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).
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...
The EX–CX Connection Isn’t Broken. Your Operating Model Is.
CX professionals know and think about the EX–CX connection. But the problem is how organizations are built (or what leaders believe) and how CX has…
Insight Is Evidence, Not an Answer
Organizations don’t stall because they lack insight. They stall because they mistake insight for the answer. There’s this expectation that insight should/will arrive already...
Building A Culture of Listening AND Action
Fact: Most organizations listen more than they act. They survey employees, capture customer feedback, and publish dashboards filled with insight (well, with numbers). And yet,...
People-Centric or Profit-Centric: Reframing the Question in 2026
In 2018, I challenged organizations to ask: Are you genuinely people‑centric or just profit‑centric in disguise? That tension hasn’t faded; as a matter of fact,...
So, What Exactly Is Customer Loyalty in 2026?
Loyalty isn’t what you thought it was Ten years ago, we often defined “customer loyalty” in terms of duration (how long someone’s been a customer)...