The Leadership Disconnect: Why Execs Are Missing the Customer Signal

Most executive teams genuinely believe they’re making customer-centric decisions. They track the dashboards, monitor the KPIs, and celebrate when the numbers look good. But here’s the hard truth: metrics alone can’t tell the customer story.

I’ve seen it too many times. Companies obsess over internal metrics - response time, uptime, SLAs, etc, without asking the more important question: what did this feel like for the customer?

• The internal report might show green.

• The customer is living red.

When Metrics Don't Show You Everything: The Danger of the Internal View

In one company I worked with, leadership proudly shared that their uptime was nearly flawless, an impressive number no doubt. But when we peeled back the layers, the customer experience told a different story. Frequent but "minor" incidents were causing regular disruption, eroding trust, and creating silent churn risk. The dashboards never showed it.

The customers felt every bit of it.

• This is the leadership disconnect.

• We manage to the metric.

• We ignore the impact.

Why It Matters

Customer Success leaders are often stuck translating internal scorecards to customer realities and not always successfully. When executives stay too far removed from the day-to-day customer journey, they miss the friction points, the effort, the emotional cost to the customer.

In today's SaaS economy, if you don’t feel what your customers feel, you can’t grow what your customers grow.

If you’re serious about retention, expansion, and customer-led growth, you need more than operational dashboards, you need customer impact dashboards.

What To Do: Closing the Gap

1. Create a Voice of Customer Program that uncovers the customer's effort at moments of truth

• Your VoC program should dig into the friction points and the 'transactional' moments where customer effort spikes, where they hit roadblocks, where their trust is tested.

  • Ask the right questions. Not "how are we doing?" but "how hard was this for you?"

    
    

2. Build a Customer Impact Dashboard

• Make customer impact the twin of your operational success.

• Take the top 10 operational metrics your C-level team tracks. Now define the customer impact version of each one.

  • Ie. your system uptime may look pristine, but what’s the frequency and severity of the incidents your customers experience?

  • Don’t just track internal productivity - measure customer effort to resolve.

• If you don’t have the data, ask:

- Can we get it?

- How should we track it?

- Who owns this customer journey? Who owns this moment of truth?

Put those impact metrics on a dashboard that sits right next to your ops dashboard. They belong together.

Quick Win: Start This Week

Take just one internal metric your leadership team loves and find its customer-side counterpart.

Example:

• Internal: Up-time SLA

• Customer Impact: # of incidents, or % customer base impacted by incident

  
  

Key Takeaways

• Metrics alone can’t tell the customer story.

• Executives must get closer to the customer reality to make the right investments.

• Customer governance and impact dashboards can close the gap.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

👉 Follow Xina on LinkedIn for more real-talk CX and CS strategy.

👉 Subscribe to the blog at cspillars.com for weekly insights you can actually use.