Revolution CX: The best customer experience is created in the HR department
Aug 5, 2025
Companies invest money in transformations in the area of customer experience (so-called customer experience, CX). They train call center employees, implement complex systems for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. However, most of them achieve only partial success. Why? Because they focused on symptoms instead of causes. It is not that correctly set processes, training, and technology automatically improve the customer experience. To a certain extent, yes, but then companies hit an invisible ceiling that has nothing to do with tools or methodologies. That ceiling is the culture of the organization.
The key question is not 'what kind of customer experience do we want to provide?', but 'what kind of culture do we have – and what do we communicate to customers and what impact does it have on CX?'. Culture indeed functions as the invisible architect of the customer experience.
Organizational culture is not a set of values on a bulletin board or motivational slogans in presentations. It is the way people actually behave, decide, and react when no one is watching. And this everyday, unconscious pattern of behavior directly shapes what the customer experiences in contact with the company.
The OCAI model (Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument), which we use at Kogi during changes in corporate culture for our clients, identifies four basic cultural archetypes, each of which creates a different type of customer experience:
Clan Culture: CX Built on Relationships
Companies with a clan culture build on trust, collaboration, and care for people. Employees have the freedom to make decisions, management supports their initiative, and mistakes are seen as opportunities for learning.
Impact on CX: The customer feels authentic interest, humanity, and an individual approach. Problems are addressed with empathy, often beyond standard procedures. This approach is typical for family businesses or organizations in helping professions.
Risk: During rapid growth, consistency can suffer due to too individualized an approach.
How to Improve CX: Set boundaries for handling complaints to keep empathy while ensuring quality is consistent everywhere.
Adhocracy Culture: CX as an Experimental Laboratory
The company encourages creativity, rapid experiments, and tolerance for uncertainty. Employees are valued for their ideas and courage to try new things.
Impact on CX: The customer may experience breakthrough innovations and surprising solutions. The company often anticipates needs that the customer has not even expressed. This environment is characteristic of technology startups or creative agencies.
Risk: Without proper framing, innovation can lead to instability and unpredictability of services.
How to Improve CX: Involve the customer in prototyping. Invite them to test earlier, before the project gets lost in internal wow-effect. A reality check will reveal dead ends in time.
Market Culture: CX Focused on Performance
Organizations are driven by results, speed, and comparison with competitors. Success is measured by numbers, decisions are quick and pragmatic.
Impact on CX: The customer experiences efficiency, speed, and focus on results. Services are optimized for maximum value in minimal time. Typical for consulting firms or high-performance retail.
Risk: The pressure for numbers may lead to a focus on short-term horizons and neglect of long-term relationships.
How to Improve CX: Add retention/CLV or NPS to performance KPIs so that the pursuit of numbers is balanced by the long-term value of the customer.
Hierarchy Culture: CX Built on Predictability
The company's environment is structured by rules, processes, and standards. Quality control, compliance, and risk minimization are prioritized.
Impact on CX: The customer gains a sense of safety, consistency, and reliability. Each interaction meets established standards. This is crucial, for example, in healthcare, banking, or the energy or telecommunications sectors.
Risk: Rigidity can hinder quick responses to individual customer needs. How to Improve
CX: Define clear conditions for employees who are in contact with customers, which clearly specifies when they may deviate from procedures and resolve a problem immediately.
Discrepancy Between Corporate Culture and CX
The most common failures occur when there is a misalignment between declared CX ambitions and the actual culture of the organization.
Example 1: 'Innovative' bank with a control culture
The bank invested significant resources in the digital transformation of customer experience. They created a mobile app with modern design, launched chatbots, and implemented agile methodology. Internally, however, the bank retained a hierarchical culture based on risk management and compliance. Each change went through a multi-month approval process, and innovations were tested for so long that the competition was a year ahead.
Result: Customers perceived the bank as slow and bureaucratic, even though the investments in 'innovation' were massive.
Example 2: 'Customer-oriented' e-shop with a market culture
A rapidly growing e-commerce company wanted to strengthen customer loyalty through a personalized approach. They hired CX specialists, invested in CRM systems, and customer service. At the same time, however, employee compensation remained based solely on short-term sales metrics.
Result: Customer service did listen to client problems – but only if they led to immediate sales. Otherwise, calls were quickly ended, and customers left dissatisfied.
Customer Experience as a Direct Result of Corporate Culture
After years of observing companies, I have come to the conclusion that customer experience is not an initiative that you implement. It is a result of who you are.
Every organization has its culture, which determines:
How quickly it reacts to changes
How much it trusts its people
How it perceives mistakes and failures
What it truly rewards and punishes
How it communicates internally
And these settings reflect in every customer interaction – regardless of what CX framework you use.
From Diagnosis to Solution: Three Key Questions
If you truly want to improve customer experience, start with these questions:
1. What experience will the customer take away from our work? Observe the actual behavior of your organization. How long does it take to approve an exception? Who has the authority to decide? What happens when a customer requests something non-standard?
2. Are our employees prepared to deliver this experience in the long term? CX is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Can your organization maintain the declared approach under pressure, during rapid growth, or during a crisis?
3. What do we actually measure and reward? If your KPIs do not align with the declared values, culture will always follow the metrics, not the vision.
The most successful CX transformations do not begin with mapping the customer journey or implementing new technologies. They start with honest reflection on organizational culture and often painful changes in core processes, reward systems, and decision-making methods.
Because customers do not feel your presentations on customer-centricity. They feel your culture. And it rarely lies.
Find out how you currently stand. I offer you a reassessment of your current corporate culture. This will give you a clear picture of the starting point before any further steps. Contact me, and together we will conduct an audit that reveals the true state.