The CLEAR argument in disguise. How reasonable decisions compound into an experience nobody chose.
Nobody in your business woke up one morning and decided to make the returns process this annoying. Nobody chose the four-step checkout, or the loyalty scheme that asks for a phone number before it says hello, or the store layout where the thing everybody comes in for is at the back behind the thing nobody buys. I have never met the person who designed a bad customer experience on purpose, and I have looked.
What I have met, many times, is a series of reasonable people making reasonable decisions, each one sensible on its own, that compound into an experience nobody chose and nobody would defend if they saw it whole.
Finance asks for a change to the returns policy because fraud is up, which it is. Legal adds a step because of a regulatory change, which is real. The loss prevention team moves the high-shrink category away from the door, for good reason. Marketing adds a screen to the checkout because the data is valuable, and it is. The technology team consolidates two systems into one to reduce cost, and the new one takes an extra tap. Store operations issues a process note so that all of this is done consistently, because inconsistency is worse.
Every one of those decisions is defensible. Every one was made by someone doing their job well. And a customer who wants to return a jumper now spends eleven minutes at a counter that used to take three, talking to a team member who did not choose any of it and cannot change any of it, and who will be the face of the experience in the review that gets written that evening.
This is not a story about bad people or even bad decisions. It is a story about altitude. Each decision was made at the height of a department, with the department's information and the department's incentives. The customer experiences all of them at once, at ground level, in one afternoon. Nobody in the business was standing where she was standing. There was no one whose job it was to.
The usual answer to this is "customer obsession", and I have no argument with the sentiment. But obsession is not a decision tool. When finance and loss prevention and marketing each bring a reasonable request, "be obsessed with the customer" does not tell you which one to say no to. Something has to sit above the departments that everyone can use to make the trade-off, and that something is purpose.
I know how that sounds. Purpose has become the most decorated and least used word in retail. Most of the purpose statements I see are true and useless at the same time, because they were written for a wall rather than for a decision. "To inspire and enrich everyday life" cannot tell the returns team whether the fraud step is worth eight minutes of the customer's afternoon. A purpose is only doing its job when it can be used on a Tuesday, at the altitude where the decisions are actually made, to choose between two reasonable options. Most purposes never get to that altitude. They live in the annual report and the induction video, and the decisions happen somewhere else.
When we built CLEAR, the first of the three models in the Readiness Stack, this was the problem we were trying to solve, and the five moves are really five ways of getting purpose down from the wall to the counter.
Clarify what the business is for, in language a store manager could use, and then, the harder step, say what it is not for. A purpose with no edges cannot help anyone choose. Live it by turning it into a small number of experience principles that the returns team and the loss prevention team can both hold up against their next request: for instance, that a customer never pays in time for a problem the business created. Evaluate every decision that touches the customer against those principles before it is made, not after the complaint. Align the departments so that when principles and department incentives collide, and they will, there is an agreed way to settle it that does not depend on who has the most senior sponsor that week. Reinforce it, which mostly means noticing and celebrating the moment somebody said no to a reasonable request because of what it would do to the customer's afternoon.
None of that stops finance from worrying about fraud, and nor should it. It gives the business a way to say: yes, and here is what we will not do to the customer to solve it.
The compounding problem was manageable when decisions were made by people, at human speed, and a store manager could soften the worst of it. AI removes both of those buffers. Decisions about pricing, ranging, staffing and the next message a customer sees are increasingly made by systems, at scale, with each system optimising for the metric it was given. If the purpose is not clear enough to aim those systems at something that matters, they will be aimed at whatever each department measures, and the compounding will happen faster and with less mercy. Nobody will have consciously made your customers miserable. It will just have been very efficiently arranged.
The CLEAR assessment asks fifteen statements about whether your purpose is working at decision altitude. In our experience, organisations find Clarify the easiest of the five moves and Evaluate and Align the hardest, which is another way of saying they know what they are for and have not yet built the habit of using it.
Every article ends with the assessment it pairs with. Free, ten minutes or less, results on screen.
