Part 3: How to Put Customers Back in the Room
Let's be clear: You will never, ever get a board to care about customers. Not anymore.
But you can make them act.
For the last two articles, we've laid out the problem. Part 1: We saw how customer excellence (via the Baldrige Award) used to be a board-level bragging right, structurally incentivized by the government. Part 2: We tracked how that system was replaced by shareholder primacy, where institutional investors became the board's real audience, and short-term stock performance became the only goal.
This created an accountability vacuum where customers vanished from all good governance reports—SEC filings, proxy statements, and investor voting guidelines.
So, how do you fix it? You don't fix it with a "customer is important" slide. You don't fix it by begging for a seat at the table. You stop trying to win their hearts. You stop appealing to their better nature.
It's time to play their game better than they do.
Boards don't respond to nice. They respond to numbers, risk, and—above all—shareholder pressure. If you want to put customers back in the room, you need to bring receipts.
The Receipts: CX Is a Financial Asset, Not a Soft Metric
Boards love numbers. Let's give them some. The data linking customer experience to hard financial outperformance isn't soft. It's unassailable.
The Stock Market Receipt: A 15-year study (2000-2014) of a real, audited investment fund showed that a portfolio of companies with high customer satisfaction (ACSI) generated a cumulative return of 518%. The S&P 500? 31%. The market systematically misprices customer satisfaction. This isn't an opinion. It's a trillion-dollar blind spot.
The Growth Receipt: McKinsey analysis shows that CX leaders achieve more than double the revenue growth of CX laggards.
The Profit Receipt: This one is a classic for a reason. A 5% increase in customer retention—the direct result of good CX—can boost profits by a range of 25% to 95%.
This isn't marketing fluff. This is margin. This is the economic engine that boards are paid to oversee.
Case Study: Growth vs. Engineering
This isn't just a theory. It’s the difference between building a business and harvesting one.
The Growth Play (Telecom): A mobile telecom operator was facing an existential crisis from high customer churn. The CEO went all-in on a radical turnaround focused on eliminating customer pain points—abolishing restrictive contracts, investing in the network. The results: customer satisfaction ratings jumped from worst to first, churn was cut by 75%, and revenues nearly doubled over three years, tripling the growth rate of competitors.
The B2B Play (Dow): This B2B giant mapped its customer journey and made a key discovery: customer pain points almost always aligned with employee pain points. By fixing their internal workflows to align with customer needs, they found that CX improvements were a direct driver of sustained business growth.
This is experience-led growth. The alternative is what most boards are doing now: financial engineering. Squeezing customers with ancillary fees, cutting service to the bone, and optimizing for the quarterly report. This approach torches brand equity and creates a transactional and disloyal customer base that will bolt the second a better option appears.
The Playbook: How to Weaponize CX
So, how do you, the operator or CX leader, use this? You stop talking about delight and start talking about leverage. You have to reframe the conversation in the only language the board understands. You stop calling it customer experience. You call it what it is: a material, intangible asset.
The board's governance gap (no SEC, SOX, or proxy rules for CX) is a weakness. Here’s how you exploit it.
1. Introduce a Baldrige 2.0
The original Baldrige worked because it was a public, rigorous system of accountability. The new market needs a new system. Let's call it a Customer Capital Scorecard, shall we?
This isn't a government award. It's an investor-demanded, data-driven rating system that frames customer satisfaction and loyalty as a material, intangible asset—'Customer Capital'—that boards have a fiduciary duty to oversee.
It's a Baldrige 2.0 that translates CX into the language of ESG and risk. It would track two things:
Customer Outcomes (The Lagging Indicators): Customer Loyalty (NPS vs. industry), Customer Retention (Net Revenue Retention, Churn Rate).
Management Systems (The Leading Indicators): Voice of Customer (VoC) maturity, Service & Recovery effectiveness, CX Governance & Culture.
This distills CX into a single, transparent score (like an ESG rating) that investors can finally use to assess and benchmark companies.
2. Speak the Language of the CFO
You, the operator, must be the one to build this scorecard internally. You have to become adept at quantifying the ROI of your work.
STOP SAYING: We need to invest in CX to reduce customer complaints.
START SAYING: A 10% reduction in service friction will cut our cost-to-serve by $4M. A 5% improvement in retention, driven by this initiative, will add $22M in high-margin revenue by preventing churn. Here is the financial model.
You stop talking about delight and start talking about Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Net Revenue Retention, and Cost-to-Serve.
3. Use the Shareholder Levers
This is the final move. Once you have the data, you use the board's real audience against them.
The Activist Lever: Activist investors love finding undervalued assets. A company with high (or improving) customer satisfaction but a lagging stock price is a target. You can arm these groups with the data that proves the board is mismanaging a material asset and leaving alpha on the table.
The ESG Lever: The S in ESG is your governance hook. The board is already terrified of its ESG score. Start framing customer issues as social issues. (e.g., Our predatory fee structure and dark patterns are a massive reputational and regulatory risk that impacts our brand value and social license to operate.)
The Proxy Lever: Start pushing for customer metrics to be included in the proxy statement and tied to executive compensation. The board won't do it voluntarily. But when a large enough investor (like an activist or a pension fund) starts asking why compensation is tied 100% to stock price and 0% to the health of the primary revenue-generating asset, the board will have no choice but to listen.
The End Game: Power, Not Kindness
The accountability vacuum is total. Boards won't move because you show them a heart-warming customer video. They'll move when you show them they are failing in their fiduciary duty to manage a material asset.
They'll move when their stock is systematically mispriced because of their negligence.
They'll move when you prove that poor CX is a financial risk bigger than cybersecurity.
Stop asking for permission. Stop begging to be cared about.
You put customers back in the boardroom not through kindness. You do it through power. You do it by speaking the only language the board understands: money, risk, and the threat of an angry shareholder.