Many organisations make customer experience decisions using assumptions, the best data they can get their hands on or someone senior says "we should improve X," and off people go to build it.
The problem isn't commitment or capability. It's that decisions get made without a clear picture of what customers value. You're guessing which experiences to improve, building solutions based on internal assumptions and measuring success with metrics that don't connect to business outcomes.
This is exactly why we include Insights and VOC as a category in our CX Scorecard.
It's about whether that systematically drives better decisions about where to invest and allows you to track the experience over time.
The real problem this solves
When you don't have systematic insight generation and VOC capability, you solve the wrong problems. Without understanding why customers interact with you or what causes friction in their journeys, you end up investing in improvements that might look good internally but don't address what frustrates customers or prevents them from achieving their goals.
You can't prove value. When executives question product or channel performance, you're left defending initiatives with satisfaction scores or anecdotal evidence rather than retention, revenue or cost numbers.
And you can't leverage insights you do gather. Customers tell you what's broken through feedback channels, your frontline teams know where processes fail but there's no system to capture these signals, analyse patterns or turn them into prioritised action. The same problems persist because nobody can connect the dots.
What strong capability looks like
They generate insights systematically, not reactively. Rather than waiting for problems to escalate or relying on complaints, they actively gather feedback from multiple sources (research, behavioural data, operational metrics, and perception) and combine them to understand what's really happening in their customer journeys.
They measure journey performance. This goes beyond tracking satisfaction scores to understanding completion rates, effort, time to resolution and whether customers can achieve what they set out to do. These metrics reveal where friction exists and connect directly to business outcomes like revenue, cost to serve and retention.
They understand the root causes behind customer interactions. This means distinguishing between customers contacting you because they want to (value demand) and customers contacting you because something broke (failure demand). When you can see this difference, you can start eliminating the reasons for customers to call you.
They close the loop with both customers and employees. When customers provide feedback, they hear back. When frontline teams surface issues, someone acts on them. This creates trust that feedback matters and builds momentum for continuous improvement.
What we're measuring
We're identifying where your capability gaps prevent you from making confident, evidence based decisions about customer experience investment and how well you can measure and monitor the journey over time.
The universal truth is that customer experience determines whether customers stay or leave. Bad experiences encourage them to go. Good experiences compound over time to build loyalty. The organisations that systematically understand what creates those experiences (rather than guessing) are the ones that consistently deliver measurable returns.
If you're responsible for customer experience and can't definitively answer where friction costs you the most money or which improvements align to your business goals, that's the gap this capability fills.
Get your CX Scorecard to see exactly where your capability sits and receive personalised recommendations on where to improve.
