Metrics Up. Trust Down?
DCX Links | February 22, 2026
Welcome to the DCX weekly roundup of customer experience insights!
CX leaders love data. Dashboards. Benchmarks. Efficiency gains.
But this week’s stories carry a warning.
You can benchmark the wrong thing.
You can automate the wrong moment.
You can optimize the metric and quietly weaken the relationship.
Meanwhile, AI is reshaping how customers discover brands and how employees deliver service—often outside official guardrails. And the companies pulling ahead aren’t just improving processes. They’re connecting data across years, aligning culture to customer outcomes, and building memory instead of moments.
The question isn’t whether your metrics are improving.
It’s whether your experience is.
Let’s dig in.
This week’s must-read links:
Benchmarking Can Make You Dumber If You Skip the Context
You Can Win the Metrics and Still Lose the Customer
The Olympics Don’t Reset Every Two Years Anymore. Neither Should Your CX
Your Brand Might Be Invisible in ChatGPT. SearchSeal Is Betting on That
DCX Stat of the Week: Shadow AI Is Now the Norm, Not the Exception
DCX Case Study of the Week: Microsoft’s Cultural Turnaround Under Satya Nadella
I’m obsessed with Wispr Flow Pro! Get a Free Month Now!
Benchmarking Can Make You Dumber If You Skip the Context
BCG Partner, Nick Clark’s warning is one a lot of CX leaders need to hear. Benchmarks feel like certainty. They give you targets, charts, and a way to say “we’re behind.” The problem is they can push you into fixing the wrong thing.
His example nails it. One bank looks “better” on first contact resolution and handle time. Then you zoom out and realize the other bank is solving 98% of needs in self-service, so the calls that do reach agents are the ugly, complex ones. Of course those take longer. Of course they’re harder to resolve fast.
So who’s actually winning? Probably the bank that prevents the contact in the first place.
Nick’s bigger theme: the most valuable stuff is the hardest to benchmark cleanly. Even something that sounds straightforward like “requests solved in self-service” falls apart fast because nobody agrees on what counts as a digital request, and it’s hard to prove the request was truly solved.
His advice is basically: benchmark fewer things, but benchmark the right things.
He likes:
Human-handled contacts per customer. How often do customers need a person?
Customers per CSR. A productivity reality check.
A maturity assessment. Compare capabilities first, then use the tactical metrics.
If you’re using benchmarks to pick targets, this is the gut check. Are you comparing performance, or are you comparing different operating models and pretending it’s the same game?
🔗 Go Deeper: Nick Clark
You Can Win the Metrics and Still Lose the Customer
In his latest Audio Thoughts cast, Jeff Matlow’s stories aren’t really about hosting companies or grocery stores. They’re about what happens when companies confuse efficiency with care.
He’s pointing at something most leaders feel but don’t say out loud.
When a company swaps humans for AI without protecting the feeling behind the interaction, something invisible breaks. When policy overrides judgment, trust cracks. When employees are trained to “say the caring thing” instead of actually care, customers can tell.
None of that shows up neatly in a weekly report.
That’s the tension. You can measure speed. You can measure handle time. You can measure compliance. You can even measure CSAT.
What’s harder to measure is whether someone felt valued.
So companies optimize what’s trackable. They tighten scripts. They automate chats. They standardize returns. The system gets cleaner. The experience gets thinner.
Jeff’s theme is simple. Customer service isn’t about solving the ticket. It’s about protecting the relationship. If the relationship erodes, it doesn’t matter how fast you solved the problem.
The uncomfortable question for CX leaders is this. Where have you quietly traded humanity for efficiency and told yourself it was progress?
🔗 Go Deeper: The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever
The Olympics Don’t Reset Every Two Years Anymore. Neither Should Your CX.
The Olympic flame goes out. The data doesn’t.
The International Olympic Committee has been using a customer data platform to stay connected with fans from one Games to the next. Not just during the 18 days when the world is watching. The quiet years in between.
Why this matters:
Before 2024, the IOC had a data lake. It wasn’t integrated. Every Games meant starting over.
Now, fan profiles connect sports preferences, countries followed, channel choices, even volunteer interest.
The result. Paris 2024 reached 84% of the potential global audience, about 5 billion people, and drove nearly four times the engagement of Tokyo 2020.
That’s not hype. That’s what happens when you stop treating events as campaigns and start treating them as relationships.
What’s different:
One connected fan data platform across touchpoints.
GDPR-compliant profiles where fans opt in and declare interests.
Ongoing personalization from Summer to Winter, from curling spikes to year-round content.
Nearly 70% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from brands that personalize. Sports fans are no exception.
For CX leaders, the takeaway is simple. If your engagement resets every quarter, you’re wasting momentum. Build memory. Connect the dots. Stay with your customer flame to flame.
🔗 Go Deeper: CX Dive
Your Brand Might Be Invisible in ChatGPT. SearchSeal Is Betting on That.
Here’s a question most teams aren’t asking yet.
When someone asks ChatGPT for the “best” company in your category… does your name show up?
SearchSeal just launched to answer that. The pitch is simple. Track what AI platforms say about your brand before it becomes a blind spot.
Why this matters:
ChatGPT reportedly has 800M weekly active users. That’s not a niche channel. That’s behavior shift.
Customers are skipping search results and asking AI for recommendations. Then they move.
Most companies spent a decade optimizing for Google. Almost none know how they appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, or DeepSeek.
That gap is real.
What SearchSeal actually does:
Monitors visibility across major AI platforms.
Tracks sentiment and competitor mentions.
Puts it in one dashboard. Think early-stage “SEMrush for AI search.”
It’s a solo founder. Zero paying customers at launch. He could have polished it for three more months. He shipped instead. I respect that.
For CX leaders, this is bigger than one tool. AI answers are becoming decision shortcuts. If your brand isn’t part of those answers, you’re not even in the consideration set.
Add this to your dashboard. Or someone else will own the narrative.
🔗 Go Deeper: SearchSeal
DCX Stat of the Week
Shadow AI is now the norm, not the exception
DCX Stat: 50% of employees now use AI frequently at work, yet only 20% say they’re using only company-provided AI tools.
Takeaway: AI is no longer an “innovation lab” topic—it’s an uncontrolled behavior pattern. If CX leaders don’t provide usable, trusted AI tools and clear guardrails, employees will route around policy to meet productivity demands, exposing customer data and experience to invisible risk.
Source: Qualtrics – 2026 Employee Experience Trends Report (“Employees Thrive Through Change”)
🔗 MORE STATS: Daily Stats on Substack Notes
DCX Case Study of the Week
Microsoft’s Cultural Turnaround Under Satya Nadella
CX Challenge: When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft struggled with a rigid, internally competitive culture where teams operated in silos and employees were rewarded for individual “know-it-all” achievements — limiting collaboration, innovation, and responsiveness to customer needs.
Action Taken: Nadella prioritized cultural transformation by championing a growth mindset — shifting from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all” culture focused on continuous learning, curiosity, collaboration, and customer focus. Leaders were encouraged to model vulnerability and openness to feedback, cross-team collaboration was incentivized, and performance reviews evolved to reward teamwork and shared success rather than individual competition.
Result:
Employee engagement and satisfaction rose significantly as individuals felt more empowered and aligned with shared goals.
This cultural reset helped spark innovation (e.g., teamwork on cloud and AI offerings) and fostered stronger customer-centric outcomes.
Microsoft’s market performance surged alongside its cultural change, with notable increases in stock price and market cap reflecting renewed relevance and competitiveness — showing how internal culture correlated with external success.
Lesson for CX Pros: Culture change is a strategic driver of customer experience — when employees adopt a growth mindset and collaborate across functions, they’re better able to solve customer problems, innovate, and deliver consistent value. Transforming culture isn’t just “nice to have” — it’s foundational to elevating CX outcomes company-wide.
Quote:
“Achieving our mission requires we evolve our culture… it all starts with a growth mindset — a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.” — Satya Nadella (Microsoft)
Further Reading:
👉 Case study on Microsoft’s culture transformation under Nadella
The Week’s CX Gut Check
Before you go:
Where have you traded humanity for efficiency and told yourself it was progress?
And which metric are you “winning” that might be hiding a relationship loss?
See you next week.
If this edition sparked ideas, share it with a colleague or team member. Let’s grow the DCX community together!
✉️ Join 1,500+ CX leaders who stay ahead of the next customer curve.
Human-centered insights. Plug-and-play frameworks. Smart tools that actually work.
All designed for CX pros who want to build with purpose—and deliver with impact.
👉 Subscribe today and get the tools to elevate your strategy (and your sanity).