By Hank Marquis

Our Lights Are Green, But They're Unhappy!

Image Credit: pexels.com/@brett-sayles

When I was consulting inside BFSI organizations, I kept running into the same pattern: every indicator said the service was healthy, yet customers and employees were frustrated. The dashboards were green, but the experience was not.

When designing new services, most IT groups go straight to product features and technical capability. Some invite digital employees into the design process. Even fewer think about how those design choices shape the experience of the external customer. The intention is good. The problem is perspective. Our view of service delivery often stops at the technology layer, and that’s where the trouble begins.

In Completely Satisfied, this is where the disconnect between perceptions and expectations first appears. People experience the service through their own work, not through IT’s internal measurements. A service concept helps bridge that gap by linking business strategy to IT solutions, making it easier to understand what truly matters to employees and customers.

What follows is a simple case study that shows why a service concept matters and how shifting perspective changes the entire conversation about satisfaction.

The lights are all green, but they're unhappy with us

Summary: By widening the design perspective to include employee insight about external customer behavior, the company improved satisfaction on both sides and generated several hundred million dollars in additional revenue year over year.

Challenge: A few quarters after launching a new financial account access system, customer churn and dissatisfaction were rising. Recovery teams were working overtime. All signs pointed to an unstable IT service.

But IT’s operational metrics were perfect. No outages. No instability. Every dashboard was green.

I still remember hearing, “Everything is working fine. Look at the metrics. Yet people keep telling us we’re down.” And technically, IT wasn’t wrong — the system was available when they expected it to be.

Following best practice, the team scheduled maintenance during what they believed was the lowest-demand window: early Sunday morning. That’s when they performed changes, updates, and system work.

Guess when high-net-worth customers check their balances?

Sunday morning. And the only reason the organization found out was by listening to sales and client-recovery staff — the people facing customers directly. They had seen the pattern for months.

Neither Sales nor IT leadership knew. This is classic service-strategy disconnect — Gap 1 in Completely Satisfied — where leaders misjudge what people actually expect from the service.

And yes, it gets better.

The maintenance window had been chosen based on IT’s internal assumptions. The team believed low volume meant low importance. They never considered the business or emotional impact because they had no service concept to guide them. Volume and value were treated as the same thing.

You’d think this would be an easy fix. It wasn’t.

Moving the maintenance window to Wednesday evening solved the experience issue, but implementing it took weeks of planning and months of schedule negotiation. The technical work was easy. The organizational alignment wasn’t.

The results.

After the shift, revenue rose by nearly $500 million year over year. Reduced churn and better word-of-mouth from happier customers drove the improvement. All of that was unlocked by reframing how IT understood the service experience.

The moral of the story.

IT is now a service provider inside a larger service provider. Without a full view of the end-to-end experience — employee, customer, and business — it’s easy to miss how much value is hidden in plain sight. A small change, grounded in a clear understanding of expectations and perceptions, can produce outsized results.

This is the same lesson central to Completely Satisfied: when you understand what people expect, what they perceive, and where the gaps sit, you stop treating “users” as abstractions and begin to see them as real people with real goals. This is also why the service concept sits inside Hailee’s workgroup digital twin — it gives structure to those expectations and the value chain they connect to, making disconnects like the Sunday-morning problem much easier to surface before they cause damage.

Ask yourself: Have you ever looked at your own maintenance windows, workflows, or design choices through this lens? Do the people closest to customers have a seat at the table, or do insights only filter upward long after the damage is done?

A small change in perspective can reveal what to do, for whom, and why — often far more clearly than any dashboard ever could.

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

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