Service failures cost UK organisations around £7.3bn a month, according to the Institute of Customer Service. On the other side, 21 per cent of customers say good service made them spend more, and 62 per cent say poor practice damages a company's long-term reputation. UK customer satisfaction sits at 78.2 out of 100. Customer experience is a commercial lever, and the clearest way to see its value is to look at what happens when it fails. The damage is rarely the mistake itself Every business gets things wrong sometimes, and customers know it. Most will forgive a genuine error. What they will not forgive is the effort of putting it right. The payment that comes out twice and takes four calls to refund. The return that vanishes into a warehouse and a fortnight of chasing. The email that goes unanswered, so they start again on chat and repeat everything to someone with none of the history. A checkout that fights them. An app that logs them out at the worst moment. Each of these is small on its own. Together they are the reason a customer decides you are hard work and takes their spending elsewhere, usually without telling you why. That is where the £7.3bn goes: into the friction of fixing things, the repeat contacts, the goodwill spent and the customers lost. Consistency is the thing customers feel Good customer experience is the same clear, low-effort experience every time, across every channel. A customer who is recognised on the phone, in the app and in store, who gets the same answer wherever they ask, and who never has to repeat themselves, trusts the brand without thinking about why. Inconsistency is what breaks that trust, and it builds up until the customer stops giving you the benefit of the doubt. The leader is the difference between baseline and aspiration Here is the part that matters for hiring. For the best customer experience leaders, a low-effort, consistent, well-run experience is the baseline. It is where they start, the minimum they will accept, the thing they fix in their first weeks. Appoint a leader who is not strong on customer experience and that same standard becomes the aspiration instead, the thing the function is always working towards and never quite reaching. The floor becomes the ceiling. With satisfaction at 78.2 out of 100 and customers quicker than ever to leave, few businesses can afford to run their customer function as a work in progress. Which makes it a commercial hire Tools and teams matter, but the height customer experience reaches is set by the person leading it. They decide which broken journeys to fix first, where a human moment earns more than an efficiency saving, and where the money goes. If customer experience decides your growth or your reputation, brief the role around the outcome you need, the retention number, the satisfaction score, the fall in complaints, and appoint the leader who has moved those numbers before. That is the search we run. Quick answers What does poor customer experience cost? UK service failures cost organisations around £7.3bn a month (Institute of Customer Service), most of it in the effort of putting things right: repeat contacts, refunds, chasing and lost customers. What frustrates customers most? The effort of resolving a mistake, difficulty getting what they need, and inconsistency across channels, more than the original error itself. Why does the customer experience leader matter so much? For a strong leader, a low-effort, consistent experience is the baseline they start from. For a weak one it becomes an aspiration the function never reaches. How should we brief a customer experience hire? Around the outcome. Name the retention, satisfaction or complaint numbers you need to move, and look for evidence the candidate has moved them before. Stellify. Elevating customer functions.