Annette Franz
Annette Franz
Annette Franz is founder and Chief Experience Officer of CX Journey Inc. She is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, consultant, and speaker. She has 25+ years of experience in helping companies understand their employees and customers in order to identify what makes for a great experience and what drives retention, satisfaction, and engagement. She's sharing this knowledge and experience in her first book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the "Customer" in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business).
Customers Don’t Experience Your Intentions. They Experience Your Systems.
This is the third in a series on the Golden Thread and your systems. If you haven’t read Where the Golden Thread Breaks Most...
Strategy Is a System, Not a Statement
“Be customer-centric.” “Put employees first.” “Create a great experience.” Leaders say these things. They mean them. And then they wonder why nothing actually changes. Back…
First Principles, Outcome Tracing, and the Golden Thread
Most organizations solve problems by analogy, as Elon Musk and others would say. Here’s what that looks like: outcomes go sideways so someone benchmarks...
What Comes First: Mindset or Behavior?
Which comes first, mindset or behavior? Leaders have been asking this question for decades (well, I know I have), and most of them have...
The Real AI Strategy Problem
Leaders aren’t struggling with AI because the technology is immature. They’re struggling with it because their businesses are, and no amount of sophisticated tooling...
Don’t Solve the Wrong Problem: How to Trace Outcomes Back to Culture
Most leaders diagnose outcomes at the symptom level. Here’s the methodology to go deeper and find what’s actually broken
The Feedback Loop That Makes “Fix the Culture, Fix the Outcomes” a System
Most culture frameworks describe what to fix. This one tells you how to know if it’s working – and how to keep it working...
Fix the Culture, Fix the Outcomes: What That Really Means
“Fix the culture, fix the outcomes.” I say this often (and I’ve written about it before). It’s even my signature line when I do...
Stop Proving CX. Start Engineering Outcomes.
Let’s be honest about what’s really happening: Most CX work isn’t failing because the idea is flawed. It’s failing because the execution never moved beyond…
Eight Ways CX Professionals Are Asking the Wrong Questions…
… And the one framework that forces them to ask the right ones.
Where the Golden Thread Breaks Most Often
Leaders don’t set out to break the Golden Thread. After all, they talk about customer-centricity, invest in employee experience, and define values and articulate...
Why Some Companies Win and Others Don’t: The Golden Thread Explained
Some organizations seem to consistently outperform the competition, while others struggle to keep up no matter what they try. The difference isn’t luck, strategy,...
Why Great Organizations Never Stop Learning
There’s a simple phrase used by Dwayne Pride in the television series NCIS: New Orleans that has always stuck with me: “Learn things.” It’s deceptively...
Who HR Reports To Says More Than You Think
I recently poked around LinkedIn job postings – forever curious about what roles are being filled, titles, and requirements. One caught my eye: a...
Gemba Walks Don’t Fail. Leaders Do.
Every once in a while, someone declares that “Gemba walks don’t work.” The claim usually comes wrapped in frustration: leaders tried it, nothing changed,...
How Middle Managers Can Avoid Becoming the Forgotten Middle (or Turn It Around)
As I mentioned in my previous articles about middle managers, business folks talk endlessly about how leaders set the tone and frontline employees drive...
Strategic Questions Leaders Must Answer About Middle Managers
Leaders love to talk about culture at the top and experience at the frontline, but they routinely skip the one group that determines whether...
Ignoring the Middle: How Overlooking Middle Managers Erodes Culture
If you want to know whether your culture will thrive or die, look at your middle managers. They’re either the greatest accelerators of change...
Before the Guardrails: The Rumble Strips Leaders Can’t Afford to Ignore
In Tuesday’s article, I wrote about what happens when guardrails within the organization fail. I closed out the article with thoughts on how rumble...
When Guardrails Fail, Systems Break – and the Golden Thread Snaps
I recently saw this headline for an article totally unrelated to the work I do: “When Guardrails Fail, Systems Break.” I’ve been talking and...