DRI™ | Coherence · Lens 02 · The Customer

“We put the customer first.”

Every support agent is trained to resolve issues. We measure satisfaction. We invest in the customer experience. Our people care.

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The person your customer reaches knows the fix. They can’t authorize it.

The agent takes the call. They know what’s wrong. They know what would fix it. But the refund needs a manager. The exception needs a policy review. The real fix needs a product change that’s not on the roadmap. Your customer hears “let me check on that” and feels forgotten.

FM-01 · Responsibility Compression at the Edge

The customer experiences a structural gap as a service failure. They’re not wrong.

“We deliver a seamless customer experience.”

Our teams are aligned around the customer journey. Marketing, product, support, and success all work together. We meet weekly to stay coordinated.

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Every team did their part. Your customer still fell through the cracks.

They bought through marketing’s promise. Onboarded through product’s design. Hit a wall in support’s queue. Churned before success could reach them. Each team hit their own numbers. Nobody owned what happened between teams. Your customer didn’t experience six teams. They experienced one company that felt like six.

FM-07 · Coordination Decay

If no one owns the handoff, the customer lives in the gap.

“Our customer metrics are strong.”

CSAT is trending up. First response time is down. NPS is above industry benchmark. The team is delivering on every KPI we track.

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The scores improved. The experience didn’t.

CSAT went up because you changed when the survey fires — right after resolution, before the customer lives with the answer. First response time dropped because the first response is a template, not a solution. Detractors stopped filling out surveys. The metrics are real. What they measure is not what your customer feels.

FM-04 · Metric Shadowing

When you optimize the score instead of the outcome, the gap migrates to the customer.

“Our support team is incredibly resourceful.”

When the system doesn’t cover an edge case, our people find a way. We’re proud of agents who go above and beyond to solve problems creatively.

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Your best agent has a system nobody else can see.

She built a way to handle the cases the tool can’t. A personal spreadsheet. A sequence of steps she figured out herself. When she’s out sick, the queue backs up and nobody knows why. Her workaround keeps things running. It lives in her head, not in your system. When she leaves, it leaves too.

FM-05 · Normalized Workarounds

If the customer experience depends on one person’s memory, it’s not a process. It’s a single point of failure.

“We learn from every customer interaction.”

Feedback loops are in place. We do post-mortems after escalations. Voice of customer reports go to leadership monthly. We listen and we improve.

Drag to examine

Your customer reported this eighteen months ago. The system forgot.

The complaint was filed. The ticket was closed. The root cause was never fixed because the system records what happened without recording why. Now the same problem is back. The organization treats it as new. Your customer doesn’t. They remember. They just stopped believing you would.

FM-17 · Structural Amnesia

The system forgets what the customer cannot.

Every lens sees the same system. Shared language is how the system starts to learn.

These aren’t failures of people. They’re the physics of organizations operating at scale and speed.