The first quarterly business review happened on a Thursday in October. Jonathan presented. Claire was there. Two members of the provider's operations team whose names the CEO had by now retained, a detail analyst named Preethi and an account coordinator named Dom, sat at the far end of the table with laptops open and the specific attentiveness of people whose job is to have the right number ready when the right question is asked. The slides were professional. The metrics were presented clearly and honestly, which the CEO had not assumed would be the case and was somewhat relieved to find was. Response time was within SLA. First contact resolution rate was eighty-one percent against a target of eighty-five, which Jonathan acknowledged without deflecting and attributed to the ongoing familiarisation period, which was accurate. Customer satisfaction score was three point six out of five against the previous internal team average of four point two, a gap of point six that Jonathan described as within expected parameters for a transition period of this duration. The CEO wrote down the number point six and looked at it for a moment. Point six on a five-point scale sounds small. It is not small. It is the difference between a customer who would recommend the company to someone they knew and a customer who would say it was fine if pressed. It is the difference between a customer who would give the company the benefit of the doubt when something went wrong and a customer who had already started forming the impression that something was structurally off, even if they could not name what it was. The CEO did not say this during the review. "What is the plan to close the gap?" said the CEO. "We have identified three areas of focus for Q4," said Jonathan. "Agent product knowledge, which we are addressing through a six-week supplementary training programme that the provider has developed in collaboration with your product team. Interaction quality, which we are addressing through increased coaching frequency and a revised quality assurance framework. And first call resolution, which we are addressing through a restructured escalation pathway that reduces the number of touchpoints for common issue types." "Timeline for closing the gap?" said the CEO. "We would expect to be at or above the previous benchmark within two quarters," said Jonathan. The CEO thought about two quarters. About the customers who would call during those two quarters and have a three point six experience instead of a four point two experience. About the ones who would not wait two quarters to decide whether the company was still worth staying with. "What does the churn data show?" said the CEO. Preethi pulled up a slide. The churn data showed an increase of two point three percent over the previous quarter. Jonathan described this as within the range of normal quarterly variation. The CEO looked at the slide and thought about whether two point three percent was within the range of normal quarterly variation or whether it was the beginning of something that would look, in twelve months, like the thing that had been happening all along and that nobody had described as such while it was happening. "I want weekly churn reporting going forward," said the CEO. "Of course," said Jonathan. The review continued. More slides. More metrics. More numbers that described the support operation accurately and completely in the ways that numbers can describe things, which is not the same as understanding the things the numbers are describing. At the end of the review Jonathan said overall they were encouraged by the progress. The transition was proceeding within expected parameters and they were confident in the two quarter trajectory. "Thank you Jonathan," said the CEO. "We are committed to making this work," said Jonathan. "I know," said the CEO.

Ruth had been a customer for four years and one month. She had found the company in the same way that many of the early customers had found it, through a recommendation from someone who described the product not in terms of what it did but in terms of how it made them feel, which was the specific kind of recommendation that produces the specific kind of customer who arrives already believing in the thing before they have experienced it themselves. Ruth had experienced it and had continued believing in it for four years and one month. She had been, in those four years, the kind of customer that companies do not see until they are gone. Not the customer who writes. Not the customer who calls with problems. The customer who simply uses the product, and pays for it, and mentions it to people she knows, and renews without being asked, and who represents a category of value that appears in the churn data only at the moment of its removal. She had spoken to Priya twice in four years. Both times she had come away from the call with the specific feeling she associated with the company, which was not quite satisfaction and was not quite delight but was something in between, the feeling of having been dealt with by someone who was actually present in the conversation. She called in the fourth week of the provider's operation with a question about a billing discrepancy that she had noticed on her latest invoice. It was not a large discrepancy. She was not agitated about it. She called with the easy confidence of someone who has called a company before and knows that the call will be handled well. The agent she spoke to was following the script correctly. The script correctly directed the agent to identify the issue, confirm the account details, explain the billing structure, and offer a resolution if the discrepancy could be confirmed on the system. The agent identified the issue. Confirmed the account details. Explained the billing structure. The discrepancy, it turned out, was not a discrepancy but a change in the billing cycle that Ruth had been informed of in an email six weeks earlier and had not remembered. The agent explained this. Ruth said she understood. The call lasted four minutes and thirty seconds. The agent closed it correctly, in the approved manner, with the correct closing phrase. Ruth's post-call satisfaction score was three out of five. She did not call again. Not because there was nothing to call about. Because the specific quality that had made calling feel worth the effort was no longer reliably there, and the effort of calling, which had always been real even when the outcome was good, was no longer offset by the certainty of the outcome. She renewed her subscription when it came up, because the product was still good. Then, three months later, she did not renew it. No email. No call. No survey response. No explanation. The subscription simply lapsed and she did not take the action that would have prevented it from lapsing. She was not angry. She was not even, quite, disappointed. She was the specific kind of gone that happens when the small things that make a relationship worth maintaining are no longer consistently there, when the value of the relationship has become purely transactional and the transaction has alternative providers. Somewhere in the company's data she existed as a churn event. She existed as two point three percent. She did not know this. She had not thought about the company since the day the subscription lapsed. She had found another product that did what she needed and had not thought about the comparison. The company had lost Ruth before it understood that Ruth was the kind of loss that could not be recovered through a coaching programme or a revised escalation pathway or a six-week supplementary training module. It had lost Ruth before Elena wrote her email. But Ruth was the number that made Elena's email make sense. The distance had been growing before the quarterly business review named it. Not the distance between the metrics and the target, though that distance was real and was being named and was being addressed through training programmes and coaching frequency and restructured escalation pathways. A different distance. The distance between the company and the experience its customers were having. Before the provider took over, the CEO had known what the support function felt like from the inside. Had read the tickets. Had walked to Priya's desk. Had sat with Sandra and understood, from direct conversation, what the team was encountering and how they were handling it and what the customers were saying and what the customers were not saying that was sometimes more important than what they were. Now the CEO received reports. The reports were accurate. The CEO had no reason to believe they were not accurate. But there is a thing that happens when the knowledge you have about something comes entirely from reports about it. The thing that happens is that you begin to relate to the thing through the reports rather than directly, and relating to a thing through reports changes how you understand it in ways that are subtle and cumulative and very difficult to reverse. The CEO understood the support function through Jonathan's slides. Jonathan's slides were not wrong. They were Jonathan's slides, which meant they were the support function as understood by the provider, presented in the format that the provider had developed for presenting it, organised around the metrics that the provider measured, using the language that the provider used to describe what it was doing. This was not deception. It was distance. The ordinary distance that exists between any two organisations working together across a contractual boundary, each with its own perspective and its own language and its own understanding of what is important and what is secondary.

On the provider side, Gil was looking at the same data from a different angle. He did not have access to the company's churn figures. He had access to the repeat contact rate for his team's calls, and to the satisfaction scores, and to the pattern of callbacks that told him, without the company's historical data to compare against, that something was not working in the way it should be working. He had raised it with his manager. His manager had said the scores were within the expected range for a transition period. Gil had said that within expected range was not the same as good enough. His manager had said that Jonathan was managing the client relationship and that Gil's job was to manage the team's performance against the SLA. Gil went back to his desk. He pulled up the six call recordings from the previous week that had produced the lowest satisfaction scores. Listened to all of them. Not as a QA exercise. As a diagnostic. He was trying to understand what the agents were doing in those calls that was producing the score rather than the reverse score. What he found was not incompetence. The agents were following the script correctly. The script was producing a certain kind of call. The certain kind of call was producing a certain kind of score. The certain kind of score was within the expected range for a transition period. And the customer was having an experience that was correct and insufficient. Gil spent the following Saturday building a supplementary coaching framework that addressed the specific gaps he had identified in the six call recordings. Not a new script. A set of questions that agents could ask themselves before entering each section of the script, questions that were designed to produce the right version of the scripted response rather than the correct version. He sent it to his manager on Monday morning with a note explaining what it was for. His manager replied that he would pass it to Jonathan for review. Gil waited. The framework was never used. It was never formally rejected. It simply did not come back. Callum and Yusuf had reached the point that Sandra had predicted. The containment had worked for longer than Sandra had expected. The conversations had produced adjustments. The adjustments had produced, not a resolution, but a managed coexistence that had allowed both of them to continue doing their work without the friction becoming visible to the people around them. Then Yusuf had made a decision about how to handle a specific customer situation that Callum had publicly disagreed with in a team meeting. Not viciously. Not maliciously. In the direct and certain way of someone who has a strong view about the right way to do something and who does not consider, in the moment, whether the forum for expressing the view is the right one. Yusuf had not responded in the meeting. He had responded afterward, in a private message to Sandra that described what Callum had done in terms that made clear that the managed coexistence had reached its limit. Sandra had the conversations again. This time they produced less. Callum maintained that he had been correct and that the forum had been appropriate. Yusuf maintained that the forum had been a public undermining and that the correctness of the view was not the point. Sandra came to the CEO. "I need to make a decision about this," said Sandra. "And I want you to know that I am going to make it." "What decision?" asked the CEO. "Yusuf's contract is up for renewal in six weeks," said Sandra. "I am not going to renew it." The CEO said nothing for a moment. "Not because the work is not good," said Sandra. "The work is good. But the situation is not resolvable in the current structure and the situation is costing the team more than the work is worth. I think that is the right call." "Is it Yusuf's fault?" asked the CEO. "It is not about fault," said Sandra. "It is about what the team needs and what the structure can support. Yusuf and Callum together are not working. Yusuf is the one whose contract is up for renewal. That is the decision that is available to me." The CEO thought about what Joel had said about two kinds of distance. "Make the call you think is right," said the CEO. Yusuf was not renewed. He did not know why. The explanation he received was professional and non-specific, the explanation given when the real reason is too specific to be useful in the context of a departure conversation. He accepted it with the dignity of someone who has been in enough workplaces to know that the stated reason and the real reason are not always the same thing, and who has decided that demanding the real reason is a cost he is not prepared to pay. He was one of the eight. He would not know this for a long time.

Joel had a theory about the distance. He explained it to the CEO over lunch on a Tuesday, three weeks after the quarterly business review, at the sandwich place two blocks from the office that they had been going to since the early days because the sandwiches were good and because going somewhere familiar when you needed to think clearly was its own kind of useful. "There are two kinds of distance," said Joel. "The kind you can see and the kind you cannot." "Explain," said the CEO. "The distance you can see is in the metrics," said Joel. "Point six on the CSAT score. Two point three percent churn. Eighty-one percent first contact resolution against eighty-five target. You can see those gaps. You can address them. Jonathan has a plan to address them and the plan is reasonable and it will probably work, at least partially, which means the metrics will probably improve." "And the distance you cannot see?" said the CEO. "Is the thing that produced four point two in the first place," said Joel. "It is not in any metric. It does not have a number. It is the accumulated effect of three years of Priya staying with the problem until it was sorted and Sandra knowing which agents needed support on difficult calls and Maya adding an entry to the green notebook every time a customer revealed something new about how they used the product. That distance is not in Jonathan's slides because it cannot be put in Jonathan's slides. It is also not being addressed by the six-week supplementary training programme or the increased coaching frequency or the restructured escalation pathway." "Can it be addressed?" said the CEO. "From here, probably not," said Joel. "You cannot address a distance you cannot see using tools designed for distances you can see." "What would you need to see it?" said the CEO. "You would need to be inside it," said Joel. "You would need to read the tickets. Walk to the desks. Have the conversations that happen before someone decides to put something in a report." "The provider's team is in a different building," said the CEO. "I know," said Joel. "They are also in a different country for three of the five days," said the CEO. "I know," said Joel. "So the distance is structural," said the CEO. "Yes," said Joel. "Which is what I said in the beginning, or something like it, and you said we would watch what happens and fix what breaks." "And now we are watching," said the CEO. "Yes," said Joel. "And what is breaking?" said the CEO. "Not the metrics," said Joel. "Not yet, or not obviously. What is breaking is the thing that was not in the metrics when we had it and is not in the metrics now that we do not. The thing that made a customer write a paragraph about a forty-minute phone call. That thing is gone and there is no metric that says so and there will not be a metric that says so until enough customers have left that the churn data makes the argument that the customer's paragraph was trying to make." "How long?" said the CEO. "I do not know," said Joel. "Depends on how loyal the customer base is. Depends on the competitive environment. Depends on whether something happens that requires the support function to go above and beyond what a forty-three-page script can support." "And if something happens?" said the CEO. "Then the distance becomes visible very quickly," said Joel. "What kind of something?" said the CEO. "A product failure," said Joel. "A billing error at scale. A data incident. Anything that requires the people on the phones to use judgment rather than process. Anything where the customer needs to feel that the person they are talking to is genuinely trying to help rather than managing an interaction." The CEO was quiet for a moment. "The privacy clause," said the CEO. "What about it?" said Joel. "I have been thinking about the privacy clause," said the CEO. "The data protection provisions. The gap between the required standard and the practice." "And?" said Joel. "I think there is something in that gap that we have not looked at directly," said the CEO. "What makes you say that?" said Joel. "Because I asked Jonathan about it in the preliminary conversations and he answered in a way that told me the question was making him uncomfortable without telling me why," said the CEO. "And because the clause I added to the contract, the one about reasonable steps to understand and preserve the culture, was signed without comment. And because things that are signed without comment in contracts are usually things that one side has decided not to contest because contesting them would draw attention to something they would rather not draw attention to." "That is a significant inference from a relatively small set of observations," said Joel. "I know," said the CEO. "Do you want me to look at it?" said Joel. "Yes," said the CEO. "Not through the formal reporting channels. I want you to look at where the data is actually going and what is actually happening to it at the operational level. Not what the contract says should happen. What is happening." "That will take some time," said Joel. "I know," said the CEO. "Take the time." Iris filed the claim on a Friday morning. She had gone home the previous evening and had written down, in the notes app on her phone, the sequence of events. The declaration. The conversation. The message at eleven at night. The second conversation. The request for understanding that had come again, in a different form, after Devin had spoken to Marco a second time. She read what she had written. Then she filed the claim. The claim was formal and specific. It described the events in the order in which they had occurred. It did not characterise Marco's intention. It described his behaviour and the effect the behaviour had had on her. The CEO received the notification on Friday afternoon. The weekend was quiet on the surface and not quiet underneath. On Monday morning the investigation began. They finished their sandwiches. The lunch crowd had thinned. The sandwich place had the particular quiet of a room that had recently been full and was returning to itself. "Do you remember the first week?" said the CEO. "When I walked around the office and sat with all of it and said the job was to protect it." "I remember," said Joel. "I did not protect it," said the CEO. "You made a decision under pressure with the information you had and the constraints you were operating under," said Joel. "That is different from not protecting it." "Is it?" said the CEO. "I think so," said Joel. "I also think the distinction matters less than what you do next." "What would you do next?" said the CEO. "I would keep looking at the distance," said Joel. "Both kinds. The kind you can see and the kind you cannot. And I would start thinking about what it would take to close it. Not through training programmes and coaching frequency and restructured escalation pathways. Actually close it." "That would mean going back," said the CEO. "Yes," said Joel. "The board would not support that," said the CEO. "Probably not yet," said Joel. "Yet," said the CEO. "The churn data will tell a story eventually," said Joel. "Stories change boards." "How long?" said the CEO. "I do not know," said Joel. "But probably before the two-quarter trajectory Jonathan is projecting." They walked back to the office. The day had the slightly too-bright quality of late autumn, the light arriving at an angle that made everything look more defined than it usually did, the edges of things sharper, the shadows longer. The CEO thought about two kinds of distance. The kind you can see. The kind you cannot. And the growing understanding that the second kind was always the one that mattered most and the one that was always addressed last, if it was addressed at all, because it was the one that did not appear in the slides.

End of Chapter 8 

Writer's Thought:

Two kinds of distance. The kind that appears in the slides. The kind that does not. Joel already knows which one matters more.

Here is What is Broken. The CEO. The Distance.

MarvinPro | March 2026

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