We’ve seen a client organization suffer from a massive decrease in order input for no apparent reason. The market was strong, and the product was in good demand. It took six months to find and fix the root cause. With a recent finance software update, the credit approval process had been changed, and the system did not accept orders above a certain amount from 75% of the company’s customers anymore. The salespeople cried foul early but weren’t heard until the business had already taken a severe hit, and management was forced to intervene. It’s a terrible yet common management disease to optimize isolated parts of the organization without considering the possible effect of those changes in the overall context. Organizations have become so complex today that simple cause-effect relationships are hard to identify. They are ecosystems.

Changes to one aspect also reverberate in other parts, and the effects usually never manifest at the source but typically somewhere else. In the example above, the finance organization was still celebrating the successful implementation of their new software when the business was already tanking.

Waning customer loyalty is even harder to understand. When it happens, then it does because of a multitude of reasons. A new salesperson they can’t connect with, cryptic order acknowledgments due to a software update, a hard-to-understand invoice, or cold, uncaring customer service. Or all of it. Customer loyalty is the result of a functioning ecosystem. When every aspect plays in harmony with all others. Behaviors, Systems, procedures, and even the look & feel are in sync. That’s what we call the CX ecosystem.