In a business world often fixated on short-term gains and investor returns, the true engine of sustainable growth—the customer—can be forgotten. MarTech expert Aisha Amaira has built her career on reconnecting companies with this fundamental truth. With a deep background in CRM technology and customer data platforms, she champions a strategic approach where technology serves not just to automate, but to amplify the customer’s voice and embed it into the very DNA of an organization. Today, we delve into her insights on CX prioritization, exploring how to move beyond superficial metrics and reactive firefighting. Aisha will guide us through reframing customer experience as a core financial driver, making the case for Experience Leadership over simple customer management, and using data to scientifically pinpoint the initiatives that deliver real, measurable value.
Many firms prioritize investor outcomes first, but this can lead to practices like shrinkflation. Could you explain the domino effect of starting with customer value instead, and how that approach ultimately delivers stronger, more sustainable results for employees, partners, and investors? Please share a real-world example.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the business ecosystem. When you put investors first, you’re starting at the end of the food chain, which forces you to extract value rather than create it. That’s where you see shrinkflation, reduced quality, and frustrating policies—you’re robbing the system to pay the shareholder. But when you flip the script and prioritize delivering genuine value to the customer, you kick off an incredible, positive domino effect. Imagine a company that truly focuses on getting things right for its customers. That focus naturally leads to organic engagement and loyalty. Suddenly, your cost to serve plummets, and you aren’t fighting so hard to meet marketing and sales quotas. This frees up budget, not for cuts, but for real growth and innovation. Your employees feel empowered and engaged because they aren’t just handling complaints; they’re delivering on a promise. This positive energy extends to your partners, who can then focus on their strengths instead of administrative busywork. The result? Higher market share, maximized revenue, and ultimately, incredible returns for investors who are now benefiting from a thriving, healthy ecosystem, not a depleted one.
A common complaint is that companies ask for feedback but never act on it, causing customers to lose belief. What initial steps should a business take to measure and signal that feedback is being used, before they even consider launching another survey?
This is such a critical point because when customers stop giving feedback, it’s not just engagement you’ve lost; it’s belief. They feel unheard, and that silence is a leading indicator of churn. Before you even think about deploying another survey, you have to turn the lens inward. The very first step is to stop measuring the feedback you’re collecting and start measuring the action you’re taking on the feedback you already have. You need to create a visible, internal system that tracks the journey of customer insight to operational change. This isn’t just for the CX team; it needs high visibility across the entire company. You should be able to point to a specific piece of feedback, show how it was analyzed, what action was taken, and—most importantly—what the outcome was. Did it reduce call volume? Did it improve a key transaction? Quantify the savings or the gains. When you can publicly celebrate a win like, “Based on customer feedback, we fixed X, which saved the company Y and improved customer retention by Z%,” you create a culture of accountability. Only then, when you can prove you’re listening, have you earned the right to ask again.
During economic cutbacks, CX and UX teams often face layoffs. How can these teams reframe their value from usability metrics to “CFO-speak,” such as margin risk, and what data is crucial for quantifying the cost of inaction on key customer issues?
This is a painful reality, and it happens because CX and UX teams often fail to speak the language of the C-suite. Reporting on usability metrics is important, but in a boardroom focused on survival, it sounds like a luxury. You’ve lost the game before it begins. The key is to reframe your value proposition from creating ease to mitigating risk. Instead of saying, “This design is more user-friendly,” you need to say, “This decision creates significant margin risk because it will increase support tickets by X%, leading to Y in operational costs and a potential Z% in customer churn.” This is CFO-speak. To do this, you must quantify the cost of inaction. Start with your customer support data—it’s a goldmine. Look at the recurring issues driving contact volume. Calculate the cost of every support interaction, the time spent by agents, and the downstream impact. You can then present a clear financial case: “This single issue, which our team has identified a solution for, is currently costing the company $500,000 annually in support costs alone, not to mention the brand damage from negative word-of-mouth.” By presenting problems as tangible financial liabilities, you transform your team from a cost center into a strategic partner in protecting the company’s bottom line.
You’ve noted that a focus on averages, like CSAT or AHT, can mask serious problems. Instead of averages, what specific metrics should a support team use to identify where friction truly lives, and how can they trace that friction back to its root cause?
Averages are the great deceivers of CX; they create an illusion of health while the business is quietly bleeding out. A high average CSAT might be driven by thousands of simple, low-value interactions, completely hiding the rage and frustration of high-value customers with complex problems. To find the real friction, you have to stop looking at averages and start looking at distributions and repeat interactions. First, instead of a single average, show the percentages: what percentage of cases are “good” versus “not good”? Maybe your CSAT is 4.5/5, but that could mean 80% of customers are delighted and 20% are furious—and that 20% is where your churn risk and brand damage live. Second, track repeat contacts. Is the customer contacting you three times about the same issue even though your SLA was met each time? That’s a massive signal of friction. Finally, look at ticket resolution. A low Average Handle Time (AHT) can be a terrible sign if it means tickets are being closed quickly but not actually solved correctly. Once you identify these friction points, you trace them to the root cause by repeatedly asking “why.” Why did the customer have to call back? Because the policy was unclear. Why was the policy unclear? Because the legal team wrote it without consulting operations. You follow that thread all the way back to the source, and that’s where you find the strategic misdirections and operational weaknesses that are truly costing you.
Let’s distinguish between reactive “Customer Management” and proactive “Experience Leadership.” How does a company shift from simply trying to gain and retain customers to truly aligning and embedding the customer’s voice across the enterprise? Please outline the first few steps in that transition.
This distinction is everything. “Customer Management” is what most companies do—it’s the reactive work of Marketing, Sales, and Support to gain and retain customers. It’s a constant cycle of putting out fires that the organization itself started. “Experience Leadership,” on the other hand, is proactive. It’s about preventing the fires in the first place by aligning the entire enterprise around the customer’s perspective and embedding their voice into every decision, from product development to policy creation. The first step in this transition is simply to clarify this difference internally. Everyone needs to understand that true CX work isn’t just about managing complaints; it’s about fundamentally changing how the business operates. The second step is to elevate the goal. The company’s purpose must shift from “gain and retain” to “align and embed.” This means success is no longer just a sales number; it’s about delivering 100% on your brand promise. Finally, the third practical step is to reposition your customer support data. Stop treating it as a cost center’s problem and start treating it as a strategic intelligence unit for the entire organization. The insights from your support team should be directly informing product roadmaps, marketing campaigns, and operational processes. That’s how you begin embedding the customer’s reality into the company’s DNA.
Popular strategies like AI-first design and product-led growth often prioritize internal efficiency or speed-to-market. What are the hidden costs of these approaches on the customer experience, and how can leaders better balance these initiatives with human-centered design principles?
These strategies are seductive because they promise efficiency and speed, but they often carry immense hidden costs that show up in the customer experience. AI-first design, for example, assumes a generic default customer circumstance. It forces anyone with a unique or complex situation to navigate a frustrating, rigid system, creating enormous friction and a feeling of being unheard. The hidden cost is the customer frustration that leads to churn and the operational burden on support teams who have to clean up the mess. Similarly, product-led growth can rush a “minimally viable product” to market, assuming the fastest path to growth is a product that sells itself. The hidden cost here is the massive strain on customer support, who are left to deal with the fallout from a product that wasn’t designed with deep human-centered principles from the start. The key to balancing these initiatives is to stop viewing them as a replacement for human-centered design and instead see them as tools that must serve it. For AI, give customers a clear choice from the very beginning: interact with AI or a person. For product-led growth, integrate the voice of the customer throughout the entire development lifecycle, not just as an afterthought. It’s about using technology to enhance, not replace, our ability to understand and serve the real human needs of our customers.
Many organizations struggle with where to begin improving the customer experience. Using a framework like MoSCoW—must-have, should-have, could-have—how can a company use existing customer data to scientifically prioritize the vital few issues that will have the biggest financial impact?
The feeling of being overwhelmed, of not knowing where to start, is incredibly common. The key is to stop guessing and start using data scientifically. A framework like MoSCoW—Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won’t-have—is the perfect starting point. You don’t need new surveys; you can data-mine what customers have already told you through support tickets, reviews, and call transcripts to build your initial categories. This gives you a powerful, customer-defined list of priorities. But here’s the crucial next step to connect it to financial impact: you must run a statistical correlation analysis. You need to find the direct, mathematical link between how customers rate their experience on these MoSCoW items and their actual loyalty behaviors, like retention and spending. This analysis will show you which “must-have” issues have the highest negative correlation with loyalty when they fail. Suddenly, you’re not just looking at a long list of problems; you’re looking at a scientifically ranked list of what truly drives customer behavior and, therefore, revenue. From there, you apply the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. Focus only on the vital few issues from your correlated list that are causing 80% of the pain. This is how you move from “we should improve the experience” to “fixing these three specific issues will have the largest positive impact on our bottom line.”
What is your forecast for the future of CX prioritization?
My forecast is that the future of CX prioritization will be defined by a painful but necessary reckoning with financial reality. For too long, CX has been treated as a soft discipline, disconnected from the hard numbers that drive the business. The companies that thrive will be those that stop prioritizing popular but misguided methods like journey mapping in isolation or chasing a Net Promoter Score. Instead, they will adopt a ruthless, data-driven prioritization that flows directly from customer value. The winning formula will be to focus first on aligning and embedding the customer voice to prevent problems. They will use correlation analysis and Pareto to scientifically identify the vital few issues that customers will reward them for fixing. And most importantly, they will hold every single team accountable for their impact on the customer experience, tying bonus pay directly to fixing the top two CX gaps they create. The era of CX as a “nice-to-have” is over. The future belongs to Experience Leadership, where prioritizing the customer experience is understood not as a cost, but as the most direct and sustainable path to financial growth.