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A few years ago I went out to a company where the leadership was scratching their heads over a nine-point drop in NPS (Net Promoter Score, a measure of customers’ willingness to recommend the company) in a single quarter. They were hiring an agency, running qualitative research, calling in consultants. Meanwhile, sitting in the call centre was an operator who explained to me over coffee, in about five minutes, exactly why customers were leaving. A change to the billing system meant people were receiving invoices with different amounts than what was in their contract. Nearly one in three customers was calling about it. She had reported it to her team leader three times. It went nowhere.
This isn’t an isolated story. It’s actually a pretty typical one.
The frontline sees the problem first. And usually it’s the only one who sees it.
Frontline employees, whether operators, shop assistants, service technicians or receptionists, sit in a position no survey can ever buy. They talk to dozens of customers a day. They see the emotions, hear the exact wording of complaints, and pick up on patterns long before those patterns show up in the data. When a product starts to fail, they know about it on Monday morning. When something breaks in a process, they know after the third phone call. The regular NPS survey will catch it six weeks later, and only if the customer is fed up enough to fill in the questionnaire.
This isn’t just my personal impression. The classic study by James Heskett, Earl Sasser and Leonard Schlesinger, published in Harvard Business Review under the title Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work, made one point back in the 1990s that still holds true today: customer experience is born on the frontline, and the quality of the interaction with the employee in direct contact with the customer is the single strongest predictor of customer loyalty. Heskett later added that people on the frontline know about operational problems on average months before central management does. This isn’t new. It’s been known for thirty years.
And yet, in practice, this information is poorly collected. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report states that only 23% of employees worldwide are genuinely engaged. In Europe it’s just 13%, the worst of any region in the world. One of the consistently strong drivers of engagement across Gallup’s reports is the item “at work, my opinion seems to count”. And that’s exactly the item that European companies have been failing on for years.
Put it together. The people on the frontline hold information the company desperately needs, and at the same time they don’t feel there’s any point in sharing it.
So why doesn’t it work?
I’ve been asking myself that question for a long time. The reasons why companies systematically ignore their own people as a source of CX (customer experience) insights basically come down to four. And none of them is “ill will”. It’s more a mix of laziness, structure and fear.
First: no one ever decided it was someone’s job. Voice of the Customer (VoC, the systematic collection of customer feedback) has an owner in every larger company. A CX manager, an insights team, someone. Voice of the Employee (VoE), if it exists at all, sits in HR and measures engagement, not the operational problems customers are running into. These two worlds pass each other by. The CX team doesn’t read the HR survey, and the HR team has no reason to go to the CX manager with what the operators are saying about the product.
Second: middle management acts as a filter. A call centre team leader has twenty things on their plate. When an operator tells them for the umpteenth time that billing is making errors, the team leader either logs it in an internal system (where it goes nowhere), or tells their manager, who tells their manager. Along the way the information gets diluted, generalised, and loses its urgency. In organisational literature this is called information attenuation. Information loses its edge, its urgency and its context as it travels up.
Third: employees have learned to stay quiet. If you tell your boss three times that you have an idea and three times it goes nowhere, the fourth time you say nothing. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School calls this psychological safety. Without it, no one says anything, even when they have good reason to. Her long-running research (summarised in her 2018 book The Fearless Organization) shows something simple: in teams with low psychological safety, people don’t report mistakes, problems or ideas. And without that, your frontline people will never tell you anything useful.
Fourth: management doesn’t trust anecdotes. “That’s just one customer.” “That’s just the operator’s subjective impression.” “We don’t have data on that.” I hear this all the time. The paradox is that an NPS with n=240 from an online questionnaire is treated as the holy grail, while the operator who spoke to 400 people in a week and heard the same complaint from 80 of them is “just an anecdote”.
What to do about it in practice
This isn’t a problem you’ll solve with a single workshop. But you can get it moving. Here are a few things that work in practice.
- Set up a collection ritual.
And I mean it. The smallest company where I saw this work had 12 people in customer care. Every Friday they sat down for 30 minutes and went through what they’d heard from customers that week. It wasn’t used to evaluate the agents, it was purely a way of gathering signals. Someone took notes, someone facilitated, and the output went into an internal Notion document that both the CX manager and the product manager read. No questionnaires, no spreadsheets. Half an hour a week.Bain & Company described the concept of inner loop / outer loop as part of their Net Promoter System methodology. The inner loop is a quick response at the level of the individual customer and the individual employee; the outer loop is systemic change. This methodology has long argued that companies which involve the frontline in discussions of customer feedback resolve the root causes of problems significantly faster than those relying only on central reporting.
- Give it an owner. And the authority to act.
If no one has “collecting insights from frontline people and passing them on” in their job description, nobody will do it. In smaller companies this can be part of the CX manager’s role. In larger ones there should be a separate function, someone who systematically categorises signals from the frontline, connects them to data from the VoC programme, and pushes them through to product, marketing or operations. But without authority it doesn’t work. If that person has no leverage to push, all they’re doing is keeping records. - Connect it to the data you already have.
This is something almost no one does. The operator says at the Friday meeting “people keep calling about their invoices”. You already have that data in your CRM (Customer Relationship Management, the system for managing customer relationships) or in your ticketing system. All you need to do is look at how many tickets in the “billing” category you’ve had over the last three weeks compared to the average. If it matches up, you have a qualitative hypothesis backed by quantitative confirmation. This is called triangulation, and in CX practice it’s gold. You don’t have to wait for the quarterly survey, you don’t have to hire a research agency. You already have it in-house. - Close the loop back to employees.
The worst thing you can do is collect feedback and then do nothing with it. Or do something with it but never tell the people who gave it. When an operator reports a billing problem and a month later it gets fixed, she needs to know about it. Otherwise she won’t bother next time. Back to Gallup: their data shows that the feeling “my opinion at work counts for something” is consistently one of the strongest predictors of whether an employee will stay and whether they’ll go beyond what’s in their job description. And it’s something a company can actually influence. All it takes is going back with an answer. - Teach management to ask differently.
Instead of “do you have any feedback?” (which almost no one will answer) try specific questions. “What complaint have you heard three times this week?” “What surprised you about a customer in the last two days?” “If you could ask the CEO one thing about the product tomorrow, what would it be?” Specific questions get specific answers. Open questions generate fluff, specific questions generate data. This small change in framing doubles what you get out of the meeting. Try it.
It sounds simple. It isn’t.
Most of the things I’ve described aren’t expensive. A half-hour weekly ritual costs nothing. Connecting tickets to qualitative feedback costs nothing either. Changing how you ask is free. What costs time and political energy is breaking down the wall between HR, CX and operations. And convincing management that the operator with ten years of experience knows more about customers than an outside consultant does. That’s the hard part.
So the real question isn’t whether you have people on your team who could tell you what customers actually want. You do. The question is whether you have the courage to trust them, and a system that can carry that information to the place where it can be turned into a decision.
Otherwise all you’re left with is that questionnaire with n=240. And it won’t tell you what the operator figured out on the Monday of week three.
