Lynn Hunsaker on why providing faster support won’t fix customer experience

Episode Transcript

Lynn Hunsaker 00:00
You need to focus on who your high-growth customers are—not just in terms of high revenue, but those who will be the most profitable in the long run. When you consider the cost to serve alongside revenue potential, you identify the sweet spot for operational success. This approach minimizes the burden on customer service and reduces negativity within your organization, such as complaints and escalations.

It also helps minimize customer turnover, meaning your sales and marketing teams won’t have to work as hard to compensate for churn or counteract negative word of mouth.

Niraj Ranjan Rout 00:42
Hello, everyone! Our guest today is Lynn Hunsaker. Lynn is the Chief Customer Officer at ClearAction Continuum, a company that provides training and consulting in experience management (XM). This spans across customer experience, employee experience, and partner experience. She has also served as an adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she designed and taught 25 full-semester courses.

Lynn, your insights are sought after globally, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation and learning from you. Welcome!

Lynn Hunsaker 01:22
It’s my pleasure to be here, Niraj. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Niraj Ranjan Rout 01:26
Great! Lynn, I’d like to start by discussing experience management (XM).

Why did ClearAction Continuum choose to focus on XM rather than just customer experience or employee experience? And why is it important to take a comprehensive approach for it to be truly effective?

Lynn Hunsaker 01:53
I define experience management as the interplay between the three key stakeholders that drive your business:

1. Customers – They fund salaries, budgets, and investors’ profit sharing.
2. Employees – They provide what customers need.
3. Partners – They augment the value you deliver in various ways.

Without customers, employees, or partners, you don’t have much of a business. That’s why we need to pay more attention to the insights we gather about these three groups. By managing these experiences together under the XM umbrella, we ensure a more holistic approach to business growth. Focusing on just one, without considering the others, doesn’t fully support long-term success.

Niraj Ranjan Rout 02:45
That makes sense. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how these three areas intersect.

Obviously, they’re all important, but together, they create something greater than the sum of their parts. How do they amplify each other, and what do the feedback loops look like?

How do you ensure that each component supports the others effectively?

Lynn Hunsaker 03:08
That’s a great question. I see it differently from many of my colleagues, who often claim that employee experience drives customer experience. While there’s some truth to that, I’ve seen employees having a great time—sometimes at the expense of customers.

For example, in retail, employees might be playing their preferred music, laughing, and chatting, but that may not align with the experience customers expect.

Some well-known brands—like Disney, Ritz-Carlton, or Virgin—can afford to say, “We focus on employee experience first, and that results in great customer experience.” But that’s only possible because they were crystal clear about who their target customers were and what those customers wanted.

When a company prioritizes its customers’ needs as its guiding principle—its North Star—it can then build everything else around that: hiring the right employees, onboarding them effectively, setting clear expectations, and designing processes that align with those customer priorities.

You need to focus on identifying your high-growth customers—not just those generating high revenue, but the most profitable ones. When you combine cost-to-serve with revenue potential, you optimize operational efficiency, reducing stress on customer service, minimizing complaints, and decreasing customer turnover.

This, in turn, reduces the burden on sales and marketing because they don’t have to work as hard to recover from churn or negative word of mouth.

To make this work, identify two to four common themes among your high-growth customers—such as risk sensitivity, simplicity, empowerment, or cost-consciousness.

These themes should shape decision-making at every level, from leadership to front-line employees. That’s how you create sustainable business growth while ensuring customers, employees, and investors are all aligned.

Niraj Ranjan Rout 07:15
That’s incredibly insightful. The idea of starting with customer experience, optimizing it by targeting the right customers, and letting that lead to great employee and stakeholder experiences is powerful.

What’s also interesting is that larger brands have the luxury of focusing on employee experience first because they’ve already solved the customer experience challenge. However, newer or growing companies don’t have that same advantage.

That leads me to another question: while you’ve positioned great employee experience as a consequence of great customer experience, are there situations where improving employee experience first can actually lead to better customer experience?

Lynn Hunsaker 08:35
Absolutely—it has to go hand in hand.

If your workforce isn’t aligned with the customers you’re targeting, you may need to rethink either your customer segments or your hiring approach to ensure a better fit.

The employee experience should reflect the same themes and standards as the customer experience.

For example, customers have already paid for your product or service. They don’t owe you engagement through social media, event participation, or survey responses. However, employees do owe a high level of engagement because their job exists due to customer preference for the brand.

Companies often hesitate to engage employees in customer-centric improvements because they fear adding to their workload. But instead of thinking about it as extra work, companies should integrate customer insights into existing workflows.

The key is to:

1. Mine customer data effectively – Instead of relying only on surveys, analyze all customer comments to identify patterns.
2. Make insights relevant – Present them in a way that resonates with different departments, from legal to HR to finance.
3. Align engagement with business impact – Show employees how customer insights directly affect their work and the company’s success.

By embedding customer-centric thinking into everyday roles, you create a more seamless, less resistance-prone approach to improving both employee and customer experiences.

Niraj Ranjan Rout 11:36
That makes perfect sense. If a company realizes that both employee and customer experience need improvement, what’s a high-level roadmap they can follow?

Lynn Hunsaker 12:12
Rather than starting with traditional journey maps, which can be too narrow and slow, I recommend:

1. Analyzing patterns in customer feedback – Use data mining to identify key themes rather than focusing just on survey scores.
2. Correlating feedback with business outcomes – Use metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) not as standalone KPIs but as tools for correlation analysis.
3. Breaking insights down by function – Every department should get its own relevant insights.
4. Focusing on the 80/20 rule – Identify and resolve the top 80% of recurring customer pain points.
5. Embedding change into existing workflows – Instead of adding extra tasks, tweak existing processes to reduce waste and inefficiencies.

This approach makes transformation more practical, scalable, and sustainable.

Niraj Ranjan Rout 19:22
This is fantastic. One last question—who should own this transformation?

Lynn Hunsaker 26:40
Customer experience should be treated like budgeting or performance reviews—it’s everyone’s responsibility.

However, a small CX team reporting to the CEO should facilitate, coordinate, and ensure execution. Their role is to help each department become more efficient, not to own CX execution themselves.

Instead of a massive CX team, a small, highly effective unit can create exponential value by driving alignment across the organization.

Niraj Ranjan Rout 28:10
Absolutely. This has been an incredibly insightful conversation. Thank you, Lynn!

Lynn Hunsaker 28:22
Always a pleasure! Looking forward to next time.