So, CX Day has wrapped up, and another CX Week has come and gone. I hope there was cake in the lunchroom, awards for the team and a celebration of some great work. There were certainly plenty of insightful LinkedIn posts about it.
CX Day should be two things: a celebration of what's working, and an honest look at what still needs our focus. But here's the thing: your customers didn't see any of it. They'll judge you on the next call, the next delivery and the next complaint.
The timing couldn't be more urgent for that honest look! Most businesses are heading into the busiest stretch of the year, kicking off with the Black Friday sales and rolling straight into holiday trading in November and December, followed by January gift card redemptions and those unwanted gift returns.
If you're a B2C business, that means more customers and more pressure. It often brings seasonal team members too, who've had the least training at the very moment customers are most stressed.
If you're a B2B business, this is when your customers may be relying on your products or services the most to deliver for their own customers. It's also when many of them decide whether your solution is the right one to take into next year.
On top of all that, most organizations will have more team members on leave. B2C or B2B, the months ahead will be either your busiest or your most challenging period of the year. What you do now decides whether the next experience builds loyalty or destroys it.
So rather than let this week's energy fade, let's put it to work.
This article presents:
- Three things CX practitioners can start before the end of the year that customers and team members will feel.
- The power of finding the friction points in your business.
- How to understand if your organization's CX is an initiative or the operating system of the organization.
INLINE
1. Ask your front line, then fix one thing
Your team members already know what's broken. It might be an internal process that makes it harder for them to deliver for customers, or something that's creating a broken experience for the customer directly.
Ask a dozen people and you'll get more than one answer. What you're looking for is the item that comes up again and again. Then match that feedback against what customers are telling you in your transactional surveys. Where the two line up, you've found the biggest thing to fix.
Let me be completely transparent: you may not be able to fix it completely in a few weeks.
That's fine. Design the fix, test it, then roll it out quickly. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than it is today. Every bit you improve it makes a difference at a peak moment of truth for your business.
When I was head of customer experience at Target, we used this same approach and turned our contact center from a cost center into a profit center.
One of the ideas was to empower our team to take orders over the phone when customers had no other way to shop with us. That proved especially important when the website crashed during a major launch. Our small contact center delivered more than US$1 million in sales in a single day.
Now here's the part leaders often forget. They ask the front line for feedback, they do the work to improve things, and then they never close the loop.
Go back to your team and tell them: "You told us this. Our customers told us the same thing. Here's what we did about it." Whether it solved the problem completely or just took some of the pain away, they need to hear it.
Make this the start of a cycle. Only ask questions you're prepared to act on, then act, then tell people what you did.
2. Walk the customer journey and reduce the friction
It always amazes me how often I'm asked to help with a customer experience that isn't working, and when I ask the leaders when they were last a customer of their own business, the answer is "never".
I get it. I've worked inside organizations where it was easy to use the product without ever going through the journey a typical customer does.
So here's my challenge for the week ahead. Be a real customer, and take note of every step. For example:
- Buy a gift card from your own website
- Buy something in store and try to return it
- Buy something online, have it delivered, then try to return it
- Ring your own contact center at 5pm on a Friday
- Use the AI self-service system that was supposed to solve every customer inquiry
You don't have to stop at one. I challenge you to walk the full journey and note every point of friction.
You will find friction. I guarantee it, and most likely not where you're expecting it.
It reminds me of a story. The story goes that Walt Disney watched people at other theme parks finish a snack and drop the wrapper, usually within about 30 steps.
Litter snaps people right out of the magic, so in his parks he placed trash cans no more than 30 steps apart. Trash cans. Revolutionary. Someone simply paid attention to the experience and removed a small source of friction.
And it didn't only help guests. It helped the team. The custodial team became far more efficient, spending less time chasing scattered trash across the park and more time emptying bins and adding to the guest experience.
That's the power of finding the friction points in your business. Remove them and you improve the experience for customers and team members at the same time.
If you really want to accelerate the focus on friction, have every member of your C-suite spend a day in the life of a customer. Really walk it: buy the item, then return the item. It quickly shows them why the work you and your team are doing on the experience matters.
Fixing what's broken and reducing friction are two things you can start the moment you finish reading this, or Monday at the latest, and you can make real progress quickly.
3. Measure the gap between the promise and the reality
Every business makes promises at this time of year. Delivered before Christmas. Easy returns. We'll call you back today.
The busiest weeks are when the gap between what you promise and what customers actually get starts to widen. So be really clear about what you're promising this season, then measure it every day through the peak, not just at the end of the quarter.
If you find you can't keep a promise, either stop making it or fix whatever is making you fail.
I've had this reinforced as a customer more times than I can count. I ordered a suit, was promised a date, rang twice and never got a call back. Then an email arrived saying it would be weeks late. If they had told me the truth the first time I rang, I wouldn't have been angry. Instead, they gave me permission to look elsewhere. And I didn't just look elsewhere. I took my business elsewhere.
The promises we make become either the reason customers keep coming back, or their permission to leave. Here's the counterintuitive part: when you do have to break a promise, telling the customer early, and telling them what you'll do to make it right, can actually earn their trust. In most cases, it keeps them as a customer.
The real test comes after the cake
In November 2025 I told CX Network I was seeing a shift from CX as an initiative to experience as the operating system of the organization. CX Day is a great test of which one you have.
If experience only gets attention one day a year, it's still an initiative. If it holds up through the busiest and most stressful weeks, it's how you run the business.
The celebrations are the easy part. The holiday peak is where your customers decide whether they'll come back in January, and whether they'll tell their friends about you.
Every business is just one experience away from gaining a customer for life, or from losing one for good.
Quick links