I was sitting in a leadership team meeting of HP’s EMEA Enterprise Business unit. There were about twelve of us around the table, all engineers except one. Santiago Cortes had a degree in marketing and communications, and he was the exception that proved the rule.
We were arguing about how to communicate a new initiative to customers and employees. Everyone was framing the message in their own terms. Santiago stood up and said something I have never forgotten: “Always remember: communication is something that happens at the receiving end.”
He meant that the most effective communication uses the language and the metrics of the audience, not those of the person trying to get a message across. I have carried those words in my brain for over twenty years. And I believe they explain one of the biggest failures in the world customer experience today.
The evidence for a communication breakdown
CX leaders across industries are struggling to make their work matter to the rest of the business. This is not my opinion alone. Forrester’s 2024 survey of over 300 CX professionals found that three in five CX leaders could not link their metrics to business metrics. Two in five said that acquiring buy-in from other departments was a top challenge. The least common skill on CX teams? ROI modeling.
The picture did not improve a year later. Forrester’s 2025 VoC and CX Measurement survey found that only half of teams could successfully link CX metrics to business outcomes. Less than a third could set realistic targets. Even fewer reported the ability to find signals in their data.
This is not a measurement problem. CX teams are measuring loads of things. It is a communication problem. We CX leaders are presenting their results in a language the rest of the business does not speak.
Speaking the wrong language
Judy Weader, a principal analyst at Forrester, put it directly in a CX Dive interview: “CX leaders tend to talk in customer experience-focused language and metrics, rather than speaking the language of the C-suite.” She argued that CX leaders need to meet other executives on their own terms by tying measurements like NPS and customer satisfaction to broader business outcomes.
Think about what this means in practice. A Chief Customer Officer walks into a board meeting and presents NPS trends, customer health scores, and satisfaction distributions. The sales leader in the room is measured on contract renewal rates, pipeline conversion, and revenue growth. The CFO cares about gross revenue retention and customer lifetime value. The CEO wants to know whether the company is winning or losing.
None of them wakes up thinking about NPS. The CX leader has communicated at the sending end, not the receiving end.
What the receiving end looks like
An article in Custify’s blog on speaking the CFO’s language illustrates this translation gap well. It points out that Customer Success teams describe their progress in terms like “retention,” “adoption,” and “advocacy”; and these are primarily qualitative terms that do not explain how CS activities tie to the organisation’s financial health. The same article shows how login counts, email opens, and ticket volumes may look impressive on a dashboard, and they rarely translate to revenue or savings, or at least not during the presentation.
The fix is not to abandon your CX metrics. It is to translate them. Instead of “NPS improved by 8 points,” say “the customers most likely to renew increased by 12%, protecting approximately $4 million in recurring revenue.” Instead of “customer health scores are trending up,” say “early churn signals declined by 15%, meaning fewer surprises at renewal time for your sales team.”
Same underlying data. Different language. Different audience response.
Use AI-driven customer analytics to solve the translation problem
There is a another important reason this translation is so difficult. Traditional CX measurement starts with survey data; NPS, CSAT, effort scores. These are CX-native metrics that live in the CX team’s world. Translating them into the language of the CFO or the head of sales requires extra modelling, extra assumptions, and exactly the ROI skills that Forrester found to be the least common on CX teams.
AI-driven customer analytics take a fundamentally different approach. It builds predictive models using the operational and financial data your business already collects: contract renewal dates, revenue per account, product usage patterns, support ticket histories, deal sizes, and expansion rates. These are the same KPIs that your sales leader, your CFO, and your CEO already use to measure their own performance. When an AI-driven customer analytics model identifies accounts at risk of churning, it expresses that risk in terms of revenue at stake, not NPS points. When it flags expansion opportunities, those opportunities are sized in contract value, not health score improvements.
The output is natively in the language of the receiving end. You no longer need to translate your CX insights for the board, because the insights were built on the data the board already trusts. This is not an incremental improvement in communication. It is a structural shift that places CX conversations squarely inside the metrics framework that the rest of the business already uses.
So therefore…
Santiago Cortes used a single sentence to teach me the most important communication principle I have learned in forty years: communication happens at the receiving end. The Forrester data confirms that the CX profession has not yet absorbed this lesson. Three in five CX leaders cannot connect their metrics to the metrics their colleagues use every day. That is not a data gap. It is a language gap.
If you lead a CX or Customer Success function, you have two paths forward. The first is to manually translate every CX insight into the financial and operational language of your audience. The second is to adopt AI-driven customer analytics approaches that build on the data your colleagues already trust; so that the translation happens automatically. Either way, the next time you prepare a leadership team presentation, ask yourself: does this make sense to the people in the room, or only to me?
Your metrics may be excellent. And if the people who need to act on them are not listening, you have not communicated. You have only spoken. Remember: communication is something that happens at the receiving end!