6 Reasons Why Every Business Should Be CX-Focused

One of the keys for businesses to be profitable is to make proactive customer experience permeate every level of an organization, says Jeannie Walters of Experience Investigators.

Let’s talk about two letters you should care about A LOT in your business: CX

CX stands for customer experience. 

It’s the sum of every interaction a customer has with a brand — before, during, and long after the transaction. Customer services is a subset of CX. 

For PR professionals, it’s essentially synonymous with customer relations, and that makes it our business too. 

In my opinion, customer relations ranks second only to employee relations in organizational priority, and for good reason: you can’t have happy customers unless you first have happy employees.

Depending on the industry you’re addressing, CX goes by other names — guest experience (GX) in hospitality, patient experience (PX) in healthcare, and B2B experience when your customer is another company. 

The label changes. But the stakes don’t.

Here’s the bottom line: effective CX must be a proactive, company-wide business imperative. Companies prioritizing proactive customer experience achieve 41% faster revenue growth and 51% better customer retention (Forrester). That’s not a marginal edge. That’s the difference between thriving and treading water.

My thinking on CX has been greatly elevated — and frankly sharpened — through my recent work with Chicago-based Experience Investigators Founder and Chief Experience Officer Jeannie Walters. 

Jeannie is the kind of client every PR pro dreams about landing: deep expertise, compelling credentials, and a message that lands in virtually any industry. 

Here’s a quick snapshot:

• Author of “Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations”
• Trained 800,000+ professionals through her LinkedIn Learning courses
• Recognized by LinkedIn as one of the most influential voices in the CX industry
• Has worked with JPMorganChase, Verizon, Comcast, SAP, and others
• Holds dual certifications: CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) and CSP (Certified Speaking Professional)
• Insights featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and NPR
• Host of 150+ episodes of the Experience Action podcast

In our work together, AuthenticityPR has landed executive profiles, contributed articles in trade media, and source expert placements for journalists seeking a trusted CX voice. Here’s a sampling:

• citybiz – Q&A with Jeannie Walters, CEO & Chief Experience Investigator at Experience Investigators
• Authority Magazine – 5 Things A Business Should Do To Create A Wow! Customer Experience
• CX Dive – How Abercrombie & Fitch uses geofencing for customer feedback
• Contractor – Your Technician Is the Experience
• Home Business – The Solo Operator’s CX Playbook: Why Winging It Is Costing You Customers

We have upcoming stories slated for Contact Center Pipeline and Airport Business, and several others in the works.

We’ve also developed this online press kit.

As Jeannie puts it: “In today’s highly competitive and uncertain business landscape, proactive customer experience implemented at every level of an organization is a business imperative.”

With that, here are some of the most actionable insights from Jeannie’s work — distilled into steps any organization can start applying now.

6 Steps to Smarter Customer Experience

1. Define it before you deliver it. “You can’t deliver what you don’t define.” That’s one of Jeannie’s most direct and repeatable lines. It’s the foundation of everything else. Most organizations assume everyone in the building already knows what great customer experience looks like. They don’t.
   
   Without a clear CX mission statement, defined success metrics, and shared language across teams, you end up with inconsistent experiences that quietly erode customer trust. The first step is simply getting aligned on what great looks like for your specific organization.

2. Be proactive, not reactive. As Jeannie says, “Let’s stop talking about customer experience as magic. The best customer experiences aren’t magic at all. They’re missions — and they’re managed intentionally and proactively.” Most organizations are architected to respond to problems after they happen. The companies that win are the ones anticipating customer needs, designing friction out of the journey, and preventing problems before they occur.
   
   In one example from Jeannie’s practice, a heating and air conditioning firm reduced customer complaints and cut truck rolls for repeat service calls simply by addressing the root causes rather than symptoms.

3. Remember: CX is a team sport. Customer service is a subset of customer experience, not a synonym for it. Delivering a consistently great experience requires everyone in the organization to understand their role, from the CFO making budget calls to the product team designing features to the ops team managing processes.
   
   One of Jeannie’s first moves with any client is establishing a CX Charter that defines how the entire team will collaborate to deliver on the experience promise. In a workshop with a hospitality client, inviting the valet team into the room — not just the executives — completely changed the conversation and led to a company-wide employee feedback system that improved the guest experience across the board.

4. Employee experience drives customer experience. If you promise a certain customer experience externally but aren’t living it internally, your employees will see right through it. Jeannie has documented this dynamic across industries: when employees don’t feel supported, trained or empowered, customers feel it too.
   
   In one engagement with a video game brand facing high complaint volume, Jeannie’s team discovered that employees, particularly those in the contact center, wouldn’t have referred a friend to work there. Building an employee wellness program improved retention, and customer outcomes followed. Employee referrals and customer referrals tend to go hand in hand.

5. Measurement without meaning is just a calculator. Organizations can drown in dashboards and still not move the needle if they’re measuring the wrong things, or measuring the right things without connecting them to action. Metrics should align with your CX mission and tell a story — not just fill a slide.
   
   Jeannie worked with a credit union experiencing slow but steady member attrition that didn’t feel urgent until leadership heard three actual member call recordings. That human context changed everything. They stopped the churn. The lesson: round out your data with real customer stories, and make sure the numbers you track connect directly to business outcomes.

6. Leadership buy-in isn’t optional — it’s the whole game. Tactical CX improvements can produce quick wins, but without sustained commitment from the top, transformational change doesn’t happen. Leaders need to treat customer experience with the same rigor as sales or finance by setting goals, funding resources, and holding the organization accountable.
   
   Jeannie frequently points to the Forrester finding that only 3% of companies are truly customer-obsessed, yet those that are customer-obsessed report 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better customer retention. The math makes the case. Leadership just has to decide to act on it.

The 3 Big Takeaways

1. For CX to be effective, it must be adopted company wide.
2. Proactive CX will blow away reactive CX.
3. Research shows embracing CX can boost your profitability.

Next week, I’ll be taking a slightly different angle on CX — sharing a few of my own recent run-ins with organizations who clearly need to purchase a copy of Jeannie’s book.

Have you experienced your own CX nightmares? Do share!

Stay authentic — and stay tuned for some therapeutic CX venting in Week 16/2026…

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