Research & Innovation
Exploring what shapes the experiences people have with organizations.Research that asks better questions about the systems behind the experience.
Why We Research
Customer and employee experiences do not happen in isolation. They are shaped by the systems, decisions, environments, expectations, and interactions surrounding them.
Traditional customer experience measures can tell organizations whether people are satisfied, frustrated, loyal, or likely to leave. Those signals are valuable, but they do not always explain what created the outcome.
Signal & Journey researches the connections behind those outcomes.
We explore how employee conditions can influence customer experience, why the same experience works for one person and fails another, how organizational decisions create downstream friction, and how technologies such as AI and automation change the relationship between organizations and the people they serve.
The goal is not research for research’s sake. It is to develop ideas that help organizations ask better questions, investigate problems more effectively, and make better decisions.
What Guides Our Work
Start with the human experience.
Look beyond the visible moment.
Connect human and organizational evidence.
Research should lead somewhere.
Our Research Approach
Observe. Connect. Test. Apply.
Our research combines real-world observation, qualitative insight, quantitative evidence, existing research, and practical organizational experience.
We are especially interested in questions that sit between traditional disciplines. Customer experience may intersect with employee experience. Service problems may intersect with policy. Technology may intersect with trust. Culture may change how expectations are formed. Operational decisions may surface later as customer frustration.
Rather than treating those areas separately, we look for the relationships between them.
Some projects begin with a customer or employee observation. Others begin with an organizational problem, an emerging technology, a behavioral pattern, or a question we believe existing experience models do not fully explain.
We then develop those ideas through research, analysis, conceptual frameworks, applied experimentation, and client work where appropriate.
Our aim is to turn observation into useful knowledge and useful knowledge into better decisions.
What We Research
Experience Continuity
Customer–Employee Connection
Experience Compatibility
Technology & Experience
Featured Research
Our research explores specific questions about how human experiences and organizational systems interact. Some projects develop into formal frameworks and white papers. Others become articles, field observations, or ideas that continue evolving over time.
White Papers
The Experience Continuity Chain™
Why Customer Experience Begins Before Day One
Organizations often treat employee experience and customer experience as separate disciplines. Customers, however, experience the consequences of both.
This white paper introduces the Experience Continuity Chain™, a Signal & Journey framework showing how hiring signals, candidate experience, workplace expectations, onboarding, employee enablement, and engagement can shape service behavior, customer trust, loyalty, and business performance.
Grounded in peer-reviewed research on the service-profit chain, candidate experience, psychological contracts, employee engagement, and customer outcomes, the paper explores why customer experience begins long before an employee serves their first customer.
The paper also provides a practical measurement framework and 90-day roadmap organizations can use to connect employee and customer data, identify upstream experience gaps, and test targeted improvements.
Beyond Customer Satisfaction
Introducing Customer-Experience Compatibility Intelligence
Why can two customers go through the same experience and leave with completely different perceptions?
This white paper introduces Customer-Experience Compatibility Intelligence, an emerging approach for evaluating how well an experience aligns with a customer’s needs, expectations, preferences, capabilities, and circumstances.
It also explores how the patent-pending CIBECOS™ framework could help organizations identify compatibility gaps, understand customer friction, support responsible personalization, and design more responsive physical, digital, and service environments.
From Research to Practice
The Experience Breakpoint Framework™
Some of our research ultimately informs how we work with clients. The Experience Breakpoint Framework™ is our applied approach for investigating a specific experience problem and connecting the visible signal to its underlying cause and measurable response.
Articles and Perspectives
Not every question requires a white paper. Our articles examine real-world customer and employee experiences, business decisions, emerging technologies, service failures, organizational patterns, and moments that reveal something larger about how experiences are created.
Real experiences. Larger questions. Practical lessons.
Ideas We Are Developing
Research does not always begin with an answer.
Some of our most interesting work begins with a question, an observation, or a pattern we believe deserves deeper investigation. This section highlights concepts that are still being explored, tested, refined, or developed into future research.
Potential areas could include:
Breakpoint Patterns
Are there recurring types of organizational breakpoints that appear across industries and customer journeys?
Customer–Employee Signal Gaps
What happens when customer feedback and employee observations tell leadership two different stories?
Experience Debt
Can organizations accumulate unresolved experience problems in the same way technology teams accumulate technical debt?
Measurement-Induced Friction
How often do internal KPIs and incentives unintentionally create behaviors customers dislike?
Technology-Accelerated Friction
When does automation improve an experience, and when does it simply make a flawed process faster?
Have an Experience Question Worth Exploring?
Some of our research begins with questions we encounter in the real world. If your organization is seeing a recurring customer or employee experience pattern that does not have an obvious explanation, we would be interested in hearing about it.
We are especially interested in questions involving relationships between customer experience, employee experience, organizational systems, technology, policies, processes, expectations, and business outcomes.
Research inquiries may lead to conversations, anonymized observations, future articles, research projects, or opportunities to collaborate.
Have something worth investigating? Tell us what you’re seeing.