You've been in that meeting, where you've walked in with a clear customer problem, done the work, and watched the questions come back about cost, ROI, and timeline. Nothing about the experience at all.

In this episode, I'm thinking about the gap between how CX teams talk about customer problems and how leadership evaluates investment. It's not a belief gap. It's a translation problem.

And in 2026, with UK retail facing significant cost pressures, the approval bar for CX investment has moved.

I look at what operational metrics tend to carry more weight in business cases than satisfaction scores alone, why Curry's and Morrisons named customer experience as a commercial driver in their recent results, and the three commercial mechanisms that tend to appear in the cases that do get approved.

I also sit with a question I find uncomfortable: what happens to the human side of CX when every route to approval runs through efficiency language?

If you've got a CX Improvement proposal sitting in your drafts folder, this one's for you.

Did anything resonate with you from today's conversation? I'd love to know, especially your thoughts about the human side of CX in these investment discussions.

Get the full show notes with all frameworks and resources mentioned at https://wheresyourcustomer.com/19

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