Customer experience research identifies a recurring problem.
Now what?
Perhaps customers are waiting too long.
One region consistently performs below others.
Employees aren’t following an important process.
Customers repeatedly struggle with the same digital feature.
A promotion isn’t being executed as intended.
Or research reveals a gap nobody expected to find.
Identifying the problem matters.
But finding it isn’t the finish line.
The value of customer experience research comes from what an organization is able to understand, change and ultimately improve because of what it learned.
First, Determine What the Finding Actually Means
Not every negative result represents the same kind of problem.
One poor customer interaction may be an isolated incident.
The same issue appearing repeatedly across locations may signal a process, training or resource problem.
A problem concentrated in one location may require local attention.
A problem appearing across an entire region may point somewhere else.
Before acting, leaders need enough context to understand what they are seeing.
- How often is it happening?
- Where?
- Under what circumstances?
- Is it new?
- Is it becoming more frequent?
- Does it appear in more than one source of customer experience information?
A useful research program helps businesses move beyond “We found a problem” to “We understand enough about this problem to decide what to do next.”
Decide Who Can Actually Do Something About It
A finding is only actionable when it reaches someone with the responsibility and authority to respond.
Consider something as simple as shopping carts repeatedly left throughout one store’s parking lot.
For a senior executive, that observation may be one small data point among thousands.
For the store manager, it may be immediately useful.
The manager can determine whether cart collection is being completed as expected, adjust responsibilities or schedules, address a recurring problem with employees and check whether conditions improve.
Different findings belong at different levels of an organization.
Don’t Assume the First Solution Is the Right Solution
Once a problem has been identified, the temptation is to fix it quickly.
Sometimes the appropriate response is obvious.
Sometimes it isn’t.
If employees repeatedly miss a service standard, additional training may seem like the logical answer.
But what if employees already know the standard?
What if staffing levels make it difficult to deliver?
What if the process itself creates the problem?
What if technology isn’t working as intended?
What if a supplier issue repeatedly prevents a location from delivering what customers expect?
A corrective action aimed at the wrong cause may temporarily change a score without resolving the underlying problem.
Before deciding what needs to change, businesses need to understand why the problem is occurring.
Match the Response to the Size of the Problem
Not every research finding requires a corporate initiative.
Some problems can be corrected immediately at the location level.
Others require training.
Some require changes to procedures, technology or staffing.
Some may involve suppliers or other business partners.
And occasionally, research exposes a problem large enough to require leadership attention across the organization.
The response should be proportionate to the problem.
That is one reason patterns matter.
If one location encounters an isolated issue, a local correction may be enough.
If the same issue appears across dozens of locations, repeatedly over time, fixing each occurrence individually may treat the symptom without addressing the cause.
Assign Ownership Without Losing the Conversation
Problems that belong to everyone can easily become problems owned by no one.
Once an organization decides what needs to change, someone needs responsibility for moving the response forward.
But ownership should not mean that one person or department is expected to understand every part of the challenge alone.
The people closest to the work may know why a process breaks down. Regional leaders may see patterns that individual locations cannot. Corporate teams may understand requirements, resources or risks that are not visible at store level.
Ownership creates accountability. Open communication creates the context needed to make that accountability useful.
Give People Information They Can Actually Use
More information does not automatically create better decisions.
In fact, too much of the wrong information can compete with the work that needs to be done.
Consider a store manager who is required to review and acknowledge brand-level reports that contain pages of information with little relevance to that particular location or the manager’s performance.
Meanwhile, the promotional signage that should already be displayed isn’t up.
The regional manager sees the missing signage and is understandably frustrated. The promotion is underway. Customers aren’t seeing what the brand intended them to see.
But the store manager may have spent valuable time checking boxes to confirm that reports were read instead of preparing the location for the promotion.
That doesn’t mean the store manager doesn’t need information from headquarters.
The manager absolutely needs to know that a new promotion is coming, what the location needs to do, when materials should be displayed and what employees need to understand before customers arrive.
The problem isn’t too much communication. It’s information delivered without enough regard for who needs it and what they need to do with it.
The same principle works in the other direction.
A regional manager may see repeated observations that shopping carts aren’t being collected from a store’s parking lot at the end of the day.
From a distance, it looks like a straightforward execution problem:
Tell the store manager to make sure employees collect the carts.
But what if employees have repeatedly been harassed in that parking lot and don’t feel safe going outside after dark?
Now the scattered carts aren’t the real problem.
They’re a signal of a larger one.
Employees don’t feel safe in the parking lot – and customers may not feel safe there either.
The appropriate response might involve security, lighting, staffing, scheduling, property management or another operational change. Simply reminding the store manager about the cart standard won’t solve it.
That’s why useful reporting has to do more than move observations up and down an organizational chart.
A store manager needs enough information to act on conditions within that location and prepare for changes coming from the brand.
A regional manager needs enough visibility to recognize when a recurring location-level issue may indicate a problem requiring resources or authority beyond the store manager’s control.
Corporate leadership needs to see patterns significant enough to require broader action without burying location managers in information they cannot use.
The right information should reach the person who can do something meaningful with it.
And sometimes the most important information isn’t that a standard was missed. It’s why people closest to the operation are having difficulty meeting it.
Then Validate the Correction
This is the step organizations can easily overlook.
A problem was identified.
A solution was implemented.
Everyone moves on.
But did the solution work?
Suppose research finds that customers regularly receive inconsistent information about a promotion.
The company clarifies the procedure and retrains employees.
That is an action.
It isn’t yet evidence of improvement.
Follow-up research can determine whether employees now communicate the promotion correctly and whether customers receive a more consistent experience.
If performance improves, the organization has evidence that the corrective action worked.
If the problem remains, leaders know they need to investigate further.
Action without validation leaves an unanswered question.
Improvement Is a Cycle, Not a Singular Event
Effective customer experience research isn’t simply:
Research → Report
A stronger process looks more like:
Research → Understand → Prioritize → Listen → Act → Validate → Refine
And then the organization continues learning.
Sometimes validation confirms that a correction worked.
Sometimes it reveals an unexpected consequence.
Sometimes the original problem improves but a new point of friction appears elsewhere.
Sometimes changing customer expectations require the organization to reconsider the standard itself.
Research remains useful because businesses don’t stand still.
Neither do customers.
Research Should Help Businesses Improve, Not Gamify Customer Service with Scores
Scores can help leaders track performance, compare results and recognize changes over time.
But a score should be a tool, not the objective.
When organizations tie employee compensation, rewards or recognition too closely to customer ratings, they may unintentionally create an incentive to improve the score rather than the customer experience.
We’ve all encountered some version of it:
“Here’s the survey. I need you to give me a 10.”
At that point, the measurement is no longer simply observing the customer experience.
The measurement begins to influence the behavior it is supposed to measure.
That creates problems beyond unreliable scores.
A location can appear to improve while the underlying customer experience remains unchanged. Managers may focus on achieving a target number rather than understanding why customers are dissatisfied. Employees can become more concerned about protecting a rating than identifying problems that management genuinely needs to know about.
It can even discourage useful feedback. A customer who knows a less-than-perfect rating could personally affect an employee may hesitate to report a legitimate concern.
The organization receives a better score – and potentially worse information.
The question shouldn’t simply be:
How do we improve the score?
It should be:
What is this result telling us about the business, and what can we improve because we know it?
Scores can tell leaders that performance changed. Dashboards can show where results differ. Reports can identify recurring problems.
But the business value comes from understanding what those findings mean and using them to make better decisions.
The objective isn’t to win the measurement. It’s to improve the customer experience the measurement reveals.
Win-Win-Win?
When employees believe their experience and ideas matter, work becomes more than completing a list of tasks for a paycheck.
They can see themselves as participants in making the business work better.
That matters when research identifies a challenge.
The employee serving customers every day may recognize why a process repeatedly fails. A store manager may know which staffing constraint makes a standard difficult to meet. A regional leader may recognize a pattern occurring across several locations. Corporate leadership can see how those individual experiences connect to larger business priorities.
When organizations create ways for those perspectives to inform one another, they don’t simply improve a customer experience program.
They build organizational knowledge.
Experienced employees who stay take knowledge with them from one situation to the next. Companies spend less time and money continually replacing and training people. Managers can identify talented employees who understand the business and develop them for greater responsibility. Teams become more willing to raise problems before those problems become larger and more expensive.
Employees also see something important:
Speaking up can lead to meaningful improvement.
That can change the relationship between employees and the organization. People who feel valued for both their labor and their knowledge have more reason to invest themselves in the success of the business.
Customers experience the effects too.
They encounter more experienced employees. Better-informed managers. Processes refined by people who actually use them. Teams address problems instead of repeatedly tolerating them.
Valuing employee input isn’t simply an employee benefit. It can be a business advantage.
Lower turnover saves money.
Retaining experienced people preserves knowledge.
Developing talent from within strengthens the leadership pipeline.
Open communication can expose problems sooner.
Employees closest to the work can contribute practical solutions.
Better processes make it easier for employees to succeed.
And customers ultimately experience the result.
Business wins. Employees win. Customers win.
That is what meaningful improvement should accomplish.
Final Thought
Finding a problem is valuable because it creates an opportunity to understand what is really happening.
But improvement rarely comes from a research finding alone.
It happens when organizations evaluate that finding alongside the other realities affecting performance.
What does the store manager know?
What are employees experiencing?
What patterns does the regional manager see?
What do operations, inventory, technology, training or suppliers contribute to the situation?
And what are customers experiencing as the result of all of it?
The people closest to a problem often understand parts of it that aren’t visible in a report. Leaders may see patterns that individual locations cannot. Research adds another perspective by showing what customers experience and where expectations and execution diverge.
Solutions emerge when those perspectives inform one another.
That requires open communication and an environment where people at every level can raise challenges, question processes and contribute ideas without the conversation becoming simply about who missed a standard or received a poor score.
Sometimes the answer will be better training.
Sometimes it will be a process change.
Sometimes employees need different resources.
Sometimes leadership needs to reconsider a requirement that made sense on paper but isn’t working in practice.
And sometimes the people doing the work already know what would make the process better – they simply need an organization willing to hear them.
Customer experience research should help create that understanding.
Because ultimately, isn’t that why the research is being conducted?
Not to produce another report. Not to award a score. Not to identify someone to blame.
It is there to help people throughout the organization make better decisions, improve the processes that aren’t working and ultimately serve customers better.
That’s the improvement that matters.
