A research paper on customer experience, employee experience and leadership in New Zealand and Australia

The Silence of the System

82 per cent of ANZ leaders gather customer feedback. 23 per cent act on it through a clear process. This research paper is about the gap between those two numbers: where the signal dies inside organisations that look fine on the dashboard, why the cause is biological before it is organisational, and The Crossing Model™ that shows what to do about it. Produced with our research partner Half Time Orange.

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What is in it

Twenty-six pages, designed to be read in one sitting and argued with for longer. Inside:

1. Six findings from 123 senior ANZ leaders on why customer experience transformation stalls, including the whisper network your feedback actually travels on.
2. The biology of silence: what Polyvagal Theory, psychological safety research and a certain Hundred Acre Wood tell us about why good people stop speaking up.
3. The Crossing Model™: leadership as the keystone between employee and customer experience, and what happens when it contracts.
4. The CFO question: what silence costs as firms scale, and why it doubles past fifty staff.
5. An introduction to the AFAR Framework™, our measurement layer for the relationship rather than the activity.
6. Six places to start, none of which need a budget line before Tuesday.

Who it is for

You are senior enough that the reports reach you, and experienced enough to suspect they are not the whole story. Chief executives, general managers and directors across customer, people, operations and finance.

You will recognise some of the conditions. Feedback gathered but rarely closed. Customer experience with your sponsorship and nobody’s governance. The most useful thing you heard last month arriving in a corridor conversation rather than a report. People who used to push back going quiet, while the dashboard still looks fine. The gap sits between functions, which is why this is built to be read across the table rather than filed in one of them, and to stand up to a CFO’s questions without apology.