Biggest Obstacles To Outstanding Customer Experience: What Experts Say

Customer Experience is now a fundamental part of contact center strategy, yet understanding its importance does not automatically mean an organization will deliver it successfully. Employee engagement, leadership alignment, internal processes, technology, and the ability to listen to customers can all create obstacles between the experience a company intends to provide and the experience customers actually receive.

• What Customer Experience Experts Told Us
• 1. Disengaged Employees
• 2. Poor Understanding of Customer Experience
• 3. Organizational Inertia and Silos
• 4. Not Listening to Customers
• Turning Customer Experience Obstacles Into Action

When this article was originally published in 2018, CCSI reached out to several Customer Experience professionals on Twitter and asked a simple question:

What do you think are the biggest obstacles to delivering an outstanding customer experience?

Their answers identified challenges that remain highly relevant to contact center operations today.

What Customer Experience Experts Told Us

Annette Franz, CCXP, emphasized the connection between employee experience and customer experience, as well as the importance of listening to customers:

“Oh my. Where to begin. Not focusing on the employee experience and helping them understand what the experience is that they should be delivering for customers. Not listening to and understanding your customers. For starters...”

— Annette Franz, CCXP
Original response — March 20, 2018

Kaye J Chapman identified leadership, technology, processes, customer effort, journeys, and organizational silos:

“Great question, CCSI. Lack of leadership CX understanding/buy-in. Outdated technology and processes. Organizational inertia. Poor understanding of customer effort. No attention to journeys. Siloed departments, processes, channels, thinking. Those are just a few I've observed!”

— Kaye J Chapman
Original response — March 24, 2018

Bill Gessert focused on employee engagement, empowerment, and the responsibility of senior leadership to build the right culture:

“There could be many obstacles, but one of the most significant is employees who are not engaged, not excited about their role, and not empowered to drive the customer experience. Senior leaders need to build a culture that drives employee engagement.”

— Bill Gessert
Original response — March 24, 2018

Nate Brown summarized two of the challenges very directly:

“I would say bad internal process and disengaged employees for my top two. What do you think?”

— Nate Brown
Original response — March 25, 2018

Looking across these responses, four recurring obstacles stood out: disengaged employees, poor understanding of Customer Experience, organizational inertia, and failure to listen to customers.

1. Disengaged Employees

The connection between Employee Experience and Customer Experience was one of the clearest themes in the expert responses.

Companies can invest heavily in customer experience strategies, technology, processes, and measurement, but frontline employees are ultimately responsible for delivering much of that experience directly to customers.

Contact center agents need to understand what is expected of them, receive appropriate training and coaching, have access to the information and tools required to do their jobs, and feel empowered to resolve customer needs within clearly defined guidelines.

Recognition, communication, career opportunities, effective leadership, and a positive work environment can also influence how connected employees feel to their work and the organization they represent.

This connection between employees and customers remains central to CCSI's current company culture strategy, which emphasizes work environment, recognition, internal growth, and continuous development.

2. Poor Understanding of Customer Experience

Leadership may understand the concept of Customer Experience, but that understanding needs to extend throughout the organization.

Do contact center agents understand the experience the company wants to provide? Do supervisors understand it? What about Training, Human Resources, Quality Assurance, IT, Finance, Product, Sales, and other departments that influence the customer journey?

Customer Experience is not the responsibility of only one department.

Every team that influences a customer interaction, policy, process, product, system, or employee can affect the experience customers ultimately receive.

Leadership Must Translate CX Into Everyday Behavior

It is not enough for leadership to say that Customer Experience is important.

Employees need to understand what that commitment means in practice:

• How customers should be treated
• What service standards should be followed
• How problems should be escalated
• What agents are empowered to resolve
• How quality is measured
• How customer feedback is used
• How individual roles contribute to the overall customer journey

Training and coaching help transform broad Customer Experience objectives into behaviors employees can apply during real interactions.

3. Organizational Inertia and Silos

Another obstacle identified in the original expert responses was organizational inertia: companies recognizing that something needs to improve but struggling to change the systems, processes, structure, or behaviors causing the problem.

Siloed departments can make this especially difficult.

A customer does not necessarily think about whether a problem belongs to Sales, Billing, Customer Service, Technical Support, Operations, or another department. From the customer's perspective, all of those departments represent the same company.

When departments do not communicate effectively, customers may experience:

• Repeated explanations of the same issue
• Unnecessary transfers
• Conflicting information
• Longer resolution times
• Disconnected communication channels
• Difficulty finding someone who owns the problem

Technology Alone Cannot Fix a Broken Process

Technology has changed dramatically since the original article was published in 2018. Contact centers now have access to more advanced CRM platforms, omnichannel systems, analytics, automation, AI-assisted tools, and Quality Assurance technology.

But implementing new technology without improving the underlying process can simply make an inefficient process more sophisticated.

Organizations should regularly examine customer journeys, workflows, escalation paths, systems, policies, and communication between departments to identify unnecessary friction.

CCSI's Quality Assurance and Call Monitoring services can help identify recurring issues within customer interactions and provide information for coaching and process improvement.

4. Not Listening to Customers

The fourth obstacle is perhaps the most fundamental: failing to listen to the people whose experience the organization is trying to improve.

Companies may have large amounts of customer data without necessarily understanding what customers are actually experiencing.

Useful information can come from many sources:

• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Customer complaints
• Agent feedback
• Quality Assurance evaluations
• Call and interaction analysis
• Repeat contact patterns
• Escalations
• Customer reviews
• Retention and churn data
• Customer journey analysis

Collecting information is only the first step. Organizations also need to analyze it, identify patterns, determine what is causing customer frustration, and make appropriate improvements.

Listen to Frontline Employees Too

Agents interact directly with customers every day and may recognize recurring problems long before those issues become visible in executive reports.

They may repeatedly hear that a website is confusing, a policy is difficult to understand, a process requires too many steps, or customers are receiving inconsistent information.

Listening to agents as well as customers can therefore provide valuable insight into where Customer Experience problems originate.

Customer feedback tells you what customers are experiencing. Frontline employee feedback can often help explain why they are experiencing it.

Turning Customer Experience Obstacles Into Action

The four challenges identified in 2018 remain closely connected.

Poor leadership alignment can create organizational inertia. Organizational silos can make it difficult for employees to help customers. Employees who repeatedly encounter broken processes can become disengaged. And organizations that do not listen to customers or frontline employees may never understand where the problems begin.

Contact center leaders can begin by asking several practical questions:

• Do our employees understand the Customer Experience we want to deliver?
• Do agents have the training and authority they need to help customers?
• Are employees engaged and supported by their leaders?
• Are departments sharing information effectively?
• Are outdated processes creating unnecessary customer effort?
• Are our systems helping agents or making their work more difficult?
• Are we actively listening to customer feedback?
• Are we listening to frontline employees?
• Are we using Quality Assurance findings to improve processes?
• Do we understand the complete customer journey?

Identifying the obstacle is the first step. The next is determining whether the solution requires better training, stronger leadership, improved processes, technology changes, greater employee empowerment, or better communication across the organization.

Customer Experience Begins With the People Delivering It

One theme appears repeatedly throughout the original expert responses: Customer Experience cannot be separated from Employee Experience.

Agents need the knowledge, systems, processes, support, leadership, and authority required to provide the experience the company expects.

CCSI's current approach reflects this connection by investing in employee engagement, recognition, continuous learning, leadership development, and internal career opportunities while helping clients align their Mexico teams with their own brand, processes, systems, and customer experience standards.

CCSI's bilingual and bicultural agents receive continuous training in areas including systems and processes, communication, active listening, Customer Experience, call techniques, negotiation, and client-specific requirements.

Explore CCSI's Nearshore Customer Service Solutions

Special Thanks to Our Original Contributors

CCSI would like to thank Annette Franz, Kaye J Chapman, Bill Gessert, and Nate Brown for sharing their perspectives with us when this article was originally created in 2018. Their responses have been preserved above as part of the original discussion.

Historical note: This article was originally published in 2018 based on responses CCSI received from Customer Experience professionals through Twitter. The original expert statements and the four primary obstacles identified by CCSI — disengaged employees, poor understanding of Customer Experience, organizational inertia, and failure to listen to customers — have been preserved. The surrounding discussion has been updated to reflect modern contact center technology, omnichannel operations, Quality Assurance, Employee Experience, and current CCSI practices.

Originally published: 2018
Last reviewed and updated: July 26, 2026