Jim Tincher shares how to bridge customer experience and business growth

When Jim Tincher began his career 35 years ago, he made what he thought was a simple request to his boss before he left for vacation: “I'd like to visit a customer while I'm there.” The response — a puzzled “why?” — would shape his understanding of how few businesses truly connect with their customers. This customer-first mindset was just one of the many reasons why he earned ICMI’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Tincher, the founder and CEO of Heart of the Customer, said throughout his career, he discovered that sharing customer frustration alone doesn’t drive organizational change — financial impact does. For example, when he worked for a major health insurance company, he observed that although it was a market leader for selling Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), the company struggled with customer churn.

“Growth covers a lot of sins,” Tincher says. “So, if you don’t deliberately connect the customer experience to those financial outcomes of how much money we’re losing, nobody cares.”

However, he was able to tell a compelling story to leadership as to why the churn rate was so high. The top driver of frustration was the difficultly customers had accessing their account. For example, if they forgot their password, they needed a 15-digit account number that they received when they first signed up for the HSA. And of course — most customers no longer had that paperwork.

The product people working for the company never had any problem logging into the website because they did it every day, so they never forgot their password — unlike the average customer, who logged in only twice a year.

“I told the C-suite, ‘Look, if our customers can’t log into the website, you essentially don’t have a product — therefore, you churn,’” Tincher says. “That’s how I got people to pay attention. You’ve got to be able to connect operations to the financial part, through the customer’s lens.”

Essential advice for future leaders

Tincher shared these key lessons he’s learned during his career:

• Master financial literacy: “Learn how to read a P&L,” Tincher says. “You don't have to go get an MBA, but you do have to understand the P&L of your company. You're going to ask a company to do things, and the leader’s going ask you, ‘How does that show up in the P&L? Because that’s what I'm measured against.’”
• Connect to business growth: Gartner interviewed 300+ CEOs and asked them for their top ten initiatives for 2024. While “growth” was at the top, items involving “customer” were at the bottom of the list. Uh-oh. His solution? “When we talk about how these customer outcomes impact growth, then they hear it,” Tincher says.
• Focus on building trust: In the age of AI, emotional connections remain important. “The number one item that drives growth at a customer level is an emotional connection with their company,” Tincher says. “If AI is used to automate the experience, you have to monitor it to see if it’s creating trust. Most implementations I’ve seen reduce trust.”
• Navigate remote work challenges: Addressing hybrid work environments, Tincher says, “It takes deliberate action to maintain those relationships when you’re remote. The real magic is when employees talk to each other, and that’s hard to mandate, but you have to find ways to get your employees to connect.”