AERIM — The Operating System for Customer Experience
Experience is not created at touchpoints. It is created by systems.
Customers feel the impact of your processes, data, policies, and decisions long before they interact with your people.
To your customers, the whole process feels broken or inconsistent. They don't care about your processes or policies. They experience a journey across the whole system - that's why the system needs to be fixed.
AERIM gives organizations the structure to see, align, design, embed, and continuously improve the systems that create experience
What AERIM Is
AERIM is an evidence-based transformation cycle designed to operate customer experience as a system, not a collection of disconnected initiatives.
It is built around five interdependent capabilities:
Assess -> Engage -> Refine -> Integrate -> Measure
These phases form a closed-loop operating model that enables organizations to understand reality, align stakeholders, design what is feasible, embed change, and learn continuously. This reflects the core logic that experience is always a system outcome, shaped long before the customer sees or feels anything.
Why AERIM Exists
Modern organizations face a universal challenge:
Customers perceive one journey, while organizations operate through many semi-independent units. This structural fragmentation is the root cause of most experience failures - not a lack of effort or intention.
AERIM was created to address exactly this gap. It provides:
- A way for teams to move from knowing the problem to coherently improving it
- A shared language for complex environments
- A method for aligning processes, policies, data, and behaviors
- A repeatable cycle for strengthening capability across the entire experience system
Experience breaks for predictable reasons. None of them are surface-level.
Most customers judge you as one organization.
Inside, you operate through dozens of teams, systems, rules, partners, and priorities. When these are misaligned, customers feel:
- inconsistent information
- contradictory decisions
- unpredictable processing times
- unclear communication
- staff who want to help but are constrained by the system
You need a Systemic Approach to your Customer Experience.
These issues don’t come from frontline performance.
They come from structural and operational fragmentation - what AERIM calls the experience system.
AERIM makes this system visible and governable, so improvements stop being isolated fixes and start becoming coherent, sustainable change.
A System Model for a System Problem
Organizations rarely fail at experience because of a single touchpoint, channel, or moment.
They fail because the system behind the experience is fragmented, misaligned, or operating on assumptions that no longer match reality.
Most improvement efforts stay at the surface - optimizing an interface, refining a script, redesigning a journey map. These activities matter, but they cannot compensate for deeper structural forces that shape what customers ultimately feel. AERIM focuses on these underlying mechanisms, the parts of the system that determine whether experience is stable, credible, and coherent:
- how decisions are made and who has the authority to make them
- how information flows - or fails to flow - across teams, channels, and systems
- how processes synchronize and where handoffs create hidden friction
- how policies interact and influence operational behavior
- how technology constrains or enables the intended experience
- how teams interpret priorities in moments that demand judgment
- how performance is measured, governed, and translated into learning
When these mechanisms work together, customers experience clarity, predictability, and trust.
When they don’t, the experience becomes inconsistent - even when everyone is working hard and trying to do the right thing.
AERIM provides a system model that helps organizations see these interactions clearly, understand how they produce customer outcomes, and strengthen the capabilities that matter most. This perspective is essential in environments with high complexity or high stakes, where reliability is not optional and where emotional stability is as important as operational efficiency.
AERIM does not simplify the complexity of modern service environments.
It makes that complexity manageable.
It delivers the clarity organizations need to operate experience reliably, reduce variability, prevent failure, and create the conditions in which customers and employees can succeed.
Is AERIM Right for Your Organization?
AERIM is built for organizations where customer experience is shaped by more than one team, system, or channel. If your journeys span multiple functions, external partners, physical and digital environments, or regulated processes, then your experience performance is determined by how well your system works - not by isolated touchpoints or individual moments.
In these environments, even highly committed teams can feel constrained by structures they do not control. Local improvements help for a while, but issues reappear because the underlying mechanisms shaping experience remain unchanged. That is the pattern AERIM is designed to address. It gives organizations a way to interpret complexity, align effectively, and turn intention into sustained operational reality.
Organizations typically turn to AERIM when they face one or more of the following challenges:
- Recurring experience breakdowns with unclear root causes, where problems resurface despite redesigns, workshops, or new tools.
- Conflicting interpretations of customer issues across teams, leading to different truths about what is happening and why.
- Strong design intentions that fail during implementation, because operational constraints, policies, or workflows were not aligned.
- Operational variability that creates emotional instability for customers, especially in high-stakes journeys where predictability matters most.
- Fragmented ownership across digital, physical, and partner environments, making it difficult to govern journeys end-to-end.
- Difficulty turning insights into coordinated action, with research or analytics raising awareness but not driving system-level change.
- Inconsistent or disconnected measurement, where metrics describe customer sentiment but don’t reveal the mechanisms behind it.
If these issues resonate, the root cause is rarely a lack of talent or effort. It is that the experience system - the interplay of processes, decisions, data flows, policies, and behaviors - is not aligned or visible enough to be managed as one coherent whole.
AERIM gives organizations a repeatable way to build that coherence.
It provides the structure to:
- establish a shared understanding of what customers actually experience,
- align stakeholders around evidence rather than assumption,
- design solutions grounded in real operational constraints,
- embed changes across processes, technology, and roles, and
- create a learning cycle that stabilizes progress over time.
This makes AERIM particularly powerful in organizations that are large, federated, or interdependent — where change is difficult not because people resist it, but because the system is complex. AERIM brings clarity to that complexity and gives teams a model they can own without relying on ongoing external intervention.
If your organization needs to move beyond reactive fixes and build an internally sustainable experience operating model, AERIM is designed for exactly that purpose.
What AERIM Is Not
AERIM is not a software platform, a toolkit you install, or a replacement for your existing CX or analytics systems.
It doesn’t require new tools, licenses, integrations, or technology disruption.
AERIM works underneath your current setup - providing the operating logic that makes your processes, tools, dashboards, and teams operate as one coherent system.
It does not introduce another layer of complexity.
It builds the foundation that allows your existing technology, data, governance, and operational routines to finally work together.
AERIM is a system model, not a system you have to implement.
It strengthens the capabilities that make reliable, repeatable experience possible - regardless of the tools you already use.
What Do We Know About Your Industry?
Customer Experience behaves differently in every sector - but the systemic forces behind the experience are remarkably similar.
Across industries, we see the same patterns: misaligned processes, inconsistent decision paths, fragmented information, and operational variability that customers feel instantly.
AERIM is being applied across a wide range of industries, generating a unique evidence base:
- 23+ industries analyzed through capability-based maturity models
- 500+ organizational assessments across digital and physical journeys
- 10,000+ data points describing real experience-system behavior
This depth allows us to identify the system mechanisms that repeatedly shape customer outcomes - regardless of whether the context is mobility, finance, retail, healthcare, utilities, hospitality, or public services.
Use the selector below to see the typical capability patterns and friction points found in organizations similar to yours.
This isn’t a generic list - it reflects the recurring system behaviors uncovered through AERIM assessments.
What Do We Know About Your Industry?
Tell us a little about your industry, and we can show you a little about what we know about your Customer Experience Pain Points and Internal Issues.
Your Customer Experience Topics
Every industry has its own operational realities, regulatory pressures, and emotional dynamics.
But the underlying drivers of experience - how processes synchronize, how data flows, how decisions are made, and how policies shape behavior - are universal.
The topics shown below represent the most common system-level friction areas identified through AERIM maturity assessments in your selected industry. These are not surface-level pain points. They are the structural, operational, and emotional contributors that consistently influence customer outcomes.
You can use these insights to:
- understand what causes customers experience breakdowns
- identify which mechanisms (process, data, policy, workflow, handoffs) sit behind those issues
- see where variability typically appears in your sector
- recognize capability gaps that matter for both performance and emotional stability
- align internal teams around the real sources of experience friction
AERIM uses these inputs to help organizations build the capabilities needed to stabilize journeys, improve reliability, and create coherent experiences across digital, physical, and partner environments.