Why Customer Experience Doesn't Deliver Results
It's Time To Change Your CX Lens
It was the first day of Spring, and time to head to the workshop to finish building that outdoor furniture. The moment I opened the door, however, I realized that I would first have to deal with the mountain of random tools and crud that had accumulated on my workbench over the winter.
Of course, putting everything away in an orderly fashion demanded a complete reorg of my tool cabinet – then three hours sorting all of the miscellaneous screws, nuts, fasteners, paints, bits, and power tools strewn about. That done, I decided the bench should be moved to another wall and the shelving should be reconfigured. When I finally emerged for supper, my wife said, “So, do we have new furniture?”
Oh yeah, that’s why I’d gone down there.
I feel like the same thing has happened with customer experience
The last thirty years have seen Customer Experience grow from a humble differentiation concept to being ubiquitous in the business world – complete with journey maps, personas, surveys, segmentations, and gazillions of data points being parsed, scrutinized and fretted over every day. Now, with the infant AI learning to stand and walk, it is poised to transform yet again.
It’s all very exciting, yet the ghost that has haunted CX since its inception – the ethereal link to business results – is still lurking. Studies continue to show only a small fraction of companies reporting significant impact of their CX initiatives – like the 2025 Deloitte study of CX professionals revealing only 20% of initiatives translating to financial impact. Something is very wrong in the world of CX. We either have to admit that it will never live up to its billing, or that most of us just aren’t getting it right. I think it’s the latter of the two.
So, What Are We Doing Wrong?
The premise of customer experience began with the best of intentions. It captured people’s imagination because it had a singular, elegant purpose – creating loyalty. It was an easy bandwagon to jump on.
What went wrong? In its simplest terms, CX went down to the workshop and got distracted. We’ve gotten fixated on the what’s and how’s of CX and lost the why – so mired in minutiae that we’ve forgotten the mission.
CX initiatives are routinely fragmented – focusing on executional things instead of strategy. We reduce friction at the expense of customer connection; confuse customer-centric personalization with revenue-centric target marketing; employ massive voice-of-the-customer programs with complex dashboards and reporting that result in little cohesive action. Then we measure our success with data that has questionable causal links to loyalty.
To manage all of this, we create steering committees, councils, advisory boards, task forces, design teams – most of which are given little authority to create meaningful change.
The results are in, folks. It’s not working.
Zoom In On The Root Of Loyalty
The solution begins with focus. For CX to impact loyalty, it has to first be laser-focused solely on experiences that contribute to loyalty. Nothing else. We need to ignore the clutter in the workshop and get straight to the furniture.
This means adjusting our lens and zooming to the one thing we know drives loyalty: Trust.
We’ve known for decades that trust is the foundation of customer loyalty. A wide body of research, including foundational work by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, not only demonstrated the link between loyalty and trust, but also identify trusts’ defining drivers. While researchers vary slightly in language, they can be expressed as: Caring, Competency and Integrity. The evidence is there, and the equation is simple: the more our customers trust us, the more loyal they will be.
This is where it starts. We need to begin defining everything we do – everything that touches a customer – in terms of those drivers. Because when it comes to CX, nothing else matters. When people believe we care, that we are very good at what we do, and that we are honest and will do the right things, we give them no reason not to be loyal.
This is Your Starting Point For Tangible Outcomes
Trust, and its three operational drivers, give us an unequivocal foundation – one that will help guide decisions and investment. The simple question, “How does this contribute to customer trust,” becomes an invaluable guardrail to keep us from chasing bright, shiny, and wholly unproductive initiatives.
There's No Other Option
I won’t sugar-coat it. This kind of a focus-shift isn’t an easy task or quick fix. But what other option is there? CX hasn’t lived up to its potential for 25 years, and a few tweaks and some new technologies won’t get us on track when the track itself isn’t headed to a clear destination.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There is a clear destination, and there is a definitive path. For success with customer experience, the singular destination is Loyalty. The road that leads to it is Trust, and the on-ramps are Caring, Competency and Integrity.
The risk isn’t in changing course. It’s staying on one that doesn’t lead to loyalty.