The dark matter of customer experience
Moving from symptoms to underlying causes.
Hello readers…
A slightly different format this week, starting with some lessons I learned about the power of incentives and org design to shape customer experience, followed by some of the best things I’ve consumed over the last fortnight. Including assessing talent, using Claude, nuclear energy, meta-trends and poetry.
Let me know your thoughts!
The dark matter of customer experience
One of my favourite projects started as a seemingly routine CX strategy piece for a telco, but evolved into a fascinating lesson in how organisational design shapes customer experience. The COO had brought us in after their complaints hit the Sunday papers, earning them an unwanted spotlight as one of OFCOM's worst offenders.
By assembling a multi-disciplinary team - spanning service design, anthropology, data science, and commercial strategy - we were able to move seamlessly from data scraping, to call centre observations to customer interviews and piece together what was really happening.
The first clue came from shadowing call centre agents. Despite claims of no explicit call time targets, we noticed floor managers hovering behind any agent whose call exceeded five minutes. This meant issues were rarely resolved in one go and agents were incentivised to get customers off the phone quickly.
Combined with poor call documentation, this created customer pinball - each new agent having to start fresh with limited context of previous conversations. The data backed this up: in the 30 days before filing a formal complaint, customers' contact frequency increased six-fold, totaling over an hour on the phone. Expensive for the business, and infuriating for customers.
But the really juicy stuff emerged when we dug deeper. A staggering 20% of complaints occurred in the first 45 days of new contracts. Most of which stemmed from "bill shock": charges customers weren't expecting in their first bill.
These early-contract issues weren't just operational hiccups - they revealed a deeper structural problem, and a classic systems thinking concept called 'sub-optimisation': where individual parts of a system are independently optimised, but the overall system suffers.
It turned out the CMO owned revenue targets and proposition development, while the COO handled customer service costs. This organisational split meant new propositions could be launched to drive revenue without consideration of their downstream impact on service costs or satisfaction. The sales and marketing function chased customer signatures and top-line growth, customer service teams were focused on operational efficiency and cost-to-serve, but nobody was optimising for the customer's end-to-end experience.
This is what design leader Dan Hill calls the 'dark matter' of organisations - the invisible forces of structure, incentives, norms and culture that shape outcomes.1
The solution required realigning these competing incentives:
Shifting call centre metrics from handling time to resolution rates.
Linking sales commissions to early-contract customer satisfaction.
Creating joint CMO-COO oversight of new propositions, especially monitoring their first 45 days.
Using predictive analytics to flag rising call frequencies, routing these customers to senior agents before issues escalated.
All of which led to a 50% drop in complaints and multi-million pound savings through better complaint handling, reduced early-contract confusion and less churn.
In the end, this became a story of asking better questions.
Instead of "how do we reduce service costs?", we got the client asking "how do we resolve issues efficiently?", then "how do we prevent issues entirely?", and finally "how do we grow profitably while keeping customers happy?" Different questions revealed different solutions.
Your customer experience isn't just shaped by your product, or call centres, or sales teams - it's forged in the dark matter of organisational design and incentives. When departments optimise for their metrics but the system fails, you're not just creating unhappy customers - you're leaving money on the table.
The best things I’ve read recently:
This was a brilliant walk-through demonstration of how to use Claude’s projects feature. He uses it to help diagnose and deal with a chronic illness that he was struggling with for years. But the lessons - such as customer instructions, managing documentation across chats, customer writing style etc - are transferable and incredibly useful.
This was a wonderful interview with Graham Duncan, the co-founder of East Rock Capital. He has a phenomenal talent for assessing talent, and while running his company he developed an incredibly robust and exhaustive referencing process that turns what most companies treat as a box ticking exercise into a competitive advantage for his firm. The conversation touches on life purpose, careers, human development and how to cultivate what John Keats refers to as ‘negative capability’.
I also highly recommend reading his wonderful essay “What’s going on here, with this human?” which goes into more depth on how he assesses talent.
Matt Klein’s meta-trends report is always insightful, analysing 70+ trend reports so you don’t have to and distilling them down into 13 meta-trends. He also provides a great critique of the trend report industry and practice of ‘trend laundering’ rather than forecasting. Most trend reports are basically advertising for the firm producing them, so Matt’s analysis provides a welcome respite from the wishful thinking and hubris that dominates so much trend content.
Nuclear energy is having a moment. Recently, 10,000 people turned out in Spain to protest the closing of a nuclear plant, tech companies are realising they’ll need huge new energy sources to power their data centres, and the new Labour government has come out in support. I used to be a member of the Green Party, and worked on their campaign to get Caroline Lucas elected in 2010, but I left a few years later and their anti-science stance on nuclear was one of the reasons, so I’m happy to see a resurgence. If you’re interested in the debate, I can heartily recommend a fantastic newsletter called Everything is Light, by science commentator and author Zion Lights, full of insightful and accessible articles on degrowth, how to think about energy costs and why ‘renewables’ is unhelpful. She was previously a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, but left the group rather than repeat false claims on live TV, and went public in her support for nuclear.
Lastly, I’m currently reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, and I’m absolutely loving it. It starts out very Jack Kerouac then morphs into a disorienting but wonderful series of vignettes unlike any other book I’ve ever read. If you can get over the jump in form, it’s wonderful. And it’s re-ignited my love of poetry, so I’m re-listening to the wonderful Frank Skinner poetry podcast too.
Thanks for stopping by.
👋 I’m Michaeljon, a strategy and growth leader.
I help organisations identify and validate new growth opportunities by connecting deep customer understanding with commercial reality. I'm a passionate people nerd, and I love getting under the skin of a business. I believe the magic happens at the intersection of the two.
Some recent examples:
✈️ Led growth strategy and experience transformation for a global travel brand, re-positioning their brand, developed new propositions and re-imagined their customer experience, to double the size of the business over five years.
🤸♂️ Developed proposition and product strategy for a preventative medicine and longevity startup, securing £1.5M in seed funding. Shaped business model, service design, pricing strategy and investor narrative as strategic advisor to the CEO.
🌿 Led a growth strategy and innovation project for major UK bank to accelerate sustainable energy adoption and drive top-line revenue. Designed innovative financial products combining behavioural and commercial insight, re-positioned their green finance initiatives and identified a £1bn+ annual lending opportunity.
🚑 Led product strategy for health-tech startup in $2.4bn US opioid treatment market. Conducted ethnographic research with people struggling with addiction to develop a life-saving proposition, define target segments, and shape market positioning.
Get in touch if this sounds like the type of expertise you need.