the Backbone of a CX Strategy

Customers don’t have to know your CX strategy. They only have to experience it. And it’s not really the strategy they are experiencing. It’s your system. The sum of all interactions and touchpoints helps them decide whether to do business with you now and in the future. Start with the end in mind (what you want customers to experience). However, recognize that everything the customer experiences is generated from within the organization. Employees must design a process with the CX strategy in mind. Employees are trained on how their roles impact the CX strategy, whether they are on the front line, supporting those on the front line, or supporting the process that impacts CX. The point is that everything the customer experiences comes from what’s happening inside the company, and employees are what drive that experience. That’s your system.

CX Strategies Are More than Words, But That’s a Good Place to Start

The first step in creating a new CX strategy or initiative is for leadership to decide to do so. It starts at the top. Once the decision is made, the next step is to create the vision. I refer to this as a mantra. This is the “north star” that defines the CX Strategy. This is a sentence or short phrase that is simple enough for everyone to remember. For example, the Ritz-Carlton’s mantra (they call it their credo) is nine words long: We’re ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. This is not a slogan. This is their defining CX statement, and all employee training on customer/guest service focuses on bringing this mantra to life. While a mantra is just words, it is the definition of your CX system.

All Employees Must Know Their Role in a CX Strategy

While the mantra may be both inspirational and aspirational, what employees really need is direction. Inspiration tells them why. Direction tells them how. Once the mantra is created, every employee must know it, memorize it, learn how their role in the organization plays into it, and then be properly trained to it. Even people behind the scenes impact CX. A warehouse employee who never interacts with customers may pack a box improperly, resulting in a customer service issue. All employees must know and understand the mantra and take responsibility for their part of the experience.

Employees Need to Know They Are Doing CX Right

Years ago, I developed a six-step process to build a customer-centric culture. It starts with creating the CX vision (the mantra) and ends with celebrating success. It’s important for employees to know their hard work is paying off.

Final Words

The CX strategy you build falls into two areas: people and process. Training people in their roles and responsibilities is critical. Creating a process that customers find easy and frictionless demonstrates your system is working. When you combine people skills with a well-thought-out process, you have your system.

Don’t tell people to be amazing. Train them on how to do so. Analyze every touchpoint a customer has with you and optimize it.

Let the employees and departments that impact the touchpoints know how important it is to deliver on your CX strategy.

And if nothing else, remember this: Even though your CX strategy is about the customer, your customers don’t experience your strategy. They experience your system.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Three Audits Before You Finalize the 2027 Plan: Customer, Employee and Partner Experience

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Three Audits Before You Finalize the 2027 Plan: Customer, Employee and Partner Experience

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

It’s October, which means somewhere in your organization a spreadsheet called something like “FY27 Investment Requests” is quietly filling up. Every department has a list. Every list has a champion. Every champion has a slide explaining why their item is the most important thing the company could possibly fund.

And every one of those slides is built on the same raw material: what that department already believes.

That’s the problem with most annual planning. The requests that win aren’t the ones backed by the best evidence. They’re the ones presented by the most persuasive person, in the room, on the day the budget gets cut. If you’d like to change that for 2027, there’s still time, and the most useful thing you can do with it is look at your organization from three directions you probably haven’t looked at together: through your customers’ eyes, your employees’ eyes and your partners’ eyes.

Why now, specifically

Timing matters here for two reasons.

First, the planning window is open and it won’t be for long. Once the 2027 budget is locked, findings from an audit become next year’s problem, and next year’s problem has to compete for money that’s already been spoken for. An audit finished in November can change the plan. An audit finished in February can only decorate it.

Second, the money is under scrutiny. Headline inflation hit 3.7% in September, and the Fed raised rates last month for the first time in three years, with more possible. When capital gets more expensive, every line item has to justify itself harder. That’s a good time to swap “we believe” for “we found.”

Why three audits and not one

Most organizations that take experience seriously look at one of the three, usually the customer. That’s a good instinct. It’s also an incomplete one, because the three experiences are links in the same chain.

Your employees create your customer experience. A frustrated, under-equipped frontline team can’t deliver a good one, however polished the strategy deck. Your partners, whether resellers, suppliers, integrators, agencies or distributors, deliver pieces of your customer experience too, and when they stumble, your customer blames you, not them. Fix only the customer-facing symptom and you’ll often be treating a cause that sits in one of the other two.

Here’s the practical test. Pick any customer complaint you’ve heard this year and ask: was the root cause in our product or process, in the way our people are set up to work, or in something a partner handles for us? In my experience, the honest answer is “all three, depending on the complaint.” One audit sees one third of the picture.

The customer experience audit

This is the one most teams already understand, and the case for doing it before planning is straightforward. Surveys and dashboards tell you what customers have been willing to score. They’re far less good at telling you about the silent downgrades, the workarounds and the quiet frustrations that never show up as a number until renewal.

An independent audit walks the journey the way a customer does, not the way your internal process diagram says it should work, and finds the friction your own team has stopped noticing. Planning-wise, it gives you:

  • A ranked list of where customers actually struggle, instead of where the loudest customer complained last.
  • A way to separate friction that costs you money from friction that’s merely annoying.
  • Evidence for the investments that prevent churn and protect revenue, which are the hardest to defend when budgets tighten.

If you haven’t put a number on what that friction costs, the CX ROI Calculator is a good place to start, and the Customer Experience Audit page explains what an independent audit covers.

The employee experience audit

Here’s where most plans have a blind spot. We budget for tools, systems and programs for employees without ever asking whether the people using them find them workable.

An employee experience audit looks at how work actually gets done: the tools that slow people down, the approvals that add nothing, the handoffs where things fall through, the manual workarounds that exist because the official process doesn’t fit reality. It also listens to the frontline, who know exactly where customers get frustrated and are often the least consulted people in the building.

For planning, it tells you:

  • Which internal friction is quietly capping your customer experience, since your people can only deliver what their systems and processes let them.
  • Where the hidden costs are: time lost to rework, turnover in critical roles, and talented people spending their days on tasks nobody should be doing by hand.
  • Which investments in tooling and process will pay back, and which are expensive ways to rearrange the same frustration.

An employee-side finding is often the cheapest fix on the whole list, which makes it one of the best candidates for a budget under pressure.

The partner experience audit

This is the audit almost nobody does, which is exactly why it’s worth doing.

Partners are an extension of your organization from the customer’s point of view. The reseller who onboards your customers, the distributor who handles delivery, the integrator who implements your product: when they have a bad experience working with you, they pass it along. Slow payments, confusing onboarding, unclear support channels, a portal that fights them at every step. None of it appears in your customer data, but all of it surfaces eventually as a customer problem.

A partner experience audit looks at what it’s like to work with you: how easy it is to get started, get support, get paid and get answers. For planning, it helps you:

  • Find the places where partner friction is leaking into customer experience before it becomes a customer complaint.
  • Decide where investing in partner enablement, portals, documentation or support will do more for customers than investing in the customer-facing side directly.
  • Spot partners who are quietly disengaging, a risk that never appears on a revenue dashboard until it’s too late.

How the three audits help you prioritize

Collecting findings is only half the job. The value comes from using them to rank the investment list. Here’s the approach I’d take.

1. Tag every finding with its evidence. For each issue, note whether it came from observation, direct customer, employee or partner input, or data. Findings that show up in more than one audit move to the top, because they’re real.

2. Look for the cross-audit patterns. A customer complaint about slow resolution, plus an employee finding about a clunky internal system, plus a partner finding about unclear escalation paths: that’s not three problems. It’s one problem seen from three angles, and fixing it pays off three times.

3. Score each candidate investment on three things. Impact on customers and revenue, effort and cost, and confidence in the evidence. Be honest about the third one. A confident hunch is still a hunch.

4. Sort into three piles. Quick fixes that cost little and should happen early in the year. Major investments that deserve a place in the 2027 budget on the strength of the evidence. And items to hold or drop, because the audits showed the problem lives somewhere else.

5. Write down what you expect to change. Attach a measure to each funded item, so that next October you’re reviewing results, not rebuilding the case from scratch.

A realistic timeline

If you want findings in hand before the budget closes, you don’t have long, so here’s a workable sequence:

  • Now through early November: scope the three audits and line up access to customers, frontline staff and partners. Start with the customer audit, since it usually has the most evidence behind it, and run the other two in parallel at a lighter scale if resources are tight.
  • Mid-November: consolidate the findings, look for the cross-audit patterns and score the candidate investments.
  • Before budgets lock: bring the ranked list to planning with the evidence attached, so the conversation is about findings, not about who argues best.

Even a lighter version of all three beats a deep dive into one, because the point of this exercise is the combination.

What I’d say to a skeptical CFO

You’ve probably already thought of the objection: another set of studies, in a year when everyone is cutting. Here’s the answer I’d give. The audits aren’t an additional line on the investment list. They’re how you decide which of the existing lines deserve to survive. If an audit helps you avoid even one major investment aimed at the wrong problem, it has paid for itself, and in my experience, there’s usually more than one on the list.

Start with the one that’s closest

If you can only do one audit before the plan closes, make it the customer experience audit, and treat the other two as lenses to add as soon as you can. The Customer Experience Audit page explains what an independent audit covers and how it works, and the Experience Design Glossary is useful for getting your team using the same words before the conversation starts.

The 2027 plan is going to get written either way. The only question is whether it’s built on what your organization believes or on what it’s actually like to be a customer, an employee or a partner. I know which one I’d bet my budget on.

Customer Experience Audit Checklist

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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Second Complaints Are the Most Expensive Ones

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Second Complaints Are the Most Expensive Ones

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

During our customer service workshops, we do an exercise we call the Moment of Misery™ Grid. The short version is that participants are asked to write down all the complaints they hear and how often they hear them. We then list them in order, with the most common complaints at the top.

It always surprises me when someone says, “We hear this all the time.” I then ask, “Why?” If you hear it all the time, why haven’t you done something about it?

The next part of the exercise is to discuss ways to eliminate or at least mitigate the problems.

Before we go further, I recognize that some organizations already have this dialed in. This exercise seems obvious, but many are surprised by the responses. They know there are problems, but they can’t always tell you how often they happen, or what they cost the organization.

So, let’s take this concept to the next level. Instead of how often we hear about the same problems, consider this question:

How often do we find ourselves fixing the same problem two times (or more) for a customer?

It’s one thing to have many customers calling and complaining about the same problem. If you can eliminate the problem, consider how much time, effort, and funds could be put toward more productive opportunities.

Most Expensive Customer Complaint

But when a customer has to call you twice (or more) for the same issue, this unnecessary call wastes time and energy for both the company and the customer. How often does this happen? Just as many companies have a goal and a metric for first call resolution, there should also be metrics for the number of calls and the amount of time required to resolve the same issue. You’re looking to measure at least four issues:

  1. How often do we fail to resolve the customer’s issue the first time?
  2. How many times do customers contact us after the initial contact for the same problem?
  3. How long did it take to finally resolve the customer’s issue (one day, one week, etc.)?
  4. What’s the average time it takes to finally resolve the problem versus how long it would take if it was solved on the first call?

That last one may be the most important metric. This will tell you how much time and money were spent because you couldn’t resolve the problem on the first call.

The point is that, just as you look to eliminate problems overall, you should also look for ways to eliminate the second (or third, or fourth …) call for the same problem. If customers are calling you twice for the same issue, the problem isn’t the customer. It’s the system … so fix it! Every repeat call that is eliminated pays dividends in the form of time, money, and customer goodwill. And that’s what a great customer service experience looks like: fixing problems once, not apologizing for them twice!

Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Pexels

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Compliance-Driven Customer Experience

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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.

Customer Experience Audit Checklist

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.

Customer Experience Audit Checklist

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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