Understanding the Business Impact of Client Pain Points

500+ views in 3 days told us one thing loud and clear: CX pros are done being seen as the “report readers.” If your post-purchase or CX readout sounds like: 👉 “Our NPS dropped 3 points” 👉 “Customers are frustrated with BOPIS pickup delays” 👉 “Only 60% of shoppers received their order within the 2-hour promise” ...and that’s where the conversation ends—you’ve lost the room. Execs don’t care about the insight. They care about what was done and what it drove. So flip the narrative. Here's a framework to help you shift from insights to action: Frame the problem: Every [frequency ], at least [ reach ] of our [ customers / employees / stakeholders ] experience [pain point tied to CX, e.g., delivery delays, inconsistent support, poor communication ], resulting in [ measurable CX loss, e.g., lapsed customers, increased churn, or loss revenue ]. This leads to [ implication #1, e.g., loss of repeat purchases, higher acquisition costs to replacechurned customers, etc ]. If this is not resolved by [ timeline, e.g., Q2 ], we risk [ implication #2,e.g., further erosion of brandloyalty, compounding operational inefficiencies, or falling behindrevenue target by $$]. Explain the action taken and measured impact (causation): To address this, we [action taken], focusing on [CX capability enhanced or fixed]. We prioritized [strategic lever: speed, clarity, personalization, etc.], because [reason this mattered to the customer/business]. Implementation was completed by [who or what team], and supported by [technology/process]. Within [timeframe], we saw [CX improvement metric] and [business outcome: cost savings, revenue lift, etc.], proving this action contributed to [strategic priority: loyalty, retention, CLTV, etc.]. 🔁 Example (BOPIS use case): Every week, at least 1 in 4 of our Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) customers experience frustration due to unclear pickup readiness notifications, resulting in missed expectations and 2x higher support calls for in-store pickup orders. This leads to lower post-purchase satisfaction and decreased repeat purchase intent. If this is not resolved by end of Q2, we risk eroding BOPIS loyalty, increasing in-store labor strain, and falling short of retention goals by $1.2M in CLTV opportunity. To address this, we redesigned our pickup communication flow, focusing on real-time order staging confirmation and clear ‘ready for pickup’ signals. We prioritized clarity and speed, because customers were arriving too early and getting frustrated by wait times—eroding trust and in-store efficiency. Implementation was completed by our CX and Store Ops teams, and supported by our customer notification platform and POS integration. Within 6 weeks, we saw a 19% increase in BOPIS satisfaction, a 26% drop in in-store wait complaints, and an 8% lift in repeat BOPIS purchases, proving this action contributed to increased customer lifetime value and reduced WISMO volume. https://lnkd.in/g-5_4Ck8

"You'll end up building a consulting business with terrible margins" is the most misguided advice I've ever received. That's what every VC told us when we decided to offer done-for-you services alongside our product vision. They weren't wrong about the margins (in the beginning). Or the scalability concerns. But they missed the bigger picture. We weren't building a service business, we were getting paid to earn deep customer insights. For six months, we handled our customers' most painful workflows manually. Yes, it was time-intensive. Yes, the unit economics looked terrible on a spreadsheet. But here's what happened: We discovered that the problem we thought we were solving wasn't actually the problem keeping our customers up at night. The real pain point was three layers deeper than what they told us in discovery calls. By doing the work ourselves, we uncovered the nuanced edge cases, the hidden dependencies, and the emotional triggers that no customer interview would have revealed. When we finally transformed all of that into our SaaS product, we weren't guessing at product-market fit. The result? Our first automated solution directly addressed workflows we had personally wrestled with hundreds of times. No feature bloat. No "nice-to-have" functionality that customers ignore. In the AI era, this approach becomes even more valuable. Anyone can build an AI tool now. But deep domain expertise, understanding not just what your customers do, but how they think, where they get stuck, and what success actually looks like – that's your competitive moat. Your AI agents are only as good as the domain knowledge and clear evals you can give them. The service margins eventually became comparable to our SaaS margins. But the learning process to get there was priceless. Sometimes the best way to understand a problem isn't to ask about it, it's to live it. Have you ever taken an unconventional path to validate your market? What did you discover that surprised you?

One missed deadline. $70,000 in margin gone. A client of ours recently had a supplier increase prices. They put a hard deadline: orders placed before April 10 were safe. All orders after? New prices. But their systems weren’t buttoned up and their team quoted the old price, then didn’t get it into the supplier system before the deadline. As a percentage of orders? Small. But margin impact? HUGE. You know what made it worse? There was no urgency from the team to see if the supplier would make an exception. The team didn’t understand the business impact. Operations teams walk a tightrope every day. One late file. One dropped follow-up. And the cost can be brutal. Ensuring not only your systems are locked in, but that your teams also know the impact of doing things right can be the difference between success and failure.

I just heard a discovery call that made me physically cringe. Rep: "What's your biggest pain point?" CTO: "Efficiency" Rep: * immediately gets excited and starts pitching efficiency features* Deal died 4 weeks later. Here's why this approach fails every time: "Efficiency" isn't a pain point. It's a buzzword that means nothing. Your prospects will give you these generic, surface-level answers until you force them to get specific. What the rep should have done: Question 1: "When you say efficiency, can you give me a specific example?" Question 2: "What's that costing you right now?" Question 3: "What happens if you don't fix this?" This simple sequence would have turned "efficiency" into: "We're losing $2 million annually because our deployment process takes 6 months instead of 2, which delays our go-to-market by a full quarter." Now you have: → A specific, measurable problem → Quantified business impact → Clear urgency to solve it The best reps I coach never accept surface-level answers. They dig until they hit the real business problem. Stop pitching to buzzwords. Start selling to specific business pain. Your prospects are waiting for someone smart enough to ask the right follow-up questions. Are you that person? — Want 15 strategies that move stalled deals forward in 2025? Go here: https://lnkd.in/e5CMHFih

There’s something about CFOs that forces you to think differently. They ask fewer questions, expect sharper answers, and have no patience for vague outcomes. The first time I presented CS impact to a CFO, I led with NPS and customer sentiment. He paused mid-slide and asked, “What’s the cost benefit here?” That moment shifted something for me. It challenged me to match the emotional value we deliver with hard business impact. To pair customer outcomes with commercial ones. And to realize that doing great work isn’t enough—you have to translate it into language the business understands. We had reduced onboarding time by 20%, which led to fewer support tickets. What we told the CFO: that saved us two FTEs in Q1. We had automated key parts of implementation. What we told the CFO: it shaved five days off setup and accelerated time-to-value and the ability to recognize revenue sooner. We had improved customer retention. What we told the CFO: it helped us hit revenue targets without increasing CAC. Same work. Same outcomes. But reframed in a way that landed instantly. Since then, this lens has changed how I think about impact. It sharpened how I communicate value—not just to CFOs, but across every function. And now, whenever I talk about CS, I always start with the same question: What would make this undeniable in a spreadsheet?