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Customer Experience: Thoughtfulness Made Visible

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This article outlines how I think about Customer Experience — shaped by operations, research, and leadership — and why I believe CX only works when it becomes thoughtfulness made visible.

It also introduces our Customer Experience Hub: a collection of articles that explore the architecture, practices, and mindset behind great CX, all grounded in real-world teaching and consulting experience.

Customer Experience Is Harder Than It Looks

Thoughtfulness made visible.

That is the idea I return to again and again when I think about Customer Experience. If thoughtfulness cannot be seen or felt by Customers, then there is a problem with CX quality.

In a restaurant, this is relatively straightforward.

If you order a meal and the food is not up to standard, you can send it back. You can explain what you expected and how the dish you received fell short.

In Customer Experience, the Customer usually cannot “return” the experience.

But they can still tell you when something was not right. Those conversations — complaints, feedback, hesitation, even silence — flow from the Customer’s perception of your CX quality. 

Making thoughtfulness visible isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Defining CX Quality

The good news is that there is an accepted framework we can use to think clearly about CX quality. One that applies across industries and channels.

The CX Pyramid describes three CX quality dimensions, starting from the bottom and working up to the top.

Level 1. Meets Needs

At this basic level, the product must work, or the service must solve the Customer’s job-to-be-done.

The Wi-Fi should work. The mobile app should complete the transaction. The repair should fix the problem. If this level fails, nothing above it matters.

Level 2. Easy to Deal With

As Customers progress through an experience, they continuously consider the level of effort they had to put in to achieve a goal.

This shows up when Customers are forced to repeat themselves, complete unnecessary paperwork or steps, or navigate pointless complexity.

CX damage can happen here — not through failure, but through unnecessary difficulty.

Level 3. Emotion

The important question at this topmost level is how the experience made the Customer feel. Respected? Confident? Relieved? Frustrated? Dismissed?

A significant portion of how a Customer remembers — and responds to the experience — is shaped by their emotions.

And what the Customer does next is heavily influenced by that emotional response.

Together, these three dimensions encapsulate CX quality — whether for a single transaction or a complex, multi-step journey.

Customer Experience Is a Discipline of Tensions

Pursuing CX Quality alone is necessary — but not sufficient. We also need to consider the realities of the organizational ecosystem we work in.

Even when organizations agree on what good CX looks like, making it real at scale can be difficult.

Not because people don’t care, and not because the frameworks are wrong — but because Customer Experience lives inside a set of unavoidable tensions.

By tensions, I don’t mean problems to be eliminated, but opposing forces that must be held and managed through judgment, trade-offs, and leadership choices at levels.

Let’s explore how to navigate some key tensions, one by one.

Customer vs. Organization

CX lives in the intersection of what is good for the Customer and what is good for the organization.

If an organization makes a decision that is good for itself — such as making it difficult for Customers to cancel subscriptions — that does not qualify as CX. It is one-sided.

Conversely, giving the Customer everything they want, all of the time, can put the company out of business. That, too, is one-sided.

The hardest — and most valuable — work happens in the intersection, where trade-offs must be made explicit and defensible.

In our company, we do not make it hard for Customers to cancel subscriptions. That choice has short-term cost implications — but long-term trust implications.

Understanding the intersection of what is good for both the Customer and the organization is important when you want thoughtfulness to become visible.

Short Term vs. Long Term

Many business decisions are made to generate short-term impact — particularly around cost and efficiency.

One common example is over-committing to Average Handling Time targets in a Contact Center.

Shorter calls are “better” for the company because they cost less — while Customers are often left with subpar quality.

Customer Experience, however, is primarily a long-term capability. It takes time to earn Customer trust.

For Customers to award you that trust, they need to feel positive intent (as explored in the Customer vs. Organization tension) and experience consistent, reliable CX quality.

The tension between short-term decisions and long-term impact is not a flaw in the system.

It is the system CX leaders must navigate.

This means deliberately considering how short-term decisions will be experienced by Customers over time — not just how they perform in the moment.

Values vs. Influence

CX is undeniably good for people.

That moral impulse is often what draws practitioners to the work.

But experience has shown me that treating CX as a morality play rarely earns influence inside complex organizations.

Demonstrating business judgment — in language your organizational leaders already use — is what secures the mandate, the resources, and the change management required to make CX real.

Without organizational influence, even well-intentioned CX leaders remain invisible — leaving both Customers and Employees worse off than they could have been.

Aspiration vs. Operational Reality

Much CX writing and speaking paints a compelling — almost fairy-tale — picture of what could be: once everyone believes in the Customer, engagement rises, loyalty follows, and outcomes improve.

Aspiration matters.

As Oprah Winfrey reminds us, “If we can’t imagine it, we can’t have it.”

But belief alone does not eliminate competing incentives, workload pressure, siloed priorities, or resistance to serving yet another set of stakeholders.

Mature CX leaders hold both aspiration and operational reality in their minds at the same time.

They understand that for thoughtfulness to be made visible, they must work with real-world constraints — not wish them away.

Please Tell Me How…

These tensions help explain something else I’ve noticed in recent years.

The questions CX practitioners ask have changed. They are less about why Customer Experience matters and more about how to make it land.

They are ‘how’ questions:

  • How do I get senior leaders to see the value?
  • Are there ways I can frame insights so other functions engage rather than disengage?
  • Is there a way I can present findings that lead to action?

These questions are not a sign of confusion — they are a sign that CX work has reached a level of maturity where influence becomes the real work.

What Great CX Organizations Have in Common

When organizations learn to navigate these tensions well, certain patterns start to appear.

They have a clear leadership mandate

Customer Experience is not treated as a side initiative or an act of goodwill. It has visible sponsorship and legitimacy at senior levels of the organization. That mandate exists not because CX is “nice,” but because it has been connected to outcomes leaders care about.

They speak the language of the business

CX insights are framed in terms that resonate beyond the CX function — risk, growth, efficiency, trust, and reputation. This makes trade-offs discussable and decisions actionable, rather than emotional or abstract.

They play the long game

Short-term pressure still exists, but it does not dominate every decision. Leaders recognize that trust, confidence, and loyalty compound over time — and they protect those signals even when quarterly pressures are real.

They improve and innovate — deliberately

These organizations use Customer input to make today’s experience work better and to shape what comes next. Continuous improvement and innovation are treated as vital — with no finish line.

None of this removes the tensions we’ve talked about. But it does make those tensions workable.

Designing and delivering CX quality is one part of the work. Learning to navigate the tensions that shape organizational life is another.

And both are required for thoughtfulness to become visible.

Our Customer Experience Hub Articles

Each link below takes you deeper into the strategy, lessons and professional growth that bring Customer Experience to life.

CX Strategy, Leadership & Decisions

CX Lessons from the Real World

Professional Growth, Capability & the CX Field

Thank You for Reading

I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work across Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience.  If this resonates, I’d love to stay connected.

You can drop me a line anytime, or subscribe on our site.

Daniel Ord
[email protected]
www.omnitouchinternational.com

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