In a world where companies are pouring more money than ever into customer experience, satisfaction is plummeting. It’s a paradox that has left many leaders scratching their heads. To make sense of this disconnect, we’re speaking with Zainab Hussain, an e-commerce strategist who has built her career in the trenches of customer engagement and operations management. She argues that the problem isn’t a lack of vision, but a severe deficit in the operational muscle required to bring that vision to life.
The article highlights a major disconnect: while 40% of CX leaders are increasing investment, 94% of customers have abandoned interactions due to poor experiences. What do you believe is the root cause of this gap, and what are the initial, concrete steps a company should take?
The root cause is a dangerous obsession with vision over reality. We’ve become so enamored with glossy predictions of AI-powered hyper-personalization and seamless omnichannel journeys that we’ve completely neglected the foundational plumbing required to make any of it work. Companies are spending fortunes on the beautiful facade of the house while the foundation is crumbling. That 94% abandonment rate isn’t happening because the company lacked a creative vision; it’s happening because the operational workflow broke down somewhere in the background. The first concrete step isn’t to buy more technology. It’s to conduct a brutal, honest assessment of your operational capacity. You need to stop asking what amazing experience you could design and start asking what your current systems, processes, and teams can actually deliver, especially under pressure.
Citing the airline industry’s multi-million-dollar meltdowns, the article points to legacy systems from the 1970s as a key culprit. From your experience, why do companies consistently underinvest in this core infrastructure, and what are the early warning signs that a company’s operational backbone is at risk?
Companies underinvest because infrastructure work is unglamorous. It doesn’t generate exciting headlines or enthusiastic boardroom presentations like a new customer-facing app does. Funding a mainframe upgrade is seen as a cost, while funding a new chatbot is seen as an innovation. This continues until a catastrophic failure, like the one that cost Delta £400 million, makes the cost of inaction painfully clear. The early warning signs are always there, long before a public meltdown. You see IT spending as a percentage of revenue begin to fall, as it has in the airline industry, dropping from an already low 5% to just 4%. Internally, you see your frontline teams developing complex, manual workarounds just to do their jobs. And externally, you see customer retention rates start to slide—the travel sector saw a 20% decline in 2024 alone. These aren’t just numbers; they’re tremors before the earthquake.
You introduce “operational personas” as a critical tool to prevent service failures. Can you walk us through the step-by-step process of developing one? Specifically, how does this reveal the operational friction that a traditional customer journey map might miss during a high-stress event?
Absolutely. An operational persona shifts the focus from the customer to the employee who has to deliver the experience. Let’s take a flight cancellation. A customer persona tells us the passenger wants proactive updates and easy rebooking. An operational persona tells us if the gate agent can actually provide that. The first step is to shadow that agent during a disruption. We map their every action: What systems do they have to log into? Where do they get their information? Who do they have to call? The second step is to document the tools. Does their system show real-time availability on other carriers, or are they working off a static list that’s already outdated? A traditional customer map shows a happy passenger tapping “rebook” on an app. The operational persona reveals the reality: an agent toggling between three different screens, a legacy system that crashes under load, and a manual phone call to a crew scheduling team, all while a line of frustrated passengers grows. It’s in that friction—the gap between what the app promises and what the agent can physically do—that the entire customer experience breaks down.
The article advocates for “infrastructure investment parity” between customer-facing tech and operational systems. How can leaders build a compelling business case for this, especially when 27% struggle to measure tech ROI? What specific metrics prove the financial impact of strengthening the operational core?
The business case is built by shifting the conversation from return on investment to the cost of inaction. You don’t start with potential gains; you start with the very real, quantifiable losses. You can point to the staggering £134 billion that U.S. brands lose annually from customer attrition or a single airline’s £400 million loss from one operational failure. That gets attention. Then, you present the clear financial upside. The metrics are incredibly compelling. We know that teams using integrated, modern CRM systems hit their quotas 41% more often. More importantly, companies that are truly “customer-obsessed”—meaning they put the customer at the center of their operations, not just their marketing slogans—achieve 43% better customer retention, 33% higher profitability, and 28% higher revenue growth. The case becomes simple: this isn’t an IT cost; it’s a direct investment in retention, profitability, and resilience.
With 54% of organizations citing siloed data as a top barrier, what structural changes are needed to truly integrate CX, operations, and tech teams from the start? Can you share an example of how this cross-functional design directly leads to a more resilient customer experience?
The most vital structural change is to eradicate the “throw it over the wall” mentality. CX, operations, and tech can no longer work in a linear sequence. They have to be integrated into a single, cross-functional team from day one of any new initiative. This isn’t just about having meetings; it’s about shared ownership and co-creation. For example, instead of the CX team designing a new mobile app feature for rebooking and then asking IT and operations to build and support it, they all design it together. In that room, the operations manager can immediately point out that their ground staff’s systems can’t process a specific type of request, and the IT architect can suggest an API solution before a single line of code is written. This collaborative design prevents the creation of a beautiful feature that is operationally impossible to deliver during a crisis, resulting in a system that is inherently more resilient because its limits and capabilities were understood by everyone from the very beginning.
Do you have any advice for our readers?
My advice is to stop chasing the vision and start building the capability. Before you approve the budget for the next AI-powered personalization engine, I challenge you to walk down the hall to your operations leader and ask them, “What is the single biggest point of friction that prevents your team from delivering a great experience for our customers?” Then, fund that. Invest in the unglamorous, foundational work of upgrading your core systems, integrating your data, and empowering your frontline teams. Because in the years ahead, the companies that thrive won’t be the ones with the most ambitious vision. They’ll be the ones who have built the operational muscle to actually deliver on their promises, consistently and at scale.
