Why not a customer statement?
A CEO fixed one developer's problem within hours of seeing it on X. It was a good moment, and it also showed who gets that kind of service and who does not.
Today is CX Day, which falls on the first Tuesday of October each year. One small exchange on X over the weekend has stayed with me more than anything I expect to read about it today.
On 3 October, Peter Steinberger, the developer behind OpenClaw, posted that the project's Android app had been stuck in Google Play review for over a week, and asked if he knew anyone at Google who could help. Sundar Pichai replied with four words: "Ack, will follow up." A few hours later Steinberger posted that the update was live, and thanked him.
Why I liked it
I really liked it. When a CEO personally picks up an issue like that, it sends a message to the whole organisation.
Small public moments like this do more for a customer culture than most of what gets written about it. People inside a company watch what the person at the top actually spends attention on.
The part I keep coming back to
But the thing I keep thinking about is this. That issue got fixed because the developer could reach the CEO directly.
Most customers can't do that. They just wait, or they move on. And when they move on, they rarely tell anyone why.
Owning customer experience is not about fixing the one case that reaches the top. It is about making sure things work for everyone who never gets there.
That is the gap I see between a CEO who cares about customers and a leadership team that owns the experience. Caring shows up in the moment. Owning shows up in the queue, on an ordinary day, when nobody senior is watching.
Nobody builds it alone
I have been lucky to work with CEOs and leadership teams who always pushed this agenda. When you are the custodian of customer experience, you cannot build a customer culture alone. You need support all around.
We can always debate how successful we were. I believe it is a continuous journey, the same way leaders keep chasing revenue growth.
What a customer statement might look like
And somehow I wish companies treated it the same way. Every quarter we publish financial statements, line by line, checked by someone outside the building. Why not a customer statement too?
I keep coming back to a short list of lines it would need to carry. How long customers waited. How many issues were solved the first time. How many left, and why.
What changes when numbers are published is who has to answer for them, and how often.
The numbers would not always be flattering. That is partly the point.
If your company had to publish one, what would be the hardest number to share?
The pointer
Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, Harvard Business Review, July 2010. Their argument is that loyalty is won less by delight and more by making problems easy to get solved. It is the closest thing I know to a case for putting "solved the first time" on the front page.