Why Do Boards Not Care About Customers?
I have a question, and it’s not rhetorical.
Why do boards not care about customers?
Customers are the ones…
Buying the product
Helping to fund the growth
Keeping the lights on
And yet when the board deck hits the table, customers might as well be Casper the Friendly Ghost.
The Numbers Don’t Lie. Boards Just Ignore Them.
Let’s start with the receipts, shall we?
CX scores have flatlined into a coma
U.S. customer satisfaction is back to 2012 levels.
Only 6% of brands improved CX in 2025. 73% stagnated. 21% got worse. This isn’t a dip. It’s a 12-year flatline.
Meanwhile, profit margins quietly climbed
Corporate profit margins rose to roughly 11%, up 3–4 points over the past decade, even as satisfaction sank.
That’s not “operational excellence.” That’s extraction—squeezing more from customers while giving them less than the bare minimum.
Leaders are operating in a bubble
There’s a 31-point perception gap between how executives think customers feel and how customers actually feel.
87% of execs believe they’re effectively acting on feedback. Less than 60% of employees or customers agree. That’s not misalignment. That’s corporate gaslighting.
What this actually means. Flat CX scores aren’t “steady performance.” They’re the sound of a market that’s stopped giving second chances. Margins built on customer indifference don’t hold—they snap. And the cracks are showing.
Why Boards Tune CX Out
Boards aren’t ignoring CX by accident. They’re ignoring it because the system rewards them for doing so.
1. Short-term profit blinds them. Boards are drunk on pricing power. They’ve learned they can squeeze customers and still post record earnings. That trick works….until it doesn’t. Margins built on indifference look great on a chart right up until they collapse.
2. CX isn’t in the boardroom. Finance, ops, legal, and risk get seats. CX doesn’t. It’s not a standing agenda item, not tied to compensation, and rarely tied to shareholder pressure. If it’s not measured, it’s ignored.
3. Incentives make mediocrity look smart. When bonuses are tied to quarterly EPS, cutting costs looks like good leadership. Investing in loyalty looks “soft.” Boards reward executives for breadcrumbing their customers and call it efficiency.
4. They confuse lagging indicators with success. Boards love revenue charts because they lag behind reality. CX is a leading indicator. By the time revenue reflects customer pain, the damage is already done. But short-term thinkers don’t care about “already done.” They care about “this quarter.”
5. They assume customers will tolerate it forever. This might be the biggest lie of all. Customers tolerate a bad experience until someone gives them a better one. By then, it’s too late to buy loyalty back.
What They Miss While They’re Counting
Boards love numbers. They just love the wrong ones.
They’ll track revenue, CAC, and EBITDA down to the decimal while ignoring the data that actually keeps a business alive.
Retention is cheaper than acquisition. Getting a new customer costs 5 to 25x more than keeping the one you already have. Every time CX declines, that acquisition bill gets bigger. Boards don’t feel it immediately but the CFO eventually does.
Loyalty multiplies profit. A 5% bump in retention can spike profits by as much as 95%. That’s not wishful thinking. That’s margin compounding. Loyalty builds profit streams that don’t need constant feeding.
Poor CX is a silent tax. Bad experiences bleed out 15 to 40% of revenue through rework, churn, reputational damage, and wasted labor. Boards don’t see this because it hides below the surface. By the time it hits the P&L, it’s already done its damage.
Lagging indicators don’t protect moats. Revenue lags. CX leads. When boards ignore leading indicators, they mistake short-term health for stability — right up to the quarter everything caves in.
Boards That Ignore CX Get Caught Sleeping
Everyone thinks they’ll be the exception. No one ever is.
History’s full of companies that coasted on pricing power, ignored their customers, and swore it wouldn’t catch up to them. It always does. Here are some examples:
Frontier Airlines: Axed phone support entirely to cut costs, leaving customers stuck with a chatbot. It’s now a case study in how “efficiency” at the expense of service torches loyalty and damages reputation.
Sears: Ignored decades of customer frustration, cut service to the bone, and kept leaning on real estate and legacy name recognition. Customers moved on. Market followed.
Bed Bath & Beyond: Over-relied on pricing games and coupons, let store experience rot, and assumed customers wouldn’t leave. They did. The company’s bankruptcy was sealed long before the final filings.
BlackBerry Limited: Got complacent on security dominance and ignored the user experience revolution happening around it. Lost an entire market segment almost overnight.
CX decline doesn’t show up in Q1. It shows up all at once. By the time boards see it, the churn’s already happened, the damage is already baked in, and “transformation” decks start flying around like it wasn’t their fault.
The Reckoning’s Coming
You can’t starve the customer and expect the balance sheet to keep smiling forever. You can’t breadcrumb your way to loyalty. And you sure as hell can’t spreadsheet your way out of a trust collapse.
CX isn’t a soft metric. It’s the early warning system for competitive failure. Every year of neglect is a fuse you’re lighting. The “we’ll deal with it later” crowd always ends up dealing with it all at once.
For years, boards have treated CX like optional frosting. Cute when there’s extra budget. Disposable when there’s not.
When the music finally stops, the companies that invested in loyalty will still have customers. The ones that didn’t will be left explaining to investors why their once-adoring market suddenly doesn’t care.
You can’t keep ignoring the people funding your salaries and bonuses and expect the story to end well.
This is the bill coming due. 🥂