Your CFO doesn’t think experience is a big deal. That’s the problem.
Here’s how it goes. The experience team presents work. Everyone nods. Someone asks about ROI. The convo shifts. Then the CFO, or someone from that world, says something like, “This is great, but what about operating expenses?” And just like that, experience shifts to soft-stuff: fund when there’s margin; cut when there isn’t.
Experience strategy isn’t a feel-good pillows-on-chocolate play. It is the bones of how your biz relates to the humans who pay for what you do. And the humans who don’t come back. And the humans who tell other humans not to bother. Ouch.
Think about the last time you tried to do something that should’ve been easy. Pay a bill, update an account, return something you bought. And it wasn’t easy. Maybe you stayed. Maybe you called someone. Maybe you said, “screw it” and went somewhere else. Now multiply that moment by every person who interacts with your company. Every day. Some of them push through. A lot of them don’t. And the ones who don’t send you a bill. They just leave.
Experience problems = financial problems.
Listen. I’m not saying experience strategy automatically produces those numbers. I’ve seen experience initiatives that went nowhere because they were disconnected from the actual human journey, dressed up as personas and great stories that never changed a single touchpoint. Experience strategy only produces financial outcomes when it is actually strategy. When it shapes decisions about what you build, how you build it, who is empowered to fix it, and how flexible you are to the shifts.
Experience isn’t the shiny output. A shiny layer of polish. Companies that are winning treat experience as an input. They are asking the experience question before they build, not after. They are asking: what does this human need to accomplish, and are we helping them do it? They are designing for the job the human is trying to get done, not the job their internal teams find easiest to support.
The cost of not asking that question shows up in call center volume, cart abandonment, bug tickets, lower retention, and higher acquisition costs because retention is slipping. It shows up with employees who spend half their time working around systems that don’t actually serve the work. There’s your operating expense. We just don’t trace it back to experience.
The first move is getting your finance and experience functions in the same conversation about the same metrics. Not experience presenting to finance. Not finance signing off on experience’s budget. Both disciplines looking together at where friction lives in the human journey and what that friction costs. When those two conversations become one, the resource decisions change. Because the problem is finally visible.
Experience is not a soft cost. It is either an investment with a measurable return or a liability with a measurable cost. There is no version where it is neutral. Your CFO needs to know that. So do you.