Digital CX is Dead. Long Live Digital CX
I’m a way past my wonder years, now a recovering corporate executive and retired consultant. It affords a remarkable vantage point, one unencumbered by the demands of a role, with no targets to hit and the luxury of time to think. It’s also why I am compelled to call out the patterns, oddities, and inconsistencies of business technology trends. I have nothing to protect, nothing to lose. No horse in any race anymore.
Notably, I’m no longer required to read business, trade, and technology books, newsletters, and headlines. But I do, along with philosophy, the humanities, history, psychology — and fiction! I recognize, belatedly, how impoverished my worldview was when I was a thrall to my career trajectory and hot takes on the business topic du jour. I would no more read a non-business book than fly to the moon. TLDR? Gave me permission to skim or skip the boring bits…and never, not ever to read anything twice.
Now I have oodles of the true currency of a good life: time. And I read, listen, and make notes like it is my job.
Digitalization is present, in some form, in all my reading these days. It was the rallying cry in my work for a couple of decades, fueling transformation CX initiatives as the means to better-ness for customers and shareholders alike. Sure, the specifics changed: e-commerce begat self-serve begat Apps begat No Service — or so it seems today. According to Big Consultancy, in the well-reasoned article that inspired the title of this piece, Digitization is over.
We know this because “…two thirds of the potential value from digitalization has not been captured, despite years of digital transformation.” Setting aside the opacity of the calculation, that is an unambiguous failure for the much-heralded transformation engine. The reasons for leaving value on the table: disjointed initiatives, un-orchestrated change management, and siloed decision making, are recognizable issues and painfully familiar to veterans of CX improvement programs. As a sample size of one customer, I certainly haven’t captured much value, either. In fact, CX, by my eye, has become hopelessly skewed in favor of order-capture, not experience enhancement. Attempts to get help are fruitless, enormously time-consuming and disjointed.
The article goes on to describe the way out of the barriers cul-de-sac, with a glaring exception. There is no accounting of the limitations of technology itself. Quite the opposite: Digitalization has been supplanted by AI Digitalization and I suspect the new rallying will be — perhaps already is — Generative AI, full stop.
It is this perennial push for a technology to save CX that is at the heart of digitalization’s failure.
I follow the podcasts and newsletters of a few CX consultants and a couple of the Big Consultancies. It has been non-stop Artificial Intelligence, literally and topically, in much the same way it was non-stop Digitalization two decades ago.
The rallying cry is identical to the Digital one. Once again, we are centering technology as the solution, without taking into account how technology is now part of the problem. For customers and employees alike. And it is apparent to many on a number of levels, not least the internet, ground zero for all things digital.
I’m disappointed that I didn’t coin the term “enshittification” as applied to the Internet. Cory Doctorow owns that gem and bless him for raising it outside of business publications. He quite rightly came to it via personal experience, as I have, and laments the lost innocence of a time before. As puzzling as it might be to the practitioners of CX, the internet and all it has spawned have managed to make customer experience worse in the last few years, even despite our devotion to Customer Experience and major investment in digital transformation.
Our response? We haven’t “realized the value“ in our bottom lines. Not a word about what customers wanted, needed, or are subjected to in Digital CX. How can that be? And what evidence can I point to that makes my case? As a recovering corporate denizen, I now know that the “guy down at the pub” vibe is a more accurate barometer of customer sentiment than self-serving surveys.
This from a data geek and avowed evangelist for marketing led organizations: What surveys say vs. what business reports to itself can be quite different. But the deeper issue is this:
companies’ data collection is shaped around business needs, not customer or employee (let’s call them human) needs. Digitalization was supposed to
