By Balakrishna Murthy
Most GCC businesses have confused warmth with customer experience. They are not the same thing, and the difference is costing them revenue.
Warmth governs how customers feel during high-touch moments: the relationship, the personal connection, the culture of the welcome. The GCC has world-class capability here.
Customer experience governs something else entirely: whether your brand delivered what it promised, whether help was available when your customer needed it, whether the problem got resolved the first time, and whether the process served the customer or the organisation.
These are not moments of warmth. They are the operational moments that determine whether your customer comes back.
When those moments fail, the consequences become behavioural. A customer who hits friction does not file a complaint. They reduce their spend, quietly defect, and tell the story of what broke, not what worked. The damage shows up in retention numbers, revenue, and the conversations your customers are having right now.
Some argue the real opportunity lies in the surprising gesture; the moment customers remember and share. They are not wrong. But Matthew Dixon's research across more than 75,000 customer interactions, published in Harvard Business Review, found that reducing effort drives loyalty more reliably than delight.
Delight is the reward for getting operations right; it is not a substitute for it.
In 20 years here, I have watched confident leadership teams rely on strong NPS scores, unaware that operational friction was quietly draining their revenue.
Hundreds of millions in revenue at risk, hidden behind a score that looked healthy and was never questioned. Customers not complaining, loyal on paper, yet spending less every month. No metric connected experience quality to actual spending behaviour.
That is not a leadership failure. It is a measurement gap most organisations in this region have not yet closed.
Friction needs to be a financial line item, not a service quality concern. CX accountability needs to sit at P&L level. The measure needs to shift from how good the welcome feels to how much the friction costs.
Somewhere in your organisation right now, customers are hitting friction.
Most businesses never measure what it costs. That gap is where the revenue leaks.
Every CX team has a growing list of customer pain points, employee feedback, and improvement ideas, but not everything can happen at once. In this article, Lauren Feehrer, CCXP explores how Agile thinking can help CX leaders prioritize effectively, reduce overwhelm, and turn insight into meaningful progress.
Let’s face a hard truth: not every organization is ready—or willing—to take customer experience seriously. That might sound harsh to some ears, especially in a
Explore this valuable resource to enhance your customer experience practice.
Explore this valuable resource to enhance your customer experience practice.
