Jun04
I once sat in a business review where everything looked great on paper.
The service team had hit its targets.
The back office was reporting green across all SLAs.
NPS scores were stable.
Escalations were down.
And yet…
Customers were leaving.
Not dramatically.
Not with angry emails or social media outrage.
Just quietly.
One by one.
It didn’t make sense - until it did.
The problem wasn’t performance.
It was perception.
We love our dashboards.
Green means good. Red means fix it. Simple, right?
Except real life, and real customers don’t operate in silos.
One team’s “on target” might still be part of a journey that’s deeply frustrating for the customer.
Because customers don’t judge your departments.
They judge the total experience.
No one says:
“Support was fast, but billing was slow, so I’ll give the company 50% credit.”
They say:
“This company didn’t deliver.”
This is the real trap of modern performance management:
Every team does its job.
No one owns the outcome.
We measure tasks, timelines, and targets.
But we rarely ask:
“Did this feel like a win, to the one person that matters most?”
This isn’t an argument against metrics.
I track them daily.
But I’ve learned to ask one extra question:
“If I were the customer, would this experience make sense?”
And when the answer is no, it’s not a failure.
It’s feedback.
That’s where transformation begins.
Fixing one team’s process won’t save a broken customer journey.
We need to zoom out and ask harder questions:
Are we optimizing for internal convenience or external value?
Are our metrics measuring motion or impact?
Are we rewarding departments for performance… or the business for outcomes?
When you look at transformation through that lens, the real work becomes clear.
It’s not about doing more.
It’s about seeing better.
Great leaders don’t just chase KPIs.
They connect the dots across systems.
They see the space between green boxes on a dashboard and ask what’s being missed.
Because sometimes, what looks like progress is just well-documented inertia.
And if your customers are quietly leaving, it might not be your numbers that need fixing.
It might be your narrative.
Transformation doesn’t begin with strategy decks or new tools.
It begins the moment we ask the uncomfortable question:
“Are we solving the right problem?”
Keywords: Customer Experience, Business Strategy, Transformation
Saving Early Pays Off as 400 Junior ISA Account Holders Accumulate Over £100,000
Do You Develop Your Character Or Competency?
Leadership Unveiled: Fostering Trust with the 5 C’s
Luxury’s Digital Pivot: What LVMH’s AI Strategy Reveals About the Future of High-End CRM
Do You Solve Problems For Your People?
