Last year, Verizon made the curious choice to acquire once-bankrupt Frontier Communications for $20 billion. Cited as a key benefit to Verizon (beyond the landgrab) was a “high-quality customer base.”

High-value customers are not difficult to find, but contact centers struggle to engage them for net-positive outcomes. Updating infrastructure wasn’t enough to turn around Frontier; contact center employees were enabled and empowered to solve customer problems and grow the relationship. When I recently spoke with Verizon Consumer Group Chief Customer Experience Officer Brian Higgins, it was clear that his company’s strategy and Frontier’s align. He similarly invested in contact center employees and attributed success to a foundation of psychological safety and a concerted effort to cocreate new tools with employees. Aside from two companies with profitable contact centers coming together, the 2026 acquisition will have the added benefit of cultural synergies, as both demonstrate value for the employee experience (EX) as a key enabler of the customer experience (CX).

Psychological safety and cocreation are necessary components of your EX strategy to successfully implement your CX strategy. Many leaders claim that psychological safety exists but don’t measure it. At Forrester, we use several questions to gauge this outcome in our global Future Of Work Survey, as it is a complex outcome of multiple actions and emotions. Furthermore, cocreation must be programmed into the organization, likely as part of a broader discipline such as design thinking. With the intention to take measurable, disciplined action, firms that have an EX-to-CX strategy:

  • Begin with a foundation of psychological safety. In the case of Verizon, employees were willing to share unmet needs so that the building of solutions started by addressing the right problems. In environments with high psychological safety, listening leads to a concerted effort to improve the employee experience — not just customer outcomes.
  • Cocreate solutions with employees. There are many solutions on the market to help your customer-facing employees recognize a high-value customer, understand the context of the conversation, and know the appropriate products and services to offer, but none of these are “turnkey” products. Bring employees in early and often to shape solutions to their ways of working and to get buy-in for eventual adoption.

No, psychological safety and cocreation are not new concepts for most leaders. But have you outlined how you will connect these two concepts between your EX strategy and your CX strategy? This connection must be made explicit in your CX vision. The goal: Align all CX stakeholders on how employees will play the most important role in the customer experience. Consistency, in everything from how change is communicated to how customer focus is recognized, builds psychological safety as well as CX quality.

This is so important to your success that we’ve outlined what leaders must do (and how to do it) in a recent Forrester report, Build Your EX-To-CX Strategy Now. Not a Forrester client? You can listen to the authors of that report discuss findings in a recent CX Cast episode. And you can join me at CX Summit North America in Nashville this June, where I will be sharing more insight on the topic. Learn more and register.