GUEST COLUMN:
Jesper With-Fogstrup
CEO
Moneypenny
Businesses today have more data than ever before. We can measure response times, customer satisfaction scores, website traffic, conversion rates and countless other metrics.
Yet despite all this information, many organisations still struggle to answer a surprisingly simple question:
Are our customer interactions actually helping customers achieve what they set out to do?
Too often, businesses focus on activity rather than outcomes. A call was answered. An email was responded to. A chatbot handled an enquiry.
A customer service ticket was closed. All of those things may be true, but they don't necessarily tell us whether value was created.
What customers care about is progress. Did they get an answer? Was the issue resolved? Did somebody take ownership? Did the interaction move them closer to the outcome they wanted?
These are the questions that matter.
Looking Beyond Customer Service
Customer experience is often viewed as a function of customer service teams, but its impact reaches much further than that: Every interaction shapes how customers perceive an organisation.
A positive experience can strengthen trust, improve loyalty and increase the likelihood of future business. A poor experience can quietly undermine a relationship that may have taken years to build.
What's interesting is that customers rarely judge organisations on individual interactions alone. Instead, they judge them on how easy the business was to deal with overall. Was the process straightforward? Did the organisation understand their needs? How much effort did they have to invest to achieve their goal?
This is where outcomes become so important.
The organisations that consistently create great customer experiences are often the ones that focus more on helping customers make progress.
The Hidden Impact on Productivity
There is also a strong connection between customer experience and productivity that is often overlooked. When interactions are handled effectively, work moves forward. Problems are solved more quickly. Decisions are made faster. Customers require fewer follow-ups. And teams spend less time revisiting issues that should have been resolved the first time around.
In contrast, when customers are left waiting, transferred between departments or forced to repeat information, organisations create unnecessary friction. And that friction carries a cost. It consumes time, creates frustration and diverts attention away from higher-value work.
For growing businesses in particular, removing that friction can have a significant impact on performance.
What This Means for Welsh Businesses
Across Wales, businesses are navigating a challenging environment. Competition remains high. Customer expectations continue to rise. Technology is evolving rapidly.
In this environment, experience can become a powerful differentiator. Products and services can often be replicated. Pricing advantages rarely last forever. The quality of the customer experience, however, is much harder to copy.
That is why businesses should think carefully about how they measure success. Rather than asking: “How quickly did we respond?” A more useful question may be: “What happened because we responded?” Did an enquiry convert? Did a customer stay loyal? Did an issue get resolved first time? Did the interaction create momentum?
Those outcomes often tell us far more about business performance than operational metrics alone.
The AI Opportunity
The rise of AI has made this conversation even more relevant.
Many organisations are exploring how automation can improve efficiency and responsiveness. Used well, AI can remove administrative burdens, improve availability and help businesses scale. But there is a danger in measuring AI success solely through speed or cost reduction.
Customers do not judge organisations on how efficiently a process operates behind the scenes. They judge them on whether the experience delivered the outcome they needed.
The businesses seeing the greatest success are using technology to remove friction while allowing people to focus on empathy, judgement and problem-solving. In other words, they are combining efficiency with effectiveness.
Measuring What Matters
As organisations look for new ways to improve productivity, strengthen customer relationships and drive sustainable growth, the opportunity may not be to do more. It may be to make every customer interaction count for more.
When businesses focus on outcomes rather than activity, customer experience stops being a support function and becomes a genuine driver of commercial success.
Not all business value appears on a dashboard. Some of the most important gains are found in the everyday moments that help customers solve problems, make decisions and move forward with confidence.
The businesses that thrive in the years ahead will be those that focus less on counting interactions and more on understanding their impact.
Because ultimately, growth is rarely driven by activity alone. It comes from creating experiences that build trust, remove friction and help customers achieve what they set out to do.
