I am sick of the CX infighting!!!

Why is it, that as CX "professionals" we cannot get our act together and acknowledge that CX is a very fast evolving field, and no specific leading “best” approach has yet emerged that could bind us together (as has happened in other business fields like Finance through regulatory mandated accounting approaches, Strategy with Balanced Scorecard, IT with ITSM/ITIL, or Quality Management with Lean/SixSigma/TQM).

CX by definition is more diverse as it takes into consideration many different approaches and views by customers and clients, and is therefore intended to be more bespoke than the other business areas.

If companies want to compete on CX (as most CX folks claim is the only way to distinguish from competitors in the future), and want to be different in their CX to competitors, then CX itself has to be diverse. So, what works in one company should/will not exactly work the same in another company, as otherwise mere copying would take away the competitive advantage and render CX advantages mute.

The CX industry is set up to be diverse by default, yet CX folks start arguing why their own approach, which might have worked in their respective ecosystem and client situations, is the best (since it worked), and everyone else’s is bad. Yet, guess what… These other approaches propagated by other CX professionals might have worked in other ecosystems and situations of another CX framework environment, so both are right.

CX is like the Medical Field

I recently started to use the analogy of the medical profession to voice my frustration and got quite some good feedback on it, so let’s take this as an example:

• CX is like the medical field.
• There are general practitioners and specialists.
• There are very experienced and new to the field doctors, nurses and support staff.
• There are university teaching/research hospitals (being more “science” driven, and field clinics.
• There are emergency rooms and recovery and rehabilitation clinics, large general and specialty hospitals, and small independent practices.
• There are medical specialty fields dealing with brains, bones, cancer, respiratory and internal medicine to name but a few.
• There are elective procedures for cosmetic reasons and emergency vital procedures for life threatening situations
• There are patients that are hypochondriacs and people that do not believe in doctors
• There are placebo, and innovative new treatments and approaches

Yet you barely hear doctors openly fighting in front of patients on who is better, and if brain surgeons or cancer doctors are the true medical practitioners. Well, they might bicker among themselves from time to time at conventions, private settings or in jokes, but you would definitely not see them trying to discredit others on LinkedIn…. If you want to challenge a medical practice, you do that at conferences or through scientific research and peer reviewed publications. Stating your opinions in the news is not helpful, its politics and attention seeking.

If you are sick, as a patient/client/customer you might chose to self-medicate, e.g. if you have no budget or health insurance or feel that the issues are not big enough to go to a hospital or doctor, or actually make your way to go to a doctor. You might do some research on which specialty doctor or hospital you want to go to, or take the quick way and go to a General Practitioner (GP) or Emergency Room to get guidance on where to go. But seldom you find an ER doctor or GP performing brain surgery or cancer treatments herself. Why? Because doctors (unlike many CX professionals) realize that there are better suited resources and skilled professionals to deal with specialist situations, and everyone has their niche and the whole industry would suffer if malpractices would become more common.

Other factors that influence your choice of medical are e.g. your health insurance/funding, where better coverage might make it more likely that you can afford and select a better and more specialized/qualified/experienced doctor. Also, certain regions have better infrastructure and coverage, regional differences in available doctors and medicinal approaches might exist, and specific local flavors or preferences could be available, e.g. homeopathy, Chinese medicine, acupuncture etc., but to say that one is superior/inferior outright is just being culture insensitive and ignorant. Cost-benefit and ROI will likely prevent all doctors from having a fancy MRI machine in the back of their practice, yet all doctors will likely have a stethoscope. But if a MRI is required, doctors will refer the patient to the respective help and collaborate.

Applying this to the CX world…

I could go on an on, and many might have seen the point I want to make already…

CX is specifically designed to be bespoke to the customer base of an organization, and organizations want to distinguish themselves from the competition, hence they specialize for customer outcome and value propositions.

Some companies might have an emergency situation, some others are looking for strategic or cultural long term alignment for the future, some others merely want to look good and win an award and gain media presence. The organizations then chose the respective best fit of doctor – sorry CX practitioner/consultant/speaker/expert/guru whatever you want to call them, aligned with their budget, regional availability, preferred approach, timeline, resources availability, organizational political situation, and strategic fit.

To then have the doctors/CX practitioners trying to scream louder than the others and make themselves look better by putting others down (yes, that’s you all the haters and negative LinkedIn posters/commenters…) is like the frogs in a boiling pot that try to escape by stepping on others.

I am a CX consultant, trainer, speaker, and award judge. Some of my friends, acquaintances and previous customers might even call me an expert. But I am also a practitioner, having worked in the trenches in full time positions in various businesses, industries and regions, and helped a large number of organizations successfully implement CX that is right for them, even though due to confidentiality agreements I am not allowed to speak about them. Each one of these assignments was different, yet I am usually following a certain philosophy (like being a brain surgeon vs. a cancer doctor, both having their respective approach being right for their respective field and assignments). So what am I now? Practitioner, Consultant, Speaker, Expert? CX professionals should not be boxed like this. While I am very specialized and maybe “upscale” in my pricing, I also know the basics in a variety of fields, so if anyone needs a general assessment or an injection, in CX I would be able to do that. Yet I sometimes chose not to do such business as clients of mine could have that service better done by other specialists or cheaper resources, and I am known to be honest about cost/benefit and often refer business to partners rather than giving my clients sub optimal value (as in cost vs. benefit). That is not being supremacist (as some have implied in comments to previous posts and DM), but rather ethical in being honest in knowing and advising customers in their best interest, not my own commercial one.

We have an issue as a profession

And here is the issue. As a profession, we are still unorganized, unstructured, wild, unregulated, new and sexy – aka the Wild West -, so of course there are a lot of Cowboys (as in “a dishonest or careless person in business, especially an unqualified one”) entering the market. They are competing with the established, structured and honest practitioners/consultants etc., and squeeze and often overwhelm the established practitioners with the social media marketing blitzkrieg waged on them, drowning out their valid voices and skewing the view clients have of our industry towards shiny tools/toys and short term wins. That is of course not fair, especially for the clients who often have no clue on why one is better than the other (as in better suited for their needs!).

Not that the “old guard” should not be challenged in our ever-changing industry. Innovation and new ways of thinking are absolutely vital to be heard and incorporated into our best practices. But those innovations should be based on merit and evidence, not only claims. How many new entrants sport to be award winners or on some obscure “best list” published by marketing and click-bait providers. So we need healthy discussion and challenge, but in a constructive way.

I also very much acknowledge that there is a problem in the CX industry in that we are starting to lose the confidence of our clients in our abilities (think what could happen if e.g. patients lose confidence in the medical profession overall, and reject e.g. taking vaccines…). In the absence of a regulator or industry organization (like e.g. in finance and medical profession), it is hard for clients to distinguish among the quality levels, titles and certifications presented. So yes, to some extent we need to continue calling out malpractice and bad actors among us. But we also need to do it in a way that educates and provides clear and valid arguments, that acknowledge differences in our profession and abilities. Not everyone can, and should be, a brain surgeon, we need GPs and nurses too (again, not implying one is better than the other, we need all of them for the industry to function…). But if like in the Old Wild West barbers start to practice surgeries and dentistry just because they happen to have a wrench and a saw (aka marketeers, sales or service staff now claiming to have become within a matter of weeks and one online training course experts in personas, journey mapping, UX/UI design, digital transformation, customer success to name but a few), we need to make clients aware of the implications of using their services, and provide evidence based options in a positive way, yet let the clients decide on what is good for them (maybe the client does not have the funding or trust in going to a hospital or is just a traditionalist…). While their budgets are depleted through using the quacks, and the health of the clients deteriorating even further, we as a profession need to step up and show that we can fix the industry and our customer’s problems, and gain back the trust and reputation we should represent.

So let’s start adding value and positive constructive discussions, and stop the infighting and superiority thinking.

Let’s make the market bigger together, instead of destroying it in its infancy.

Let’s challenge mal-practitioners, but in a way that outlines our reasoning so that clients and the industry can learn and understand.

And let’s be open for constructive criticism and stop splitting up in factions and echo chambers.

Let’s be more like the medical profession.

I rather have a strong discussion on what the industry should and should not be, and get hit by haters and trolls here on this discussion thread, rather than seeing continued negativism and infighting on postings of practitioners.

Tell me your thoughts so we can have an open and honest discussion based on frank and fact-based research based grounds.

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Marc Karschies is Managing Partner of Karschies, Ceron & Alred Consultants (KCA-Consultants), an International boutique Service Strategy and Quality Management Consultancy company out of Dubai, UAE. Contact us for more info on how we can help you at mkarschies@kca-consultants.com