Reasons Why CX Programs Fail? - Our Research Results

Thank you to everyone that participated in the survey after Lorraine’s blog post from March 16, 2021. The results were interesting and confirmed many of our hypotheses. We encourage you to listen to the CXPA LinkedIn live session with Gabe Smith, Alison Circle, and us where we had a great discussion around our findings.

You can view the session by clicking the following link:

The respondents spread across CX Consultants, Practitioners, and Vendors with the vendor population being in the minority.

When looking at Strategy, Execution, and Customer-Centric Culture, we saw lack of strategy as the most frequent cause of CX failure, while the second reason was lack of Customer-Centric Culture, followed by Poor Execution.

Most of the comments on Strategy centered around insufficient alignment of the strategy across the entire company. While the Customer-Centric comments pointed out that there seems to be the right intent, but to actually live a customer-centered culture seems to be extremely difficult. The discussion during the LinkedIn live session discussed different points of view as to why.

When looking at which of the three causes has changed the most in the past 5 years, we had a tie between Company focus on CX and Executive focus on CX.

Much of the verbatim and the live discussion touched on how both of these are tied together and the challenges over the past 5 years to move from superficial “talk” about CX and the ever-changing responsibility of CX practitioners to facilitate change.

The last part of both the survey and the LinkedIn live discussion centered around what one thing would we change or focus solely on to improve CX. Many respondents called out continuing to engage core executives on CX results, while there was also a lively reaction to CX as a discipline vs Technology being the “answer”.

From both the survey responses and the LinkedIn live discussion, we conclude that once again, times are changing but the three cornerstones of Strategy, Culture, and execution remain critical to CX success.

Thank you again to everyone who participated, and we look forward to seeing what the next 5 years bring in maturing our CX Discipline.