CX AI vs. CX PI (Practices Intelligence)

While 2024 was the year of CX AI, interestingly, many professionals at year-end are talking just as much about culture and clarifying what CXM is and is not.

CX AI has mixed reviews to-date: awesome potential, some great wins, and realization that do-it-yourself has limitations (data quality, integration, ethics, self-centric vs. customer-centric, ...). Inroads with CX AI are impressive, yet still far from comprehensive: Support (operational uptime, sentiment analysis, workload distribution), Success/Sales (health scores, automation of mundane tasks), and Marketing (personalization, content creation, sales enablement).

CX AI is insufficient in scope for customer-centered internal and external policies and processes, mindsets, handoffs, stakeholder engagement, silo prevention, root cause resolution, ethnography, preventing premature product launches, preventing non-agile development, rising above industry norms, and so on.

CX PI is a phrase I coined to talk about both sides of the coin: CX technology (AI) and CX practices (PI).

What is your CX Practices Intelligence (PI)?

• Is your CX PI as modern as your CX AI?
• Is CX AI limited by outdated CX PI?
• Is CX PI better or worse since 2020?

"Outdated" means it's out-of-sync with what's needed today.

Shared values and shared value increases are the mindsets of employees and customers post-pandemic. We all experienced the most scary period of our lives, and we had time to deeply define what's important to us each personally.

• Management of business/etc. has not adapted to this!
• CXM is more mercenary than ever!
• EXM focuses on HR practices although 70% of employee engagement is determined by supervisors!
• Everyone claims EXM is a pre-requisite to good CX, yet CXM limits EXM to touchpoint employees. Non-touchpoint employees are equally important to CX!
• CX AI is failing to prevent shrinkflation and inflation (shared value increases) and 2020s VoC and VoE rarely capture or influence shared values.

Hence: disengaged employees at record highs and easily triggered customer tempers at record highs. 30% to 50% of people worldwide do not trust businesses to do the right thing. We cannot afford this trend.

CX PI has been extremely slow to adopt new CX thinking introduced every year this decade, despite thousands of enthusiastic readers among the CX professionals community.

Examples:

— Instead of asking whether employees understand and support your company values, ask how well the company is understanding and supporting the employee’s values and value. Same for customers (VoC) and for partners (VoP).

— Instead of relying on real-time VoC to respond to a small percentage of customers (despite multiples with the same issue who weren't in your survey or didn't contact you), focus at least 50% of your energy on outer loop permanent resolution of the issue’s root causes for all customers now and in future.

2020 Customer Experience: 20 Wishes

21 Tips for 2021 CX Excellence

23 CX Practices You Should Stop in 2023

Artificial Intelligence in CX Learning (2023)

24 Ways 2024 CX Could Be Smarter

24 Ways to Boost 2024 CX ROI: What's Your CX Insights Usage Rate?

CX PI is extremely outdated: much more is not yet in CX practices.

Good news: you CAN catch up in 2025-2026.

It's not a matter of slogging through immature CX PI for years. It's a matter of what you're aiming for, who you're learning from, and how you skip unnecessary CX PI for superior CX PI.

Yes, you can skip a lot of today's mainstream CX PI, just like consumers in many nations skipped landline telephones altogether and went from nothing straightaway to mobile phone proficiency.

Why does CX PI matter?

• Layoffs of CX professionals and teams, and employees in general.
• High costs of poor CX and EX.
• CX AI is grossly incomplete without modernized CX PI.
• Our CX profession CAN rapidly increase maturity: respect, funding, impact.
• And dozens more reasons!

How to get started? Assess your CX PI. You'll get detailed recommendations, tailored to you.

What else?

1. Try any Experts CX+EX+PX Leadership module to see what you're missing. Visual aids and audio narration with personal real-life application examples and step-by-step organization accelerate CX PI far beyond what you get from articles.
2. Arrange a Fireside Chat with your leaders to quicklyget them on the same page for modernized CX PI.

Let's make 2025 The Year of CX PI!

What's your biggest CX PI peeve? What's your favorite progress in CX PI?