Driving with purpose: A CX leader's guide to aligning your program with your company's core mission

In this guide CX and business leaders will learn:

1. How to define a clear purpose that anchors your CX work to your company's mission
2. The framework for operationalizing feedback into actions that change products, processes, and outcomes.
3. Proven tactics to build shared CX ownership across every level of your organization.

The challenge: The silent crisis of disconnected CX

Many leaders recognize that great customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have—it's a critical lever for growth. Yet for most organizations, customer feedback remains a collection of fragmented anecdotes. Data lives in silos across departments and tools. Insights, if they're even discovered, don't drive action. Teams work hard but without coordination, and customers feel the consequences. This is the silent crisis of disconnected CX: the gap between knowing customer experience matters and actually operationalizing it as a strategic engine for the business.

When I joined Samsara a year ago, we faced exactly this challenge. Customer feedback was scattered across more than 10 different tools, with no central team to lead the charge. Feedback arrived through inbound emails, call center interactions, third-party reviews, and survey comments—but there was no unified way to listen. Without a clear view of the customer journey or established KPIs, valuable insights were being lost in the noise.

I knew we needed more than just another tool. We needed a single, scalable system for customer listening and action—one that would align directly with our mission of improving the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of the world's physical operations.

The solution: A purpose-driven CX strategy

Our team understood that our program's value wasn't just about collecting data—it was about using that data to help the company achieve its mission. With Qualtrics as our strategic partner, we built a blueprint for purpose-driven CX grounded in three core principles:

1. Mission alignment: Filter every action through the company's core purpose, ensuring CX work resonates from the C-suite to engineering teams.
2. Operational integration: Build sophisticated listening posts across the customer journey that surface systemic issues and drive macro-level fixes.
3. Shared ownership: Democratize customer data so every employee, regardless of role, can make better decisions and proactively address customer needs.

This wasn't just a technology implementation. It was a fundamental shift in how we understood and responded to customer needs—a shift that would unlock 2X ARR growth for happy customers and transform CX from a back-office function into a strategic growth engine.

The Samsara playbook: 3 steps to build mission-aligned CX

When we started building our centralized CX Strategy function, I needed a clear path forward—one that would show value quickly while setting us up for long-term impact. These three steps became our blueprint for moving from fragmented feedback to a program that genuinely drives business outcomes. If you're ready to move beyond collecting data and start connecting your CX work to what your company is actually trying to achieve, start here.

Step 1: Align on the "why"

A great CX program starts with a clear purpose. Without it, feedback becomes noise and initiatives lose organizational support. The most successful programs filter every action through a guiding principle that connects directly to the company's mission.

For us, this meant asking a simple question about every customer insight and proposed fix: Does this make our customers' jobs easier, safer, and more productive? This North Star aligned with our mission and gave our CX program a clear mandate. Instead of just fixing a complaint, we focused on how that fix would tangibly improve the lives of drivers and fleet managers. This alignment ensured our work resonated across the entire organization, from the C-suite to engineering teams.

Your Playbook:

1. Define your CX filter question: Create a simple test that connects customer insights to your company's mission. Make it memorable enough that every team member can apply it.
2. Secure executive alignment: Ensure leadership agrees this filter reflects company priorities and will support initiatives that pass the test.
3. Make it operational: Include your purpose statement in project briefs, stakeholder presentations, and CX dashboards so alignment becomes automatic, not aspirational.

Step 2: Operationalize insights across the journey

Collecting data isn't the goal—acting on it is. The most impactful CX programs build sophisticated networks of listening posts that capture feedback at critical moments, then systematically translate insights into actions that change products, processes, and business decisions.

My team went from having a handful of generic listening tools to building a comprehensive feedback network. We leveraged Qualtrics to consolidate more than 50 surveys and establish new strategic feedback channels across the customer journey. This included systematically analyzing inbound emails and call transcripts for common pain points, deploying targeted surveys after key interactions to understand the "why" behind customer scores, and establishing new feedback posts on our website while monitoring third-party review sites for comprehensive listening.

This approach enabled us to drive more than 100 macro-actions to fix systemic issues. This wasn't about isolated product updates; it was about using insights to make tangible changes to processes and even business decisions that improved customer outcomes at scale.

Your Playbook:

1. Map your customer journey: Identify the critical moments where feedback would be most valuable and establish listening posts at each stage.
2. Consolidate before you expand: Audit existing feedback tools and eliminate redundancy before adding new channels. Create a single source of truth.
3. Focus on systemic fixes: Look for patterns across feedback sources that point to root causes, not just symptoms. Prioritize actions that solve problems for many customers, not just one.
4. Close the loop visibly: When customer feedback drives a change, communicate it back to customers and internal teams to reinforce that insights lead to action.

Step 3: Make it everyone's job

Data is only powerful if it's accessible. The best CX programs democratize insights so every employee—regardless of role—can understand customer health, identify risks, and spot opportunities. This shared ownership transforms CX from a department initiative into a company-wide capability.

We took a bold step by creating the company's first Customer 360 dashboard. This gave every customer-facing employee a centralized view of key data points including account health, renewal risk, and upsell opportunities. Employees could now make informed decisions and proactively address customer needs without waiting for insights to filter through the CX team.

To embed this cultural shift, we partnered with our People team to redesign new employee onboarding to include 2.5 hours of customer deep-dives. From day one, every new hire—regardless of department—understands their role in delivering on the company's mission. This commitment to shared ownership created a new kind of company culture where CX became everyone's responsibility.

Your Playbook:

1. Build your customer 360: Create a unified dashboard that surfaces the most actionable customer data for each role. Make it simple, accessible, and tied to daily workflows.
2. Redesign onboarding: Add customer-focused content to new hire training that goes beyond demographics to real customer stories, pain points, and wins.
3. Celebrate customer-centric wins: When employees use customer insights to drive improvements, recognize them publicly to reinforce the behavior you want to see.
4. Enable self-service: Give teams the tools and training to explore customer data independently rather than gatekeeping insights through the CX team.

Impact that resonates: From metrics to mission-driven culture

The results of our transformation were not just impressive—they were transformative. The ROI was clear, quantifiable, and spoke directly to the business:

• 2X ARR growth: Promoter accounts grew their annual recurring revenue (ARR) 2X faster than non-promoters, contributing to quantified annual financial benefit.
• Substantial operational savings: A 30% reduction in critical support tickets freed up resources to focus on strategic initiatives rather than reactive firefighting.
• NPS leadership: Internal NPS climbed 4 points in less than a year, outperforming competitors and reflecting genuine customer loyalty.
• 100+ systemic improvements: By using insights to drive macro-level actions, Samsara is tangibly making the jobs of drivers and fleet managers easier and safer every single day.

But the bigger story is cultural. CX shifted from a back-office function to a strategic growth engine. Every piece of feedback now leads to action, and every employee understands their role in delivering on our company's mission.

We're not just collecting feedback; we're driving a culture of action. We're ensuring that every piece of feedback helps us make a customer's job easier, safer, and more productive. That's the real ROI.

The path forward: from feedback program to strategic engine

Our story is a reminder that the true value of a CX program comes when it moves from passive data collector to active business driver. What we've built proves what's possible when you align your CX strategy with your company's core mission and partner with a platform that empowers you to turn insights into measurable, purpose-driven impact.

For organizations looking to make this shift, the path is clear: start with a purpose that connects to your mission, build the infrastructure to operationalize insights across the journey, and democratize data so everyone feels accountable for customer outcomes. When these elements align, CX becomes more than a department—it becomes a competitive advantage that your leaders notice and your customers feel every day.