"Every process problem is a customer problem in disguise."
That was the premise Annette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst, managing partners at Resonance Growth Partners, opened with in this session of the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Webinar Series. CI teams are already good at finding waste, reducing variation, and improving flow. Their argument was that the same breakdowns you track on an operational dashboard are felt by customers as something else entirely. A delay becomes uncertainty. A handoff becomes frustration. A defect is a broken promise, and a complicated process is just unnecessary effort. The operational problem and the customer problem are two sides of the same coin.
Annette made the point with a story from Germany, where she was presenting from. Her railway app showed her first train delayed and told her she had plenty of time to make a connection, so she stayed in a cafe rather than rushing to the platform. The train then arrived only a few minutes late, far short of the predicted delay, and by the time she realized it, her connection was gone. From a dashboard, that is a data accuracy issue or a schedule variance. Standing on the platform, it was a missed meeting, a scramble to find another route, and, because the next train was run by a different operator, a ticket she had already paid for that she could no longer use. One small operational miss produced uncertainty, frustration, effort, and extra cost.
Most of the customer feedback organizations collect is solicited: surveys, interviews, focus groups. Useful, and not going anywhere, even as response rates keep falling. But solicited feedback carries a built-in tax. The customer has to stop and do something to be heard, which means effort, and it only arrives after the fact. Annette's reframe was to treat the data already moving through your operation as customer signals. Repeat contacts, transfers between teams, escalations, a frontline nurse saying "I've heard this three times this week." None of it looks like customer feedback, which is exactly why it gets overlooked. These signals almost always show up before the survey score moves, before complaints rise, and before the customer leaves.
She framed it through Forrester's definition of customer experience: how customers perceive their interactions, and whether those interactions are effective, easy, and emotionally engaging. Perception is the operative word. It does not have to match the truth to be real to the customer. Operational friction hits all three at once. A delay makes the experience less easy. A process failure makes it less effective. Poor communication erodes trust.
Volker opened with his own story. During the last weeks of his wife's pregnancy, clinical staff took her vitals on paper to enter later, and reminded her to rate them a 10 on the survey, while she never once saw anyone act on the experience feedback she gave. The care was excellent; the experience loop was broken. He has seen the mirror image on the CI side. At a recent Lean conference, when he asked practitioners how they bring voice of the customer into their improvement work, the answers ranged from "customers are willing to pay for these steps" (said without having spent time with customers) to using quality and delivery data as a stand-in, to a handful of Kano or QFD interviews. CX teams often measure sentiment but cannot act on it. CI teams often act but anchor to operational data rather than what customers experience.
The fix they proposed is a three-step bridge: use both solicited and unsolicited signals to build cases for improvement, prioritize those cases by real business value, then run them through a normal CI problem-solving cycle. The middle step is the one that matters. Volker governs it with a simple Venn diagram: customer value on one side, business value on the other. Customers might love a price of zero; your NPS would soar and your business would fold. You might add a fee to a faster service and watch customers leave. The work worth doing sits in the overlap.
The first example was a 32-bed medical-surgical unit. The manager already received HCAHPS scores, complaints, service recovery reports, call light data, readmissions, staffing metrics, and safety events, all arriving separately, all summarized in monthly reports by which point the patients who gave the feedback had already gone home. The team was, in Volker's words, looking in the rearview mirror.
They changed one thing. They reshaped their existing daily huddle into a 15-minute patient signal huddle, adding solicited signals (HCAHPS comments, discharge surveys, follow-up calls, family feedback) and unsolicited ones (bedside rounding, caregiver observations, escalations, transfer delays, room changes) to the metrics they already reviewed. A friction theme surfaced fast: patients did not know when their imaging and tests would happen, and the waiting produced real anxiety. No survey had flagged it. Operational data showed transport and imaging running behind through the day. The team wrote a problem statement (patients are experiencing anxiety and dissatisfaction because diagnostic test timing and status are not consistently communicated), a frontline nurse took ownership, and the cycle compressed from the usual sixty-to-ninety-day survey-to-committee loop into daily signals, daily huddles, entries in KaiNexus, and local fixes within days.
The second example is the kind of result that gets a CFO's attention. A med tech company had heard for years, in surveys, that its biggest dissatisfier was the lack of transparency from the moment a product was prescribed to the moment it arrived. That opacity wrecked customers' patient scheduling and cost them revenue when a patient was booked but the product was late. The feedback kept getting deprioritized because no one had attached a business value to it.
Meanwhile, operations did what good operations teams do: drove out variation, cut lead times, and stood up an express shipping option to handle the customers who kept calling to expedite. Lead times dropped. Call volume did not. Roughly 40 percent of calls into the contact center were still some version of "where is my product?" and "can you expedite this?", and the number kept climbing. Digging into the behavioral data told the real story. Customers were calling because the process felt uncertain, that uncertainty correlated with churn to competitors, and the people who actually felt the pain were the scheduling staff, not the prescribing physicians the company had been interviewing.
With a business case finally attached, the team built an end-to-end status view: a delivery tracker with predictive machine learning that felt like watching a DoorDash order or a pizza tracker. They cut the underlying need for express shipping and let customers request an expedite themselves, with one click, through a GenAI chatbot. Call volume fell more than 30 percent. Annual shipping cost dropped by over $10 million. Reduced churn generated more than $20 million in annual recurring revenue. After that, the improvement and CX teams started hunting down other long-standing friction areas together.
As Annette put it, this is not about collecting more data. It is about enriching the signals you already use to decide what to work on. None of these moves required a major program. The huddles existed. The signals existed. What changed was using them to prioritize.
Volker closed with four steps any CI leader can begin on this week. Talk to your CX or patient experience team and ask what friction they have already documented. Audit your current project inventory and add a customer-friction element to each project, or notice where a friction theme has no project at all. Build a habit of feeding more signals into your improvement system, and use that system, KaiNexus or otherwise, as a prioritization engine, because most organizations are not short on dashboards, surveys, and alerts. They are short on knowing which problem to act on next. And when you close a project, check whether it actually changed the customer's experience and delivered the business value you expected.
The Q&A circled a few themes worth flagging. Frontline staff are the earliest and richest source of customer signals across every industry, and they burn out fast when they raise the same problem for years and nothing happens, a point Mark underscored with a story about a hospital pharmacy whose posted hours did not match its recorded phone hours, and the technician who said he had been reporting it for ages. Touch points are a signal in their own right: one team found that a ticket marked "first call resolved" and glowing green on the dashboard had actually been transferred several times, each transfer closing the ticket and hiding the real customer effort. Several people made the case for capturing positive signals too, so that an improvement team becomes a source of champions rather than the department that only ever brings bad news. And on conflicting feedback, both presenters argued that contradiction is a starting point, not a problem. In one case, opposite reviews of the same product turned out to reflect two segments: experienced users who loved it and newer users who could not work with it.
If your improvement portfolio shows operational impact but cannot say whether the work changed anything for customers, that gap is the opportunity. Making improvement work and its impact visible across teams and sites is what KaiNexus is built for.
Annette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst are managing partners at Resonance Growth Partners, where they help organizations connect customer understanding, employee insight, and business performance. Annette has more than a decade designing enterprise CX strategies, analytics frameworks, and feedback-to-action operating models, and is a Forrester-certified CX professional. Volker has more than 25 years turning customer insight into action at enterprise scale, with a background spanning CX and operational excellence leadership. Mark Graban, senior advisor at KaiNexus, hosted.
This session is part of the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Webinar Series. Coming up next, on July 22, KaiNexus CRO Jeff Roussel presents "Why Great CI Programs Don't Get Funded and What to Do About It." You can register and browse more than 100 recorded sessions in the webinars on-demand library. For weekly continuous improvement reading, see the KaiNexus blog, and for conversations between sessions, the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Podcast.
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