The Most Expensive Sentence in your Business is, “I’m not Sure, Let me Check”

Picture this, a customer asks about a return policy. Your team member checks the system, finds three different answers, picks one. Later that week, you get a complaint. This moment, repeated across your organisation, is not a training gap. It is a retrieval gap.

"Let me check" happens in 30 seconds. When retrieval fails, the panic starts. The worker frantically searches, guesses, asks someone else. One store handles a complaint one way, another differently. One employee interprets a policy one way, their colleague interprets it differently. Your brand promise breaks at the moment it matters most. Performance support exists to solve this, but most companies never implement it properly, or at all.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reports 22.1 million working days were lost in 2024/25 due to work-related stress, depression, and anxiety. Frontline workers experience a specific stress that others do not. Their mistakes are public, immediate, emotional.

A mistake happens in front of a customer, the customer reacts instantly, the worker feels the consequence right then. When uncertainty exists about the right action, anxiety compounds across every interaction. Across 100 interactions a week, workers become exhausted not from physical demand but from the weight of social and emotional risk repeated without certainty about whether they are doing it right.

Southeastern Grocers, a $10.5 billion revenue operation with 45,000 colleagues across over 400 stores, discovered that their frontline employees had inconsistent access to correct information. In a business handling millions of daily customer interactions, this inconsistency was costing them a lot of money daily.

They implemented a platform delivering the right information at the exact moment of need. Participation moved from 85% to 97%. Leadership trust rose from 59% to 89%. Stores with highest engagement showed higher sales and statistically significant reductions in accidents.

No, the answer is not to replace your people with Ai agents. If you put AI on top of messy, outdated content, you scale inconsistency. You automate the wrong answer.

Performance support requires governance first. Content must be current. It must be approved by the human in the loop with authority. It must be structured for retrieval, not for reading. A 47-page policy document is not retrievable in 30 seconds. It needs to be structured so a worker can get the answer in 30 seconds, or it does not work.

Qualtrics research shows $3.8 trillion at risk globally due to poor customer experience. The mechanism is accumulated inconsistency. For workers, this feels like personal failure, like they made a mistake. This psychological load compounds over months and years. It is part of why 76% of retail workers who leave do not return to retail at all, they leave the industry entirely.

The companies that implement performance support properly will see lower turnover, higher customer satisfaction, and reduced stress-related absence. They will have employees who feel their organisation believes they are capable of doing the right thing, if only they have the right information at the right time.