‘Customer Experience Is Built In Conversations, Not Frameworks’ by Freya Finnerty
There’s a familiar rhythm to CX work. The right people in the room, the right frameworks on the table – and for a moment, it feels like real progress.
But too often, that momentum fades, and nothing actually changes.
In this refreshingly honest and practical piece, WiCX Inner Circle member and Senior Change & Delivery Consultant at Enfuse Group, Freya Finnerty, challenges one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in our industry: that better frameworks don’t automatically lead to better customer experiences.
Drawing on her experience facilitating CX workshops, Freya unpacks why so many well-intentioned initiatives stall, despite alignment in the room and clarity on the problems. Instead, she invites us to look at what truly drives change inside organisations – the conversations we often avoid.
From budget ownership to accountability and competing priorities, this article is a powerful reminder that customer experience isn’t built in workshops or stored in journey maps – it’s shaped in the moments where teams choose to have the conversations that actually change how work gets done.
I've facilitated enough CX workshops to recognise a pattern.
The room fills with all the right people: marketing, digital, operations, customer service. We discuss the topic of the day. We apply all the frameworks we know. We might map the customer journey, identify pain points, or prioritise opportunities.
Everyone leaves energised.
You can almost feel the collective relief as people leave the room. We’ve done something. We’ve mapped the problem. We’ve moved it forward.
Three months later, nothing has changed.
The journey map sits in SharePoint. The prioritised backlog hasn't been touched. And customer satisfaction scores are exactly where they were before the workshop.
Over the years, I’ve realised that the problem is not in the workshops per se.
It’s in relying on them instead of having the conversations that actually change how organisations work.
Why We Fall For The Framework Illusion
CX professionals love a good framework.
They give us a shared language that helps us make sense of complex customer experiences. But they are not magic bullets. They can’t tell us who's going to fund the improvements, resolve competing priorities, or tell us what happens when the quick win conflicts with a department's quarterly targets.
Those problems require uncomfortable conversations.
Research shows that 49% of executives cite leadership misalignment as an impediment to CX transformation, whilst 43% point to organisational silos. Beyond Philosophy's study of CX professionals found that "silo mentality" is the biggest organisational hurdle to improving experience.
The frameworks identify the problems. But fixing them? That’s on us. We can do it through power conversations.
“The frameworks identify the problems. But fixing them? That’s on us. We can do it through power conversations.”
— Freya Finnerty
What Actually Changes Customer Experience
Nearly 80% of consumers say that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the most important elements of positive customer experience. Here’s what I've noticed separates CX initiatives that strive in this direction, from the ones that don’t:
1. You Have The Budget Conversation
‘We all agree this is the top priority for customers. So which team is cutting something from their roadmap to fund it?’
Most CX leads avoid this conversation. It's uncomfortable, it exposes competing priorities, and it forces trade-offs that people would rather postpone. But without it, nothing changes. And six months later, you're running another workshop to identify the same pain points.
PwC's research shows that 32% of customers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. Your frameworks have exposed this before. What they don't tell you is who's willing to sacrifice short-term metrics to prevent it.
2. You Have The Accountability Conversation
‘For this customer outcome, who has end-to-end ownership?’
In most organisations, the answer is: no one specifically.
Marketing owns acquisition. Digital owns the website. Operations owns fulfilment. When a customer experience spans all three, and most do, accountability fractures.
Some teams spend hours mapping a journey, only to realise at the end that seven different people would need to agree before a single change could happen. That's an organisational design problem.
According to CX Dive, behavioral researchers call this “group identity bias”: the tendency for people to prioritise their in-group over the larger whole. Marketing protects its brand, operations protects its service level agreements, and product protects its roadmap. Each optimises locally whilst the customer journey fragments globally.
Breaking this requires explicit conversations about where accountability actually sits.
3. You Confront the Prioritisation Conversation
‘Everyone wants to improve CX. But what happens when it conflicts with hitting this quarter's revenue target?’ This reveals whether CX is genuinely a priority or just something people say in strategy documents.
I've been part of meetings where a team identified a change that would significantly improve customer experience but slightly reduce short-term conversion. The room goes silent. No one wants to sacrifice quarterly metrics for long-term customer satisfaction.
But that conversation about what the organisation is genuinely willing to trade off is key. Until you've had it, you don't actually know what your priorities are.
Why These Conversations Are Hard
There's a reason we reach for frameworks instead of having these conversations.
Frameworks feel productive. They let everyone feel like they're contributing without anyone having to make difficult decisions.
Conversations are messy. They expose tensions and require people to admit their team's priorities conflict with customer needs. They demand that someone give something up.
But here’s an uncomfortable truth: customers experience your internal misalignment as friction. If teams are optimising locally and protecting departmental targets, customers feel it as delays, handovers, repetition, and inconsistency. That gap doesn't close through better journey mapping. It closes through tough conversations that change how teams work together.
Companies like Indeed took the approach of creating a shared language around data to help CX practitioners create a cohesive narrative about who the customer is and what they need. That's not a framework decision. That's a leadership decision to have the conversation about alignment.
Where To Start
If you're responsible for CX in your organisation, here's what I suggest:
Stop running workshops for a moment. Instead, identify one customer pain point that matters to the business and ask yourself: ‘What conversation am I avoiding?’
Is it the conversation with finance about reallocating budget? The conversation with IT about decision-making authority? The conversation with your peer about who actually owns this outcome?
Whatever it is, that's where you start.
Customer experience improves when someone is willing to sit in a room and say: 'Here's what we need to change about how we work together. Here's what I'm willing to own. Here's what I need from you.'
“Customer experience improves when someone is willing to sit in a room and say: ‘Here’s what we need to change about how we work together. Here’s what I’m willing to own. Here’s what I need from you.’”
Keep the Conversation Going
Freya’s insights remind us that CX transformation doesn’t happen in workshops or frameworks alone – it happens in the conversations we’re willing to have.
Inside the WiCX Inner Circle, we create spaces for exactly these kinds of conversations.
From member-led discussions and working sessions to webinars and live podcasts, our community brings together women shaping customer experience across industries to tackle the real challenges that drive change.
If you want to continue exploring how to turn insights into action and be part of these conversations, you can join the WiCX Inner Circle waitlist today.