If you’re not #1, it might be you, not them

If you’re the leader of a business that isn’t Canva, Bunnings, or Messina, and you think your organisation is running pretty smoothly, and your customers are largely happy, this might be a bit of a wake up call… Chances are your employees are swapping stories about a series of issues you have probably never heard of. Meanwhile, your customers are raging to their friends about something that all the performance data signals in the world wouldn’t pick up.

The crux of it: 80 per cent of companies believe they provide great employee and customer experiences – only 20 per cent of employees and customers agree.

When leadership assumes they’re delivering excellence while employees feel disillusioned and customers feel unheard, brands don’t just fail to differentiate—they will never foster love or loyalty from their people or customers.

EX, CX & BX are connected

It’s becoming increasingly clear that EX, CX, and BX are intrinsically linked, but before businesses can deliver a distinctive, consistent brand experience for customers, they need to fix their employee experience. 

It turns out that internal misalignment could be costing your business up to a 147 per cent increase in revenue vs competitors that have their shit together. 

I’m sure this isn’t new news for some. Qualtrics chief product officer of research Michel Feaster highlighted that ”The best brands come in threes. Aligning EX, BX and CX accounts for 27 per cent of the variance between stronger- and weaker-performing companies. However, 78 per cent of businesses are not currently prioritising the alignment.”

Is your business misaligned?

Misalignment between EX, CX and BX can be found in the differences between:

1. How leaders view the organisation versus how employees experience it
2. How departments interact, share data sets and align with each other
3. How the organisation perceives itself versus how customers actually experience it

Address EX, CX & BX simultaneously

Starting to address both EX, CX and BX simultaneously is simpler than you think.

Start thinking about your business like you think about your favourite brands. When you picture them, you don't think about departments and interaction points, you think about them in terms of the feeling they give you.

See your business as your customers do

I’m a huge fan of Dope. Their brand name makes me smile. Then I think about the branded sticker I put on my fridge in my otherwise minimalistic monochrome kitchen. Then I think about the time a snowboarder said ‘Dope jacket bro’ (I ski, so that actually meant a lot).

My point is I’m not thinking about the business in its component parts, marketing, product, sales etc. Every single small micro-interactions multiply to create a feeling that makes up my Total Brand Perception. 

Most brands evoke neutrality from businesses at best

The hard truth? Most feelings about brands are neutral. And I’m speaking directly to the leaders of those businesses. I have my home loan with NAB—the single biggest financial commitment of my life—and I feel nothing. No connection. No loyalty. If another lender gave me a halfway decent rate, I’d switch in a heartbeat. Same with my NAB credit card. Same with my transaction account. And yet, I do feel loyalty to Up. Why? Because it’s where my mates are. It’s where it’s easy to split a bill, send a golf emoji ⛳, and actually enjoy the UX. It feels made for me. Meanwhile, NAB? It’s just… there.

Despite all the investment in digital tools and brand campaigns, they’ve managed to make banking feel like a utility. Unavoidable, functional, and completely forgettable.

Up doesn’t have the biggest budget or the longest history – but it has my attention. And you can be sure its employees know what they’re there to deliver: banking gamified.

Let’s look at how Patagonia approach their EX, CX and BX:

• Employee Experience: Employees get paid to protest and are encouraged to be active in climate initiatives, making the purpose real from the inside out.
• Customer Experience: Repair programs, activism, and environmental sustainability make buying Patagonia feel like a movement, not just a transaction.
• Brand Experience: Patagonia reinforces its environmental mission through carbon footprint product tags, repairable wetsuits, and QR codes on products linking to supplier stories. In-store events teach DIY gear repairs, while digital platforms let customers track the environmental impact of their purchases.

Nab’s NPS and Trust metrics are enviable. But all these metrics do not tell you what a simple conversation would: that employees and customers do not feel love for the brand, let alone exposing why this is. Patagonia on the other hand… well just talk to the next Google employee you meet about how they feel about the brand.

It’s the neutral employee and customer experiences that remain hidden behind the brand tracking, media, NPS and website engagement stats that are the real threat to your business.

When you start thinking about the feeling you want both employees and customers to share about you, you can begin to boost both EX and BX and close the employee-customer gap.

Let’s break this down into the simple steps leaders can take.

1. Sort out your internal mess first

When was the last time you had a conversation with marketing and sales and asked for their POV on what the customer really wants? Or what’s missing the mark? Is anyone prioritising closing the gap between departments if they (more than likely) disagree?

Here's what you actually need to have a conversation about:

The gap between what your leadership team thinks is happening and what's actually happening on the ground.

How well your departments are playing together in the sandbox. 

2. Fix the employee-customer disconnect

How easy would it be for you to go and find customer conversations that expose how they really feel about your business? Which department would you go to? Would they be saying the same thing or would it be a cacophony of disparate data?

Start having more conversations with your customers to uncover:

How far off your current customer experience is from what you think you're delivering.

What potential customers truly think about you (not your brand health stats, real conversations, real insights, real ‘whys’).

3. Steal from the military

As complex organisations go, the military might actually know more about running a tight ship than your last five management consultants combined. They use something called Commander's Intent, and it's brilliant in its simplicity: a shared objective so simple that every soldier knows exactly what needs to be done and why, so they can make decisions within their unit as they face the unexpected, without sixteen layers of approval.

Now, imagine if everyone in your business – from the CEO to the intern who started yesterday –truly understood what your brand stands for. What if they also felt empowered to make consistent decisions that set you apart from the competition?

Take Action: Work with marketing and HR to develop a brand experience platform that can be used to align culture and decision-making to create tribal behaviours, before looking at the customer-facing version of the BX platform.

The conversation revolution

While everyone's obsessing over collecting more data, what we actually need is better conversations, which lead to better experiences.

Here’s the thing no one wants to admit: most data tells you what, but never why. And in the scramble for dashboards, decision trees and dashboards about dashboards, brands are ignoring the most powerful tool in the shed – a real conversation.

Take Slack, for example. Early in their growth, they were seeing solid user adoption in tech circles, but when they tried to crack more traditional industries, the numbers didn’t add up. Usage was decent, but understanding was low. All the product data said “it’s working” – but the sales weren’t closing. So they sat down with a middle manager and asked: “If we took Slack away tomorrow, what would break?” Her answer? “I’d have no idea what anyone’s working on. I’d feel blind.” Boom. Not a chat tool. Not an email replacement. A visibility engine. That single insight reframed their entire positioning and helped unlock growth in corporate environments where transparency – not speed – was the value.

Then there’s Airbnb. The data said guests were price-sensitive travellers looking for cheaper accommodation than hotels. Seemed logical… But in a host interview, one woman said: “I love hosting. It’s like the world comes to me. I feel like I’m part of something bigger.” That single line cracked open the emotional truth of the platform. Airbnb wasn’t a marketplace – it was a movement. “Belong anywhere” became the new brand north star, unlocking a decade of growth and giving them the moral licence to move beyond beds into experiences, communities and culture.

And if you want the OG case study for why conversations matter more than dashboards, look no further than Febreze. P&G had developed something genuinely innovative – a spray that didn’t just cover up smells, it removed them. The initial ads leaned hard into utility: kill pet smells, cigarette smoke, gym bag stench. All backed by data. All falling flat in-market.

It wasn’t until researchers visited a woman who was using Febreze regularly that they uncovered the real unlock. She wasn’t spraying it because her house smelled bad. She was spraying it after cleaning – folding laundry, wiping down surfaces, vacuuming. “I use it as a finishing touch,” she said. “It makes the room smell nice. Like it’s really clean.”

That was the billion-dollar idea that nearly got missed. People didn’t want neutral, scentless homes. They wanted homes that smelled clean. The fragrance wasn’t a functional benefit – it was an emotional reward. A psychological cue that the job was done.

So the team quietly reworked the product to dial up the fragrance and shifted the messaging. Febreze became less about eliminating odour, and more about completing the cleaning ritual. Sales soared.

The insight didn’t come from a brand tracker or sales funnel. It came from watching someone clean their house, smile, and spray Febreze like the cherry on top.

You don’t get that from bounce rates. Or NPS charts. 

You get it from asking the right question. Listening for the unmet needs. And treating customers like humans – not data points.

Take action: Here AI can actually help. Forget the synthetic customer data options that can feel like a tempting short-cut, and instead look for tools that allow you to scale real conversations with employees and customers by doing the heavy lifting for you.

Becoming a true brand

Your brand needs to be the same thing in the boardroom as it is in real life. It's that simple, and that difficult.

When you achieve this, everyone – from your board members to your newest customer – will see your brand the same way.