I once spent more than an hour trying to navigate a medical provider’s supposedly easy-to-use app. Seven employees couldn’t solve the problem. When the organization’s quality control department invited feedback, I called the number provided and waited another 17 minutes before anyone answered.
The person who finally picked up was polite and honest. She could document my complaint, but she couldn’t change anything. Her job was to summarize feedback for the executive team.
I wondered how many other patients had simply given up. How many abandoned the call after five minutes? How many never bothered reporting a problem because complaining required almost as much effort as getting help?
Somewhere in that organization, executives were probably reviewing customer satisfaction reports without realizing their complaint process discouraged complaints. They might have interpreted the absence of complaints as evidence that the system was working.
Dr. James Killian, author of Obsessed: Cultivating the Customer-Driven Leader, has spent more than 25 years examining the relationship between leadership behavior, employee experience, and customer outcomes. His perspective raises an uncomfortable possibility: A company can report excellent performance while employees work around broken processes and customers quietly look for alternatives.
Are Your Customer Service Metrics Rewarding the Wrong Behavior?
Consider a customer service representative evaluated primarily on average call handling time. A customer calls with a complicated problem requiring research, patience, and perhaps assistance from another department.
I’ve experienced the consequences. After waiting approximately 45 minutes to reach a representative about a complicated issue, I encountered someone who appeared more interested in ending the call than solving the problem. Eventually, they disconnected the call, sending me back into another lengthy queue.
That employee may have appeared productive on a performance report. Meanwhile, the company had wasted my time without resolving anything.
Average handling time has legitimate operational value. But when it becomes more important than resolution, employees learn to protect the metric at the customer’s expense.
Executives should examine whether problems were solved, not simply how quickly interactions ended. Otherwise, they risk rewarding employees for creating repeat calls.
Your Employees Know Which Policies Are Driving Customers Away
During a stay at an upscale Las Vegas hotel, I encountered several frustrating problems that seemed relatively easy to correct. Rather than post a negative review, I requested a conversation with someone responsible for the property.
The manager’s response surprised me. She wished I would publish a terrible review.
The executives controlling the hotel’s operating procedures worked in another city. Employees couldn’t persuade them to correct problems they experienced every day, but public complaints got their attention.
Consider what that reveals about management. An employee responsible for protecting the guest experience believed publicly damaging the hotel’s reputation was the only effective way to improve operations.
The information wasn’t missing. The process for getting it to someone with decision-making authority was broken.
Killian describes four leadership categories: customer-avoidant, customer-tolerant, customer-centric, and customer-driven. A useful way to distinguish them is to examine what happens when customer needs conflict with internal convenience.
Does management protect existing procedures, margins, and departmental boundaries? Or does customer evidence influence those decisions?
When employees need five approvals to solve a basic customer problem, helping customers becomes a personal risk. Customer avoidance becomes a rational response to management’s rules. The employee may appear uncooperative, but executives created the conditions that encouraged the behavior.
Stop Asking Who Made the Mistake
Killian described working with a fast-casual dining organization where a serious customer complaint prompted a different management response. Instead of asking who was responsible, a leader asked, “What in our systems allowed this to happen?”
That question changed the conversation. Employees and managers could examine the process together instead of spending their energy assigning blame or defending themselves.
There’s a practical reason this works. When employees expect punishment for reporting problems, bad news gets minimized, positive results get exaggerated, and operational failures remain hidden.
Executives consequently make decisions using incomplete or distorted information. I’ve seen how easily management confuses employee silence with operational success. A CEO who wants accurate information must make it safer to identify a flawed process than to conceal one.
That doesn’t eliminate individual accountability. It helps distinguish an employee’s poor judgment from behavior management has inadvertently encouraged.
Punishing someone for following a defective procedure leaves the procedure intact. The next employee inherits the same problem, and customers continue paying the price.
Why Employee Engagement Programs Can’t Fix Broken Systems
When employee engagement scores decline, executives often introduce recognition programs, incentives, or appreciation initiatives. Those efforts are relatively easy to implement, but they may ignore what makes employees frustrated in the first place.
Killian recommends examining where employees lose time, energy, discretion, and the ability to help customers. His warning is direct: “Don’t decorate a broken system. You redesign it.”
Consider an employee who spends every day requesting unnecessary approvals, correcting preventable errors, or explaining policies that frustrate customers. Recognition doesn’t remove those obstacles, and neither does another engagement survey, unless management changes something based on the findings.
Every unnecessary approval, repeated explanation, and unresolved complaint also consumes operating capacity. Companies can spend more money trying to improve morale while preserving the problems responsible for declining engagement. Before funding another recognition initiative, executives might learn more by tracing recurring customer complaints through employees’ actual workflows.
Why HR and Customer Experience Shouldn’t Operate Separately
HR measures engagement, retention, and workplace satisfaction. Customer experience departments monitor complaints, satisfaction scores, and service interactions.
Each function can perform well against its individual measures while customers continue receiving inconsistent service. Killian points to the service-profit chain, which connects employee conditions, service delivery, customer response, and business performance.
Consider a department experiencing declining employee satisfaction alongside increasing customer complaints. Reviewing those trends independently provides only part of the explanation. Together, they may expose inadequate resources, restrictive procedures, or missing authority that prevents employees from helping customers.
Executives don’t necessarily need to rotate every employee through every position. But they should recognize the danger of departmental metrics that reward individual functions while overlooking the customer’s complete experience. Customers encounter one company, regardless of how many departments appear on its organizational chart.
AI Can Handle the Interaction, Someone Still Owns the Outcome
As organizations automate customer interactions, the distinction between efficiency and accountability becomes increasingly consequential. An AI system may answer questions, route requests, or make decisions faster than an employee. But responsibility for incorrect decisions and unresolved problems remains with management.
Killian puts it plainly: “AI can automate a decision, but it cannot absorb accountability.” Reducing employee-handled interactions may lower costs without improving customer service. If customers cannot correct automated decisions, reach someone with authority, or obtain an understandable explanation, the company has simply automated its obstacles. Before expanding automation, executives should examine how exceptions are handled and who can resolve them.
The same principle applies to traditional customer service operations. Efficiency measures have limited value when customers cannot accomplish what they contacted the company to do.
The Real Test
Killian recommends asking what evidence exists about how executive decisions will affect customers and the employees serving them. I would go further. The next time management reviews a customer service report, follow an actual customer through the process.
Pretend you are the customer. Call the support number. Try resolving a complicated problem. Use the newest software. Count how often you must repeat information before someone can help. Then compare that experience with the performance report presented at the next executive meeting.
If the two tell different stories, the report isn’t necessarily false. It may accurately measure what management requested while overlooking what customers need.
A company’s priorities become apparent when solving a customer problem requires sacrificing a favorable metric, changing an established policy, or admitting that an executive decision was wrong. That’s when executives discover whether they’re managing the customer experience or merely managing the numbers that describe it.