You've analyzed your customer interactions and gained visibility into dozens of friction points, failed journeys, and moments where customers didn't receive the experience you intended.
But this creates a new challenge: when everything looks like an opportunity for improvement, where do you start? And how do you prioritize those friction points?
If you're wondering why you've encountered so many areas of opportunity, you're not alone. Gartner found that only 14% of customer service issues are fully resolved in self-service. Even for issues customers described as "very simple," only 36% were successfully resolved without leaving self-service.
These findings reveal that most organizations aren't struggling because customers refuse to use AI self-service. They're struggling because too many customer journeys break down before customers reach a successful outcome.
At USAN, we see analyzing customer interactions as only the first step toward improving customer journeys. The second, and most transformational step, is turning those insights into action that creates measurable CX impact.
To do this, we're going to answer two critical questions:
Once you've been able to identify friction across the customer's journey, an important factor to understand is that you don't need to tackle everything at once. It's more important to determine which issues need fixed right away, and which can be fixed later.
A practical framework evaluates issues across three criteria:
Understanding customer impact requires looking beyond the intent categories an organization has already defined. AI can uncover emerging or previously uncategorized intents, revealing why customers are reaching out and helping teams trace where the friction began.
In many cases, the root cause may sit outside the contact center entirely. The issue could originate in a retail location, a self-service chatbot, a mobile app, a website, or another part of the customer journey. By connecting these interactions across channels, organizations can move beyond treating immediate contact and address the experience that caused it.
At a 2026 Customer Contact Week forum, CX evangelist Matthew Storm explained that the beauty of using AI to analyze every call is that organizations no longer have to rely solely on predefined customer intents. Instead, AI can reveal why customers are actually reaching out, including root causes that may never have crossed your mind.
These insights can inform agent coaching and identify opportunities within the contact center, but their value extends much further. They can also expose gaps in digital experiences, communication processes, and workflows owned by other departments.
For example, Rob Estabrook, Director of Contact Center Operations from Dominion Energy shared how they discovered customers needed to feel safe and reassured after making a bill payment. The transaction itself may have been completed successfully, but the journey still felt incomplete because customers lacked confirmation.
The solution was simple: send a text message confirming that the payment had been received. A relatively small change but addressing an important emotional need.
Evan Johnson, Vice President of the Contact Center at U-Haul, shared a similar example. Customers were repeatedly calling to confirm reservations they had already completed online.
On the surface, the calls appeared to be an increase in contact volume. A closer analysis revealed that the digital experience was not providing customers with enough real-time reassurance that their reservations were secure. By introducing notifications, U-Haul could give customers the reassurance they needed while reducing unnecessary follow-up calls.
Both examples demonstrate that a journey can be operationally complete without feeling complete to the customer. Evaluating customer impact helps organizations identify these gaps and prioritize improvements that make it easier for customers to reach their goals with confidence.
Customer friction not only affects the customer experience, but it also affects operational costs, drives unnecessary contact volume, reduces agent engagement, and limits an organization's ability to really serve customers.
Dominion Energy illustrated this connection at CCW; they support around 2.8 million customers with 350 associates handling customer calls from residential to commercial. After implementing solutions from Amazon Connect Customer with the help of USAN, they gained greater visibility into why customers were contacting the organization and how those interactions were being managed.
The company subsequently reported a 19% reduction in residential call volume, helping lower operational costs. At the same time, CSAT scores improved, demonstrating that reducing assisted-service volume does not have to come at the expense of customer experience.
The benefits extended to the agent's experience as well. With fewer calls arriving back-to-back, associates had more time to engage meaningfully with customers. Dominion Energy reported a 50% reduction in unwanted attrition and achieved one of its highest engagement scores.
These results demonstrate why business impact should be evaluated across more than cost savings alone. The right improvements can reduce contact volume and operational expenses while also strengthening customer satisfaction and creating a better working environment for agents.
In the scale dimension, you want to consider how widespread an issue is. A friction point that appears repeatedly across high-volume journeys may create significantly more impact than an isolated problem, even when each individual occurrence seems minor.
Scale also depends on whether an organization can accurately identify and measure the issue.
Dominion Energy’s analysis revealed that 80% of its calls had been assigned incorrect dispositions. This meant the company’s existing categories were not providing an accurate picture of why customers were reaching out.
With more accurate reporting, Dominion Energy was able to better understand customer intent and sentiment, personalize service, and identify opportunities to prevent unnecessary contacts. With the right AI tools, the data revealed the true scale of customer needs and helped the organization determine which journey improvements could produce the greatest impact.
The highest-priority issues are those that happen frequently and create meaningful customer or business impact. By evaluating friction through the combined lenses of customer impact, business impact, and scale, organizations can focus their resources on the improvements most likely to move the needle.
Insights only create value when they reach the teams that have the authority, expertise, and resources to act on them. Improving customer experience, therefore, requires collaboration across the business.
A broken process may require support from operations. A compliance issue may need involvement from legal or risk teams. A failed digital experience may require product, technology, or IT.
For example, when a website outage causes customers to contact the call center, agents can explain the situation and manage expectations, but they cannot resolve the underlying technical problem. The insight must reach IT so the issue can be fixed at its source.
AI-driven interaction analysis helps organizations connect customer feedback, intent, sentiment, and repeat contacts to the departments responsible for the broader experience. Then, the organization can create a plan that identifies the root cause, the team responsible for addressing it, the departments that need to collaborate, and the customer or business outcome the organization expects to improve.
This prevents insights from becoming another backlog of opportunities and ensures the right teams are accountable for turning them into measurable improvements.
Some organizations have internal resources to research and resolve these issues across multiple departments. Others benefit from working with a CX partner that brings expertise and provides an outside perspective, helping organizations move from insights to action quicker.
Dominion Energy’s experience demonstrates the value of this approach. By partnering with USAN and applying Amazon Connect Customer solutions, the organization gained deeper visibility into customer experiences and supported more personalized service and improvements that extended beyond the contact center.
USAN helps organizations analyze and audit 100% of their customer interactions generated by AI on Amazon Connect Customer, determine business failures, and create a practical path toward resolution.