The Silence of the System white paper open on the lead finding: 82 per cent of Australian and New Zealand leaders gather customer feedback, 23 per cent have a clear process to act on it

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

The Silence of the System

82 per cent of New Zealand and Australian 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 the research

Designed to be read in one sitting and argued with for longer.

Inside:

  1. Six findings from 123 senior leaders across New Zealand and Australia 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 to get started.

How the research was done

The numbers come from the Orange Zest readiness diagnostic, run with our research partner Half Time Orange. 140 senior leaders have completed it so far, and 123 of them work in New Zealand and Australia, which is the cut this paper reports. So when you read 82 per cent and 23 per cent on these pages, those are the New Zealand and Australian figures. The study is live rather than finished, which means the sample grows with every wave and later waves will test whether the pattern holds. Published September 2026 by Good CX with Half Time Orange.

The paper is free, and it is citable: The Crossing Model™ and the AFAR Framework™ are © 2026 Good CX Ltd. If you want a thinking partner alongside it, get in touch.

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Media and press: press resources, images, the release and the paper.

Listening as theatre: 82 percent of leaders gather customer feedback and 23 percent act, a page from The Silence of the System
Open spread from The Silence of the System showing that 82 per cent of ANZ leaders gather customer feedback and 23 per cent have a process to act on it

Who is this research for?

You are senior enough that key reports reach you, and experienced enough to suspect they are not the whole story. CEOs, GMs and directors across customer, people, operations and finance.

You’ll 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 was by the coffee machine, not in a report. Meanwhile, your people who used to push back have gone 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.

“A diagnostic is a small model of the larger organisation. Whether the response makes it through tells you most of what you need to know about whether anything
else will.”

Brenton WebberHalf Time Orange

Join the next wave of the study

The sample is live. The findings come from Half Time Orange's Orange Zest readiness diagnostic, and the study is built to grow: same questions, future waves, stronger patterns. Take the diagnostic and your organisation joins the next wave, and you receive your own Orange Zest report in exchange.

Take the diagnostic at Half Time Orange