Editorial
The Gist
- ZIRP distorted growth signals. Cheap capital rewarded speed and scale while masking weak fundamentals and poor decision-making.
- Retention replaces expansion as the growth engine. In a higher-rate environment, durable customer relationships now define sustainable performance.
- CX becomes an economic discipline. Customer experience is increasingly measured by its impact on margin, predictability, and long-term value creation.
For over a decade, from the post-2008 recovery through the pandemic rebound, cheap money hid the cost of bad decisions. Many companies and entire categories expanded simply because the low cost of capital made every bet look safe. In sum, speed replaced scrutiny.
ZIRP, or the Zero Interest Rate Policy, defined this era. Near-zero rates encouraged aggressive expansion, inflated valuations and a “grow-at-all-costs” mentality that rewarded activity over value creation. Hidden from view were the second-order effects. When the cost of capital falls to near zero, it dilutes the cost-benefit filter that guides sound decision-making. One consequence of zero cost was zero filter. The results are predictable: companies chased growth for growth’s sake and the “get big fast” mindset treated scale itself as progress.
This led people and businesses to perform unnatural acts, making business and investment choices that would have been unthinkable in a market that priced risk honestly. But today, that false luxury is gone and the comedown has been harsh.
Higher borrowing costs and more cautious investors are forcing organizations to rediscover discipline and focus on the fundamentals. We’re not just seeing a market correction, but also a leadership correction. ZIRP’s end has triggered a reset of valuations and a return to a more conventional measure of success: the ability to deliver a good or service that adds value.
In this shift, customer experience returns as the most reliable indicator of whether a company can deliver that value creation consistently. That correction has also reshaped how leaders think about growth itself.
How ZIRP Changed — and Then Reversed — Growth Economics
The shift from cheap capital to disciplined growth fundamentally altered how leaders evaluate risk, scale and success.
| ZIRP Era Assumption | Post-ZIRP Reality |
|---|---|
| Capital is cheap and abundant | Capital is expensive and selective |
| Scale signals success | Durability and margin signal strength |
| Growth outranks discipline | Discipline determines growth viability |
| Speed beats scrutiny | Scrutiny protects value |
| Expansion validates strategy | Retention validates strategy |
Related Article: Post-ZIRP CX: Stop Buying Customers. Start Earning Them.
Table of Contents
- The Big Reset: Why Growth No Longer Means What It Used To
- Retention as the New Growth Story
- What Executives Really Care About
- The New ROI Framework
- Technology’s Role: Simplify, Prove, Scale
- Growth Isn’t Gone, It’s Just Growing Up
The Big Reset: Why Growth No Longer Means What It Used To
Growth used to mean getting bigger. More customers, more markets, more movement. It gave a strong impression of progress, but much of it was built on borrowed confidence as much as cheap capital real growth requires staying power.
Decisions that once felt bold now look reckless in hindsight, but change is still hard. Keynes said it best: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” And that’s exactly where many organizations find themselves trying to unlearn a version of growth that no longer works because the report card ’s grading curve changed to favor efficiency, profitability and predictability.
Market share doesn’t mean much if margin disappears. And scale for its own sake isn’t strategy; it’s exposure. As those truths set in, the C-suite is finding new alignment, with CFOs, CROs and CMOs speaking the same language again. Growth only matters when it can sustain itself, when customer retention and customer loyalty become the real performance.
The result is a quieter, more disciplined kind of progress with a clearer link between financial performance and the experience companies deliver. And this is exactly what brings the focus back to customer experience.
Retention as the New Growth Story
In a post-ZIRP economy, customer experience is the constant. Markets move, costs rise and fall, priorities shift, but the value creation for customers remains the truest measure of a company’s strength. The companies flourishing are the ones that never lost sight of that connection between customer value and business value.
Military doctrine states that it takes three men to attack what one can defend. In my experience, this ratio holds just as true in business. It’s significantly cheaper to keep customers than to find new ones.
This math has a way of clarifying priorities in order to see where the money moves. Research shows that a 5% customer retention bump can boost profits by 25% to 95%. Budgets that once fueled activities like acquisitions are being routed toward experience, service and support; the places that keep customers close and confidence steady.
Customer retention stabilizes revenue, compounds over time, and protects valuation. It also forces teams to prioritize the parts of the business that actually work, not just the ones that grow.
CX’s Shift From Soft Metric to Financial Signal
As growth economics tightened, executives began evaluating customer experience through financial outcomes rather than sentiment alone.
| Traditional CX View | Post-ZIRP Executive View |
|---|---|
| Brand perception and satisfaction | Revenue predictability and margin protection |
| Engagement scores | Retention and lifetime value |
| Campaign-level measurement | Business-wide economic impact |
| Marketing-owned responsibility | Board-level accountability |
| Lagging indicator | Leading indicator of resilience |
Customer experience has outgrown its reputation as the soft and subjective side of marketing. It’s become a board-level discipline and a measure of financial predictability.
What Executives Really Care About
Numbers do most of the talking, as they should in today’s data-driven world. Customer experience only matters when it means protecting margin, steadying revenue, and shoring up.
Executives aren’t asking for engagement metrics. They’re asking what happens to renewal rates, churn and the cost of serving a customer better. They’re asking how durable and protected the business really is when the wind changes. The data points in the same direction. Forrester shows that the most customer-obsessed firms grow revenue 41% faster and profit 49% faster than their peers.
As value narrows to fewer simple truths: predictable revenue, lower service costs, expanding lifetime value and fewer surprises, what matters becomes clearer. Leadership is aligning around these fundamentals because they are the signals investors trust. The leaders finding their footing are the ones connecting experience to economics and showing that every better journey leads to stronger financial results.
That’s the job now: nurturing that direct path from what customers feel to what the business earns.
Proving value takes discipline. It’s less about storytelling and more about stewardship. Measuring what matters, staying honest about what doesn’t and treating CX as both a reflection of performance and the engine behind it.
The New ROI Framework
Gone are the days of the post-mortem ROI check, where you opened the spreadsheet at the end to see if the bet paid off.
Now this analysis is part of how the bet gets made. Every major decision should start with a version of the same question: Can we prove it’ll be worth it while we’re doing it?
Retention, experience, efficiency all shape the numbers that matter most. When customers stay longer, revenue evens out. When the experience is better, it costs less to bring people in and keep them. When operations are tighter, margins hold. Over time, that consistency compounds into the kind of advocacy you can measure, with customers who renew, refer, and reinforce the value story you’ve built.
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That’s why frameworks like Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) have become so useful. They give teams means to model time-to-value, weigh risk and return before the work begins, and show, in real terms, how experience impacts profit.
REJ is becoming a CX tool as much as a financial one; a way for leaders to make disciplined bets reflecting real customer impact, not just projections.
Of course, that only works if you can actually see what’s happening while it’s happening. The systems behind it — the CX data, the CRM, the analytics, the customer insight — don’t create the value, but they make it visible. Technology helps by showing what’s actually working, not by arguing that it will.
Technology’s Role: Simplify, Prove, Scale
The last decade made technology the default answer to every business challenge, but when tools multiplied faster than returns, investment fatigue and impact dilution set in. What this environment is revealing is something that has been true for a long time: there is more value in most stacks than the business has been capturing, and the pressure now is to bring that potential into the results. Performance and measurement matter more than ever because the pace of change no longer gives teams the luxury of time to catch up.
It’s a problem explored further in Stop Building Tech Stacks, where technology’s purpose shifts from addition to alignment.
If the ZIRP era rewarded accumulation, the current one rewards precision and wiser choices. The mandate is to simplify, consolidate and make every platform deliver measurable outcomes. Technology has moved beyond the balance sheet to the income statement. Every platform has to show what it contributes, whether that’s lowering costs, generating revenue or protecting margin.
Composable architectures are helping organizations do exactly this. They make tech stack changes less scary, help uncover unrealized potential, and show where the real value lives. Most companies already have the tools they need to compete. The opportunity now is learning how to see their full potential and to align it with performance, not just promise.
Value now depends less on owning technology and more on understanding what the existing technology truly delivers.
Growth Isn’t Gone, It’s Just Growing Up
The economics of growth have matured and so has the role of customer experience.
Andy Grove once said, “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.” The same applies here. The smart leaders aren’t wasting the crisis, they’re using it to rebuild around true value: customers who stay, spend, and speak well of the experience.
The work ahead isn’t about doing more; it’s about proving more. Growth still matters. It just has to earn its keep.
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