Customer experience isn’t a department.
Reputation Intelligence asked leaders how fast a CEO should hear about an unhappy customer. Chris argued for right away, not once a quarter, and for making the customer every department’s job.
IntelligenceExpert Feature
Hear it now, not next quarter.
Reputation Intelligence published the piece on October 19, 2026. It starts from a newsletter by former CEO and executive coach Joel Trammell, who suggests leadership teams ask once a quarter how many times they heard about disappointing a customer, and that Customer Success report directly to the CEO.
Chris, quoted as President and COO of Uniti Med and GQR Healthcare and author of You Are Capable of More, agrees that leaders need to hear the bad news, but says three months is far too long to wait. If a client or one of the healthcare professionals his teams work with has been let down, he wants to know now, while there is still time to fix it.
He also takes a different view on structure. Rather than handing customer success to one leader, he makes every department head responsible for it, because sales, marketing, operations, finance, technology and HR all shape the experience people have.
The higher a leader moves, the easier it is for information to get filtered on the way up. Staying close to the people you serve has to be intentional, and so does building a team that brings problems forward while they can still be solved.
What Chris Shared
Don’t wait for the quarter
A quarterly review of disappointed customers is a good question asked too slowly. By the time it comes around, the chance to make it right may be gone.
Pick up the phone
When a client or clinician is upset, Chris is willing to call them himself, listen, apologize where his teams fell short and work out how to make it right.
Every department owns it
There is no single head of Customer Success. Making it one person’s job makes it too easy for everyone else to assume it isn’t theirs.
Culture over heroics
Not every problem should need the President or COO. The bigger job is a culture where every team feels responsible for the experience and has the ability to improve it.
Customer experience isn’t a department. It’s the result of everything your company does.Chris Sund, in Reputation Intelligence
Reputation Intelligence.
Reputation Intelligence is a newsletter on Substack covering brand trust, reputation and customer experience. Its features gather executives, founders and CEOs to respond to a leadership idea from their own experience.
Chris appears alongside founders and CEOs from skincare, real estate, media and AI, each weighing in on how quickly bad news should reach the top and who should own the customer.
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Chris speaks and writes on ownership, culture, customer experience and leadership, as a sitting executive and the award-winning author of You Are Capable of More.