How Synchrony built a system for connecting insights to business outcomes

Almost everyone agrees that customer insights matter. So why can't anyone prove that a single insight drove a single business decision? 

It's not for a lack of data. Or research. Customer experience teams have an abundance of both. The problem is that influence is surprisingly difficult to track inside large organizations.

That's according to JD Buckley, VP of CX Strategy and Service Design at Synchrony Financial. Speaking at the Forrester CX Forum in New York, she suggested that the next major challenge for the CX profession may be proving its impact.

"How do we know this research made a difference?" 

"Would the product team have done that anyway?"

"What business impact did your team actually create?"

Those questions are familiar to anyone working in customer experience. They also expose one of the profession's biggest blind spots: the inability to trace influence from discovery to outcome.

The attribution problem nobody talks about

The CX strategist opened with a familiar scenario: A CX team spends weeks conducting strategic discovery research. The work is customer-driven, cross-functional, and grounded in data. Stakeholders nod along during presentations. Product teams appear aligned. The findings are well-received.

Then, the performance review season arrives.

"It's clear your team is doing a lot of work," JD said, paraphrasing a conversation many CX leaders have experienced. "But how do you know you're doing the right thing?"

The challenge becomes even more apparent when products begin to ship. She recalled checking in with a product partner about a feature her team's research had helped inform.

"We were going to do that anyway," the colleague replied. "Your team's research just confirmed what we already knew."

The work clearly mattered. "You know that your team's research is informing outcomes, but you just can't prove it," JD said.

That gap led her to three questions: 

• How do I prove that my team's research shapes outcomes, not just confirms them? 

• How do I connect discovery to dollars while ensuring what gets shipped remains human-centered? 

• And how do I prevent my team's work from being absorbed and re-attributed elsewhere?

"Trying to answer these questions became the start of how I created 4RI," she told the audience.

The problem, according to JD, isn't whether customer insights influence decisions. It's that the connection often gets lost as work moves through the organization. By the time a feature reaches customers, the original research may have passed through multiple teams, planning cycles, roadmap discussions, and competing priorities, making its influence difficult to trace.

She set out to fix that.

A metric five years in the making

The answer JD discovered is a framework she calls 4RI: Ratio of Recommendations to Roadmap, Release, and Impact.

It emerged from more than five years of experimentation across multiple organizations and is designed to measure something most CX teams struggle to quantify: influence.

Rather than focusing solely on final outcomes, 4RI tracks four distinct dimensions: recommendations connected to roadmap items; recommendations that make it into released products; recommendations that create measurable customer and business impact; and recommendations that never move forward, along with their opportunity cost.

"4RI measures three things: the momentum of research influence, the impact of released recommendations, and the opportunity cost of inaction. Each requires a different reporting cadence and a different conversation," jD explained.

The framework reflects a central idea behind her presentation: influence is worth measuring, and not just at the finish line.

Most organizations celebrate outcomes after a product is released. But in large enterprises, major initiatives can take two or three years to reach customers. Teams that wait until launch to demonstrate value can spend multiple planning cycles looking as though they haven't contributed anything at all.

"The zero-to-two stage progress scale exists to prevent that from happening," JD said.

In her view, momentum itself deserves recognition. Her framework treats progress toward impact as something that can be measured and communicated, rather than an invisible waiting period between research and results.

The infrastructure behind influence

Before traceability becomes possible, four structural elements must exist:

• A living inventory of recommendations connected to roadmap items and their owners

• An enterprise-wide journey framework that acts as a contextual layer from customer lifecycle stages to individual touchpoints

• A customer segmentation model tied to needs and outcomes rather than demographics

• Strong cross-functional partnerships, not just with senior decision makers, but with implementation teams who own the metrics CX teams need to borrow.

Without these foundations, recommendations become disconnected from execution.

The most striking example came from Synchrony's early attempts to operationalize the framework. Working with an intern, JD, and her team built what they called a Journey Atlas Roadmap. This was the full enterprise journey framework, all six product and technology team roadmaps, 150-plus recommendations tied to customer pain points and evidence. They were, she said, ecstatic.

Then they launched it, "And nobody could read it."

Product teams were overwhelmed by the volume. Prioritization exercises stalled. Without the right context, stakeholders didn't know where to start.

The turning point came just before the roadmap planning season. They exported all 150 recommendations and asked product teams to flag anything they might consider for their annual roadmap. One product manager went through every single one, noting what she'd consider, flagging what might benefit other teams. That annotated list came back filtered to fewer than 30 recommendations, connected to journeys and CX North Star opportunities. "She's still my biggest champion today," JD said.

Now, instead of reacting with, "This is a lot," teams were asking a different question: "Which of these should we be doing?"

Stop asking teams to do more

Many teams present product leaders with a list of new recommendations and expect them to make room. Even when supported by strong research, those ideas compete with existing commitments, roadmap priorities, and performance targets. From the product team's perspective, it's often just more work.

Synchrony Financial’s team found a different approach, one they started calling “the gateway maneuver.”

Instead of leading with new recommendations, the team first mapped CX insights to roadmap items already owned by teams. The message shifted from "here's something else you should do" to "here's how you can make what you're already doing better."

CX North Stars became the connective tissue. They linked future customer experience goals to work already underway, helping product teams see how today's roadmap decisions contributed to tomorrow's outcomes.

"We weren't asking them to do more," JD explained. "We were helping them do what they were already doing. Just a little bit better."

From there, teams became far more receptive to new recommendations. 

3 conversations for 3 audiences

The operating model JD shared at Forrester organizes 4RI around three recurring conversations, each designed for a different audience.

Momentum is the quarterly conversation with product leadership. How many recommendations have made it onto the roadmap? How many are actively being worked on? The goal is to make influence visible during the long stretch between research and release.

Opportunity cost is the annual planning conversation with product owners and journey leaders. What recommendations are stalled? What opportunities have been deferred? What is the business cost of doing nothing?

"You can potentially change the whole conversation with this metric alone,” JD said.

Impact is the executive conversation. What percentage of research recommendations reached release? What customer and business metrics moved as a result? And how did those outcomes compare with previous years?

This is the conversation that shifts CX from a research function to a strategic business partner.

Holding those conversations consistently requires more than a reporting framework. It requires a way to keep recommendations connected to journeys, journeys connected to roadmaps, and roadmaps connected to outcomes. Otherwise, the evidence needed to demonstrate influence gets lost long before the results arrive.

For Synchrony, that infrastructure came from TheyDo's Experience Context Platform. By connecting recommendations, journeys, roadmap initiatives, and business outcomes in a shared layer of context, JD’s team could trace the path of an insight long after the original research was completed. As work moved through the organization, those connections remained intact, creating a record of how customer insights influenced decisions and outcomes over time.

That context layer is also where AI enters the picture. AI makes it possible to scale the work required to connect insights, decisions, and outcomes across a large enterprise. Without context, AI can generate recommendations. With context, it can help organizations understand what changed, why it changed, and where customer insights influenced the business.

The future of CX may be traceability

For years, customer experience professionals have focused on generating better insights. The next frontier may be proving what happened because of them. The presentation closed with JD’s professional call to action: "Take the win. No one's going to give it to you." Don't wait for full releases to acknowledge that research shaped an outcome. Don't let debates over partial credit paralyze the team. And don't let "we were going to do that anyway" become the final word.

"Our job as CX leaders is to advocate for the customer," she said. "But we also have to create intentional pathways to advocate for our teams, and for ourselves."

Her framework points toward a future where CX teams do more than deliver research. They maintain a continuous chain of evidence connecting customer needs, organizational decisions, implementation, and business outcomes.

In a world where AI can generate recommendations instantly, that traceability may become one of the profession's most valuable capabilities.

Because if every organization can produce insights at scale, competitive advantage won't come from creating more of them.

It will come from proving which ones actually changed the business.

Synchrony Financial's JD Buckley presented "Turning Insights Into Impact With AI" at Forrester CX Forum New York on June 24, 2026.