DYK # 42: Did you know … most CX efforts fail before they even begin?

As I’m writing my book CXTS™ - Customer Experience is a Team Sport, I spent a considerable time thinking and speaking about CX. And one of those topics I researched in more detail was “What is the problem with CX?”. Today, we’ll look into Chapter 1 of my book and I provide a little sneak peak on the challenges CX faces today. 

CX is everywhere. So why isn't it working?

Customer experience is one of the most talked about topics in business today. It comes up in boardrooms, strategy sessions, leadership offsites, and vendor pitches. And yet, despite all that attention, CX continues to underdeliver in most organisations. Why is that?

The answer isn't that CX doesn't work. The answer is that most organisations never build the foundations and the conditions it needs to succeed. 

The problem starts with definition

If you ask ten people what CX means, you'll get ten different answers. It’s a mindset, a team, a set of metrics, a strategy, a function, it’s Customer Service, it’s Marketing. 

Whereas in actual fact, CX is all of the above. And that misconception is often the root cause of CX failures. When there's no shared understanding of what CX is, then how do you know who's responsible for it? 

This isn't a mere terminology issue, it's a structural one. And it snowballs quickly if left unaddressed. 

When I work with clients during a discovery phase, I ask lots of questions. When I ask who's responsible for CX, I typically hear one of two responses:

• A) The CX Team (or frontline teams if we remand Customer Service to CX),

• or B) everyone.

While B) everyone seems like a great answer in theory, in reality it often results in fragmented efforts, competing priorities, and no clear line of accountability. Everyone's doing "CX" in their own way, and no one's coordinating the customer experience end-to-end. 

On the other hand, if one single team is responsible for CX, we end up with little to no action at all, since a single team alone can’t manage customer experiences that span the entire organisation. 

Organisations are built in silos. But customer journeys aren't.

For centuries, organisations have been centred around departments. Marketing does marketing, Sales drives sales, Customer Service catches the fallout. Each team has its own KPIs, its own priorities, and its own definition of success. Fair enough.

But customers don't experience your organisation as individual departments. They experience it as one brand, one journey, one relationship from end-to-end. 

When those two realities collide, the customer is caught in the middle and ends up losing. Issues get fixed locally rather than systemically, blame gets shuffled between teams, and frontline teams are left holding the bag for problems created upstream. It’s not a great experience for anyone. 

That’s supposedly when CX comes in. When organisations decide to get started with CX, they start with good intentions, but limited underlying clarity. Instead of spending time on a clear CX strategy, defining what CX means for your organisation, who owns what, and what success looks like, teams jump straight into operational firefighting. Surveys get sent, journeys get mapped, reports go to the board, but not much actually changes. NPS stays flat, ROI questions get louder, CX gets labelled "fluffy", and as a result budgets get cut. And the cycle repeats. 

The problem isn’t that the tools are wrong, it's that the foundations were never laid.

The real challenge: CX is a Team Sport (CXTS™)

CX can't be the job of one team alone because the customer experience is shaped by every team. Product, Sales, Marketing, Operations, IT, Finance, HR. All of them have a direct or indirect impact on what your customers feel, think, and do.

I often find that it’s easy for people to see and understand the link and direct impact frontline teams have on the customers, and the customer experience. But it’s a lot harder for most to understand the indirect impact most, if not all other teams have. If you work in IT, you impact the customer through the technology decisions you make. Whether the tech is customer facing, or used by staff, who in turn serve your customers. If you work in HR, you write JDs, you hire, train and incentivise people. How do you not have an impact on the customer? Indirect as it may be. 

The missing ingredient isn't more tools or bigger budgets. It's clarity and alignment. A shared understanding of what CX is, how it should work across the organisation, and what each team's role is in delivering it.

CX is a Team Sport. The problem is, we're not treating it as one, and our understanding about how to operationalise CX as a company-wide practice is still low.

The good news? When organisations get the foundations right, clear definitions, shared accountability, and an organisation-wide approach, CX delivers real results. Research shows that organisations that prioritise customer experience grow revenue 1.7x faster than those that don't (Forrester), and customers with a positive experience spend up to 140% more (Deloitte). The ROI is there, it just requires building CX the right way from the start.

That's exactly what CXTS™: Customer Experience is a Team Sport is designed to help you with.

Register your interest here and be the first to know when the book is available!

In our next DYK in July, we’ll look into establishing some of those foundations for your organisation by creating clarity around CX, and differentiating the concept of CX from the business discipline, and the function of CX. And we’ll also share what your CX practice actually is. 

So stay tuned, and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more updates. 

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