The Institute of Applied CX Science

Customer experience, audited like a balance sheet.

Every broken customer journey costs money: repeat contacts, rework, escalations, credits and the customers who leave. The cost sits in five different ledgers, so nobody adds it up. IACS-7 is the Institute's published method for adding it up, in figures your finance team can check line by line. The Institute applies it with organizations as a consultancy and teaches it in certificate programs, in English and Arabic.

Price a broken journey Apply for a free Friction Audit

Working paper

One billing journey, one year

Repeat contacts240,000 journeys × 23% fail × 1.2 extra contacts × $7$463,680
Manual rework240,000 × 10% reworked × $18$432,000
Escalations240,000 × 4.5% escalated × $38$410,400
Goodwill and credits240,000 × 6% credited × $22$316,800
Cash costthe four lines above$1,622,880
Attributable churn1,000 extra leavers against a comparison group × $210 margin × 1.5 years$315,000
Annual friction costcash cost plus the churn estimate, each shown separately$1,937,880

Low case to quote first (cash only, less a 30% allowance): $1,136,016

A constructed example, not any organization's figures.Price your own journey

The problem

A satisfaction score can rise while the customer book loses money.

The Institute calls this the Solvency Paradox. It is not an accounting error. It is a gap in what gets measured.

Revenue is audited. Customers are not.

The income statement is audited every year. The customer book that produces it is described by satisfaction and loyalty scores that are computed in different ways and rarely reconciled to the ledger.

Goodwill buys the score.

Credits, repeat contacts and human rework keep customers happy with systems that keep breaking. The cost of buying that happiness never appears on a customer experience dashboard.

Some revenue costs more than it earns.

A customer who calls six times a month and rates the service highly can cost more to serve than they pay. Ranked by revenue, that customer looks valuable. Ranked by what they are worth, they are not.

Five costs

Repeat contacts, rework, escalations, credits and attributable churn, joined for one journey.

Five numbers

Burden, APR, tier, C‑BEP and alert state, for every customer.

One grid

Margin against friction, a picture a management team can argue with.

How IACS-7 measures it

The Financial Control Grid

Rank customers by what they are worth, not by what they pay.

Put margin and friction on the same row and four kinds of customer appear. The grid shows where to look. The five numbers of the Standard decide what to do.

Accounts A to D are a constructed teaching set, split at the median of this four-account book. Choose a quadrant to read its strategy.

Monthly gross margin, higher toward the top

Friction: support hours per $1,000 of revenue, higher toward the right

Selected quadrant

Silent Killers

Low margin, high friction Strategy: Exit

Where to start

Five ways in, from ten free minutes to a full audit

The worksheet prices one journey. The audit prices one business unit. The Academy teaches your people to do both.

Price one broken journeyThe free Friction Worksheet puts the five costs of one journey on a working paper you can take to finance.Free Have it measured with youThe 21-day Friction Audit, built from your own data and presented to your leadership.No fee, five places Train the people who build the numberPrograms from a half-day clinic to, from 2027, the Certified Solvency Architect credential. Taught in English; Arabic on request.Academy Read the method in fullThe Customer Value Trilogy and its companion, The Friction Economics Standard.Four volumes Browse the libraryThe Standard, the books, white papers, video lessons and the data behind them, in one place you can search.Free

Founding Cohort, 2026

Five organizations. One business unit each. No fee.

The Founding Cohort receives a full 21-day Friction Audit built from its own data: the avoidable cost of one business unit's broken journeys, how much of it is recoverable and in what order, presented to leadership with a written report. In return we ask for anonymized data and one case study you approve before it is published.