The critical components missing from your balance sheet

We’ll come to that.” After the numbers. After the restructuring. After the expansion plan.

Two decades later in CX, I see the same choreography.

Boards will spend hours interrogating financial performance, acquisition strategy, system upgrades and risk exposure. All valid. All necessary. Yet the conversation about what clients are actually experiencing, what your best people are feeling, and where small fractures are forming, often gets squeezed into a neat slot near the end.  

It is a polite form of postponement. The corporate equivalent of saying, “We really must catch up properly,” and never opening the diary.

Why CX and EX are overlooked

Sometimes I think CX and people management - from HR to exployee experience (EX) -  are like the aunt you absolutely have to invite to the family wedding. She is part of the story. She has history. She matters. But she is not shaping the seating plan or making a speech. She is there because she should be there.  The irony is almost painful.

These two disciplines deal with the only two assets that can walk out the door without notice: your people and your clients. Everything else in your business, your systems, your intellectual property, your brand assets, stays put. Employees and customers choose you every day. Or they choose not to.  

And yet, culture and customer loyalty are often treated as hygiene factors. Important, yes. But more maintenance than momentum.

Part of the problem, if I am honest with my own profession, is how we have positioned ourselves. 

HR and EX can drift into language about engagement and wellbeing without always tying it back to hard numbers: the cost of attrition, the drag of mediocre leadership, the risk of capability gaps.

CX can drift into sentiment and scorecards without clearly linking them to churn, share of wallet and lifetime value.  

When that happens, boards subconsciously reclassify both functions. They become internal barometers rather than growth engines. Useful to monitor, less urgent to invest in.

The question underneath all of this is simple. What do you believe truly drives sustainable performance?

Why good businesses fail

If you believe it is only strategy and capital allocation, then HR and CX will always sit slightly to the side. If you recognize that execution lives in your people and revenue lives in your relationships, then these functions cannot remain second cousins. The hard truth is that most businesses do not fail because the spreadsheet was wrong. They falter because talented people disengage and leave, because clients quietly reduce their spend, because early warning signs were noticed but not elevated.

Culture and customer loyalty are compounding assets. They rarely create dramatic quarterly spikes. What they create is resilience, pricing power and trust. You only feel their absence when it is too late.  After forty years across both worlds, I no longer see EX and CX as soft disciplines fighting for attention. I see them as commercial levers that have been too politely framed.

Perhaps the real shift is this: stop asking the board to care because it is the right thing to do. Start showing why it is the profitable thing to do.

Otherwise we will continue to be invited into the room, thanked for our insights, and gently moved to the back of the queue while the “serious” conversations happen up front.

Quick links

• CX Isn’t a Platform. It’s a Philosophy 
• The top 10 challenges facing CX practitioners in 2025
• Customer experience is the next product: Startups can’t afford to treat CX as support