The disparity between the quality of customer experience that brands intend to deliver and what customers experience is widening.
Forrester’s Global CX Index 2025, found a clear decline in customer experience (CX) quality worldwide. The reasons differ, but the pattern is consistent: customers expect more, and organisations are struggling to deliver it.
One of the biggest challenges we see our clients face on their customer-centric transformation journeys is being ready to implement desired improvements. We’ve helped many clients develop compelling CX strategies and we work with the teams and stakeholders to design the services and products that will deliver it.
But when it comes to implementation, organisations stumble. That’s because successful implementation not only requires quality design, but it’s also about being ready to drive and manage the organisational changes that delivering high-quality customer experience brings.
5 reasons why implementation fails
It’s one thing to design a great experience. It’s another to bring it to life, at scale. Successful delivery requires more than quality design. It demands the capability, culture and commitment to drive organisational change.
Many organisations stumble not because their customer experience vision is weak, but because their delivery foundations aren’t ready.
We see five recurring stumbling blocks in delivering customer-centric transformation.
- Not creating CX as a business system
Too often, executive sponsorship fades after the initial experience visioning phase. New products and services, customer journeys and CX metrics are created, but they remain siloed – bolted onto departments rather than built into the organisation’s core
This results in misaligned KPIs that focus only on optimisation without including customer value and emotional outcome. Teams chase targets that make internal sense but fail to deliver end-to-end improvements.
- Siloed delivery
In many organisations, one department owns ‘journeys’, IT owns ‘platforms’, the Operations team owns ‘process’ – and this prevents a seamless design delivery .
When delivery is fragmented, experience breaks down. Customer-centric transformation requires new operating models and ways of working that bridge those gaps. Depending on the organisation, it can mean an overall restructuring of teams to enable a design-operations cadence that can scale to deliver.
Read more on why siloed CX strategies fail.
- Technology and data not fit for purpose
Legacy systems, low-quality data and fragmented platforms remain some of the biggest barriers to progress. Personalisation, measurement and agility all suffer when technology isn’t designed around the customer journey.
Without clear journey-level use cases, it’s difficult for organisations to invest appropriately in tools and systems. To create impact to the experience, it’s key to link the improvements to business and customer value to help prioritise investments.
- Measurement doesn’t link to value
Many organisations track NPS or customer satisfaction, but few connect these scores to commercial impact. When satisfaction dips, leaders feel the consequences in churn, cost-to-serve, or lost sales, but struggle to prove what’s driving it, and how to improve the experience to produce the desired impact.
This can create a decline in funding for CX initiatives if they’re not tracked and measured holistically. Organisations need to provide the right level of insights to influence key decisions.
- Culture and change management are underpowered
Even the best strategy fails without the right behaviours to sustain it. Many transformations stumble because teams aren’t equipped – or empowered – to deliver differently.
Common pitfalls include:
- Teams not having the rights to change policies or processes
- Skipping the work of embedding service behaviours, coaching and empowerment in training, especially for frontline staff
- Inconsistent communication about why the change matters and what success looks like
5 building blocks for success
Delivering customer-centric transformation means being willing and ready to change. To close the gap between design and delivery, organisations need five core building blocks:
1. Define CX ownership and how it’s governed
Change requires leadership and ownership. Having a clear owner for CX transformation with an assigned budget and the authority to spend signals to the organisation that customers sit at the centre. And the messages such as ‘with customers at the heart’ must be continuously heard across the organisation, from leaders to the frontline.
This also requires experience to be measured, with the benefits evidenced in the day-to-day and executive scorecards. CX metrics should be tied to performance and, in consequence, financial outcomes. For example, what does a -1 or +1 point in CX improvement mean to revenue.
How this looks in practice: Cleveland Clinic became the first major academic centre to create an Office of Patient Experience and appoint a Chief Experience Officer. Its systematised empathy model, backed by enterprise-wide governance and analytics, ensures experience principles survive leadership changes.
2. Set up design capability fuelled by customer insight
Establish DesignOps to streamline improvements and add business value. Give each team design, engineering, data, operations, and compliance capabilities.
This will reduce inefficiencies and break silos. To ensure the team proposals for improved or new products and services are fit for purpose, have an accessible insights repository fed by continuous, inclusive customer research.
How this looks in practice: Airbnb has built one of the world’s most advanced DesignOps ecosystems, connecting design, engineering and data around a shared insight platform. Every team – from product to customer support – has access to the Airbnb Design Language System and a central insights repository that captures qualitative and quantitative data from guest and host interactions globally.
3. Integrated operating model
Ensure teams have end-to-end remit and commercially relevant KPIs. Empower these teams to change policies and processes, not just products or services.
How this looks in practice: DBS Bank (Singapore) anchored its multi-year transformation around ‘Making Banking Joyful’. It re-wired performance management, empowered teams to experiment, and rebuilt processes around customer outcomes. This resulted in them being recognised by Euromoney in 2025 as World’s Best Bank and World’s Best Bank for Customer Experience – proof that culture and operating model design deliver results.
4. Link up the data and platforms
Link platform enablers to journey outcomes through a roadmap that includes customer data management and systems architecture.
How this looks in practice: When KLM wanted to attract millennials and retain other customer segments by delivering omni-channel customer experience across its website, mobile app and social media channels, it didn’t just modernise tech but integrated it with operations to make frontline service scalable. KLM integrated with back-end systems and deliberately used of AI to personalise service across platforms.
5. Measure, track value and connect it to funding
As the saying goes, ‘what gets measured gets done’. Build a measurement model that connects CX to loyalty/retention and revenue or cost. Use that model to prioritise a value backlog by customer journey with three to five outcomes. Then use the customer outcomes to refresh the business case periodically.
How this looks in practice: Slack has shown how linking experience metrics to operational outcomes creates credibility and clarity. Independent Total Economic Impact (TEI) studies show Slack improving both CSAT and cost-to-serve for service teams. Its European customer stories highlight how real-time collaboration shortens resolution times, making collaboration the default mechanism for cross-journey improvement.
Our reimagining process involves more than just the big ideas that define the ideal experience and customer journey. We consider the full CX ecosystem: the people, processes, platforms, technology, environment, partners and policies that need to align for it to become real.
This gathering of people, sharing ideas and conversations, creates ownership across departments and ensures we design with operational reality in mind. We discuss some of the big delivery questions such as: What capabilities exist? What can be adapted? What needs to change? Co-designing the experience with the people who will ultimately deliver it makes all the difference.
The bottom line
Designing for delivery requires more than great concepts. It requires structure and culture that make great experiences possible.
Without it:
- Delivery costs more – due to misalignment across teams and inefficient ways of working
- Delivery takes longer – momentum fades, and the people trying to lead transformation get tired of going against the current
- Delivery fails – because legacy systems will revert to default, with some initiatives in place but not joined up, leaving gaps in the customer journey.
To close the gap between vision and reality, organisations must build capability for sustained, scalable delivery.
If you're ready to move from design to delivery and build lasting customer-centric capability, let's talk.
