Leading Through Experience to Create $77M in Enterprise Value

The Challenge

When I first walked into the organization's headquarters, the tension was palpable. Product portfolio owners were staring at declining customer satisfaction scores and rising churn rates with a mixture of frustration and resignation.

"We know something's wrong, but fixing it feels like trying to repair an airplane while it's flying."

This sentiment perfectly captures the paradox many enterprises face today, they recognize the need for customer experience transformation but fear disrupting the very operations that keep their business aloft. It's a challenge I've encountered repeatedly across industries, but rarely with stakes as high as in this case.

Uncovering the Real Challenges

The visible metrics told only part of the story. Yes, satisfaction scores were dropping and customers were leaving, but these were merely symptoms of deeper organizational dynamics that had calcified over years of operation.

As we began our diagnostic work, three distinct categories of challenges emerged.

1. Trust Barriers
2. Process Gap
3. Cultural Resistance

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1. Trust Barriers

The organization had developed what I call "protective relationship management". Teams had become gatekeepers rather than connectors to their customers. In one particularly telling workshop, a product manager admitted, "We're afraid to let you talk to our customers because we don't want to risk those relationships." This fear had created an environment where customer contact was tightly controlled and research findings were routinely questioned or dismissed.

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2. Process Gaps

The infrastructure for systematic customer feedback simply didn't exist. Beyond basic NPS surveys, there were no structured feedback loops. During an audit of their research practices, we discovered there was no centralized customer contact database, no clear data governance for research findings, and wildly inconsistent approaches to measuring success across teams.

"We're drowning in data but starving for insights."

Teams were collecting information but lacked the frameworks to transform it into actionable intelligence.

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3. Cultural Resistance

Perhaps most challenging was the organizational immune system that instinctively rejected change. Teams had become protective of their initiatives and roadmaps, viewing any new approach as a threat rather than an opportunity.

"We've seen initiatives come and go, why should we believe this one will be different?"

This skepticism wasn't unfounded. Previous transformation attempts had often promised radical change without respecting the complex operational realities of the business. The result was predictable, grand visions that failed to materialize into practical improvements.

Designing a Balanced Approach to Transformation

Having worked with organizations at various stages of experience maturity, I've learned that successful transformation requires a delicate balance – moving fast enough to create meaningful change but slow enough to bring everyone along. Our approach needed to create value without disruption, transforming the organization without breaking it. We built our strategy around five interconnected pillars.

1. Partner with Leadership
2. Create Adapatable Expertise
3. Focus (Relentlessly) on Value
4. Establish Voice of the Customer Infrastructure
5. Implement Thoughtful Change Management

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1. Partner with Leadership

Rather than positioning ourselves as external experts with all the answers, we established a joint center of excellence with executive stakeholders. This wasn't just symbolic – it created clear lines of communication and authority that proved essential when navigating organizational complexity.

We connected service leaders directly with product teams, creating bridges across traditional silos. This partnership approach meant we weren't pushing change from the outside but catalyzing it from within.

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2. Create Adaptable Expertise

Flexibility proved crucial to our success. We deployed industry advisors in adaptable groups that could respond to changing priorities and embedded teams within business units to build relationships and understanding. This maintained a flexible resource model that could scale up or down based on need.

I've seen too many transformation efforts fail because they rigidly adhere to predetermined structures rather than adapting to organizational realities. By contrast, our fluid approach allowed us to meet teams where they were and evolve our support as their capabilities grew.

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3. Focus on Value

To overcome skepticism, we needed to demonstrate concrete value early and often. We created a sophisticated two-stage Value Scoring system that brought rigor to initiative evaluation:

Stage 1: Benefits Assessment

This comprehensive evaluation covered strategic alignment, customer experience impact, revenue potential, cost savings, regulatory compliance, and      competitive advantage.

Stage 2: Complexity Evaluation

We balanced potential benefits against implementation realities, including technical requirements, costs, and platform dependencies.

This framework transformed abstract discussions about customer experience into concrete business cases. By linking everything to established business metrics, we spoke the language of the organization rather than forcing them to adopt ours.

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4. Establish Customer Voice Infrastructure

Building sustainable transformation required more than one-off research projects. We needed to create the infrastructure for ongoing customer connection.

We built a comprehensive customer recruitment database with clear processes for engagement, developed tools for managing participation, and established protocols for data collection, storage, sharing, and deletion. This infrastructure made customer research a systematic capability rather than an occasional activity.

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5. Implement Thoughtful Change Management

Perhaps most importantly, we recognized that transformation is as much about psychology as it is about process. Our change management approach focused on three principles.

• Building Trust
• Aligning with Reality
• Pacing the Change

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Building Trust

We started with small, noticeable wins that demonstrated value before attempting to scale. By visualizing behavioral paths that revealed gaps in ordering journeys, we identified over 20 design opportunities to increase feature adoption. These early successes built credibility for larger initiatives.

Aligning with Reality

Rather than imposing our agenda, we mapped current initiatives and identified integration points, carefully avoiding conflict with significant programs already underway. This respect for existing work reduced resistance and created natural collaboration opportunities.

Pacing the Change

We matched our pace to the organization's capacity for change, building momentum through a series of wins rather than pushing for revolutionary transformation. This created space for experiments that could evolve into larger initiatives when proven successful.