We’ve all been there—a team offsite, a full-day planning session, or a visioning exercise, trying to define how we move the company forward. Customer-led data has delivered valuable insights to shape the plan. The energy is high, senior leadership is engaged, and teams are genuinely excited about what’s next. But then tomorrow comes. Duty calls, emails flood in, and priorities shift back to the day-to-day. This is the inflection point when organizations either succeed or stall in their transformation journey.
Unfortunately, most stall. Research shows that 60–70% of change initiatives fail (Errida & Lotfi, 2021). What goes wrong?
All too often, organizations fall off what we call the action planning cliff—the point at which customer insights are collected, reports are built, findings are shared… and then nothing meaningful happens. Recommendations gather dust. Teams pivot to new projects. And the same friction points that customers raised remain unaddressed, month after month.
At The Verde Group, where we specialize in identifying and measuring customer experience risk, we see this pattern frequently. The consequences are real and costly. Customers quickly notice when their feedback seems to vanish into a black hole. Response rates to surveys are declining, not because customers don’t care, but because they believe companies aren’t listening. It’s getting harder to collect insights because:
- Customers don’t see meaningful action or change.
- Companies often fail to communicate what they’re doing—or have done—with the feedback they’ve received.
When customers feel ignored, trust erodes. And internally, when frontline teams provide valuable input only to see it disregarded, morale drops and skepticism toward CX efforts grows.
It’s not a lack of caring that leads to inaction—it’s often a lack of clarity, structure, or ownership. In many organizations, responsibility for acting on insights is vague. Teams treat all issues as urgent, which makes prioritization impossible. And customer insights often lack economic framing, making them easier to shelve during budget cuts or leadership transitions. While tech can diagnose CX issues, solving them requires people—leaders with clear vision, strategic alignment, and cross-functional coordination.
Avoiding the action planning cliff means closing the gap between insight and execution.
At The Verde Group, we help clients bridge that gap. We start by identifying which friction points represent the greatest economic and strategic opportunities—the moments that truly influence customer behavior and business outcomes.
Then, we go a step further: we quantify the financial impact of those friction points. We model how much annual revenue is at risk or could be recovered by addressing specific CX issues—such as churn reduction, increased repurchase rates, or improved market positioning. This financial framing is essential for securing executive support and elevating customer-led insights from a branding exercise to a business imperative.
From there, we translate insights into department-level action plans. This is where transformation really happens—not in a PowerPoint deck or on a dashboard, but in the day-to-day operations of marketing, product, sales, service, logistics, and the frontline. Our action plans are realistic, accountable, and aligned with business goals.
But insight-to-action is not a one-time leap—it’s an ongoing discipline. Customer expectations are constantly shifting. That means your CX strategy must be a living framework with regular reviews, clear metrics, and a willingness to adapt. Companies that excel in CX have institutionalized a continuous loop of listening, analyzing, acting, and refining. And when organizations act on customer feedback, customers are willing to provide it.
In a world where customers have more choice than ever—and switching is often frictionless—listening alone is no longer enough. Acting is what sets leaders apart.
The companies that win are those that turn customer insights into strategic action. That’s how you reduce risk, earn loyalty, and fuel long-term growth.
At The Verde Group, we believe that true CX leadership is not about collecting insights—it’s about doing something with them. Because the best insights don’t end with a report. They end with results.
Sources
- Forrester Research (2024). US Customer Experience Index: Ongoing decline in CX quality post-COVID across effectiveness, ease, and emotion metrics.
- The Verde Group proprietary research and client data: Risk-based customer experience modeling across B2B and B2C sectors.
- Internal CX impact modeling studies (Verde Group, 2021–2024): Demonstrated correlation between resolved experience friction and increased customer loyalty, reduced churn, and higher revenue contribution.