That’s Asda price

Friday’s fiasco:

When satisfaction scores expose what leadership won't admit

Asda scored 77.5 out of 100 for customer satisfaction last year, second-bottom in the UK Customer Satisfaction Index. Only the Co-op ranked lower, and they had a cyberattack. Rachel Eyre, Asda’s chief customer officer, said last year was “a period of significant change” as the company completed “the separation of our IT systems from our former owner, which inevitably caused some temporary disruption to the customer experience”

While it may be true, that explanation skips over the real damage in times of disruptive change: broken internal relationships, unclear decision frameworks, and communication failures compounding across departments during multiple leadership transitions. These aren’t unmeasurable soft issues; they’re quantifiable risks with direct revenue impact. And in supermarket retail, where loyalty is everything, customers and staff deserve the truth.

Allan Leighton returned as executive chairman in November 2024, brought back to rescue Britain’s third-largest supermarket after helping lead its dramatic turnaround in the 1990s alongside Archie Norman. His stated focus: making Asda “special for our colleagues and millions of customers.” Sales declined 4.2% in the 12 weeks to 28 December 2025, and Asda was the only major UK supermarket to suffer a drop in sales over Christmas. The retailer’s market share fell to 11.4%, the lowest it has been over a Christmas period and the worst on record. 

Customer satisfaction scores measure whether your internal systems work well enough to deliver external promises. When customers report problems with quality, reliability, and availability, they’re describing downstream effects of upstream dysfunction. Staff facing job cuts, leadership changes, and unclear strategy can’t deliver consistent service whilst reading about their employer’s troubles in the news. Teams managing transitions without adequate support create the temporary disruption that becomes permanent.

The correlation between declining satisfaction scores and declining sales is causal, not coincidental. Poor external metrics expose internal damage: leadership transitions that reset priorities mid-project, communication gaps that leave frontline staff improvising, accountability vacuums where decisions stall, and relationship fractures that prevent problems being escalated before customers feel them.

Experienced leaders like Leighton usually know what’s broken. The challenge isn’t diagnosis; it’s knowing what to fix first when so much needs attention simultaneously.

Our advice to Asda? Quantify the internal damage before it costs you the business.

Our Organisational Repair Index™️ (ORI) does exactly this. It measures damage across nine factors to show precisely where internal damage is creating external failure. It takes gives you a damage heatmap showing which teams, processes or relationships are most fragile, what’s most at risk (delivery, attrition, regulatory confidence, customer churn), and enables us to tell you what to repair first.

For Asda, an ORI™️ baseline would quantify how leadership transitions damaged decision integrity, where accountability chains broke during the IT separation, and which relational fractures are causing the service inconsistencies customers are experiencing. It would show whether the biggest damage sits at senior leadership level, in cross-functional handoffs, or in frontline team stability. Then you’d know whether to fix senior team alignment first or frontline communication structures - and you’d have metrics to track whether repair work is actually closing the gap.

Then we can repair it systematically using the diagnostic data: implement measurable accountability cadences where the ORI™️ shows decision integrity has collapsed, establish clearer decision-making  in the departments where coordination is most disrupted, and create feedback loops in the areas where psychological confidence to raise problems has dropped. Repair means fixing the broken relationships the data exposes, not just documenting that they’re broken.

Customer satisfaction scores don’t just reflect service quality; they reflect whether your organisation functions. That’s the real Asda price: unquantified damage, declining trust, and a choice to make before it’s too late. 

Repair damage. Rebuild trust. Restore performance. Our 90-day programme addresses relationships, accountability gaps, and performance issues - progress tracked weekly using the ORI™ .

Fixer files: trends

Four mistakes people make in the face of a fiasco

1. Thinking it will blow over in 24 hours

It won't. Crises don't have news cycles anymore. What starts as a complaint on Monday becomes a whistleblower story by Wednesday and a regulatory investigation by Friday. The window for controlling your narrative closes faster than you think, and waiting for the storm to pass means you're still standing there when the hurricane arrives.

2. Focusing on the wrong problem entirely

Staff satisfaction plummets, so leaders commission engagement surveys and plan away days. The actual problem? Three managers creating toxic environments that HR documented but never addressed. Fixing the loud problem whilst ignoring the real problem means the fire takes longer to extinguish and guarantees embers that will reignite in six months. 

3. Spending more time imagining disasters than resolving the current one

What if journalists find out? What if the board loses confidence? What if customers leave? All this energy goes into preventing hypothetical problems whilst the actual problem compounds. If you address the root of what's broken now, you'll be able to handle what comes next when it arrives.

4. Mistaking internal reassurance for external credibility

Your communications team says the statement sounds reasonable. Your lawyers say it's defensible. Your executive team agrees. But none  of them are your customers, your staff, or your stakeholders. Internal consensus doesn't equal external credibility. Don’t fall for the echo chamber. Sense check with people you can trust.