CX became a religion. The pews are full. The building is still on fire.

Customer experience is one of the most elaborately theorized and least practically improved disciplines in modern business. There are frameworks. Certifications. Conferences where people who study customer experience present to other people who study customer experience about how important customer experience is. There are NPS scores measured quarterly, reviewed in decks, discussed in all-hands meetings. And the bad customer experience remains.

Here's what I think happened. Customer experience became a measurement function instead of an operational one. The industry built an enormous apparatus for understanding how customers feel and a surprisingly modest apparatus for changing what customers encounter. Journey mapping workshops produce funnel diagrams, workflows, automations, spreadsheets, metrics, and new data points, all artifacts that go into a deck. And the deck gets filed.

Some of it is structural. The people who measure customer sentiment report to different leadership than the people whose operational decisions create that sentiment. An NPS score drops from 32 to 28. A meeting is convened. Action items are produced. The action items go to people with other priorities. The score goes to 25. Another meeting is convened. You can see where this is headed, and it is not toward the customer.

Some of it is that CX made its home in the service layer. It concerned itself with how interactions felt rather than how systems worked. Training your customer-facing people to be warmer and more sympathetic, while leaving intact the phone tree that exhausted the customer before they got to those people, is a very expensive way to not solve the problem.

The companies that actually close the gap aren't the ones with the most sophisticated measurement programs. They're the ones where someone with authority looked at the customer journey from the outside and asked one question: would I accept this? And then changed the thing. Not the measurement of the thing. You can measure your way to an accurate diagnosis. You cannot measure your way to a cure.

— Gary Hopkins

Founder and principal of Method, a strategic marketing practice.