Two floors apart for six years, until a task force put them in the same room.
Why FCX exists, and why the name never got a real replacement.
Project FCX, 2020.
Renata Ferraro ran customer experience for a national retail chain for nine years — journey maps, NPS dashboards, friction audits on every checkout flow. Devora Cortez ran HR for the same company. They sat two floors apart and had never spoken until a reorg put them on the same task force in 2020, tasked with fixing frontline turnover, which was running near 70% annually.
Renata's first question was simple: have we ever actually mapped what it's like to be one of these employees, the way we map what it's like to be a customer? The answer was no. Nobody had. There were customer journey maps for every single product category. There was an exit-interview spreadsheet nobody had opened in fourteen months.
Six weeks, one store cluster, a 22-point drop.
They ran a six-week pilot, internally called Project FCX — Frontline Colleague eXperience — mapping the actual experience of a store associate from job posting to first shift to year three. Turnover in the pilot stores dropped 22 points within eight months. Nobody planned for the name to stick. It just never got a real replacement, and by the time anyone thought to rename it, it was already what everyone called the whole approach.
When Renata and Devora left in 2022 to do this independently, for other companies, they kept calling it FCX. Renaming it felt like it would erase the six weeks that actually mattered.
Four things we hold every engagement to.
We only take engagements where we can calculate a baseline first.
If there's no data to start from, the first project is building the data, not the fix.
The sponsor has to be willing to see a bad score.
We've walked away from mandates where the real goal was a nicer-sounding number, not a truer one.
We hand off the measurement system, not just a report.
A dashboard nobody can run without us isn't a deliverable. It's a retainer we didn't propose honestly.
If it wouldn't hold up as a CX finding, it doesn't get presented as an EX finding.
Same rigor, same standard of evidence, just pointed at a different journey.
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