Performative CX is Killing Good Teams

If you are a client of CX Pilots or you have been in the audience at any of our trainings or speaking engagements, you have heard me go crazy on what I call “performative CX.”  

What is "performative CX?

Performative CX is a group of activities people do either voluntarily or involuntarily to demonstrate what they are doing is valuable. Performative CX is found in organizations where there is greatest doubt or skepticism—where leaders lack trust in CX. The catch-22 is clear—CX teams often cannot achieve the results they know are possible because they lack the resources to do so when the company requires onerous reporting on metrics that may be unimportant.  

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• According to CXIndex.com, 90 percent of B2B executives have cleared budget for CX since 2021.¹  
• Companies, globally will spend $641B in CX, increased by $130 B/year since 2019.²
• 55 percent of B2B companies have a dedicated CX team in place as of 2023.³
• 43 percent of B2B executives have complained their CX teams are not adding value and are calling into question the efficacy of their roles.⁴

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An example of performative CX

Let me give you an example. A few years back, I was on a CX Pilots team that was doing a process audit. The company wanted to know if their CX/EX processes were what they needed to be to achieve their goals. In this process audit we interviewed all the CX team members, all the people adjacent to the CX team (that is a large list!), and the leadership closest to the CX team.

We started with the CX team leader. We quickly learned that over 40% of her job was to gather information about what she was doing throughout her week—who she was meeting with, for how long, what the topic of conversation was, and the outcomes.

She was collecting quantitative data about survey response rates and putting them into PowerPoints that needed to be shared with the CMO and the COO each Monday morning.

The truth is I have to go through 50 performance reviews a year by PowerPoint. I know this and I want to remain employed, so the stakes are clear—demonstrate value on a PowerPoint slide or be fired.

The backstage math was simple. She made $148,000 per year, her total cost to the company was $187,000 a year, and she needed to waste $74,000 of the company’s money trying to demonstrate the value of CX—weekly!  

Next, we interviewed the guy whose job it was to manage the VoC (voice of customer) survey work. This company sent out thousands of simple, NPS-based surveys, collected the data, and published an NPS score. If there were egregious negative outliers, he would share that info with the affected part of the company, but that was rare.

I spent almost 60% of my total time working on my portion of the weekly PowerPoint deck my boss needs to share with her boss. The rest of the time, I am pretty much babysitting this NPS ranking.

I asked him to see the year-over-year NPS scores every week, and it revealed the company had a surprisingly high NPS score but in the long analysis, it only moved up and down in insignificant amounts. It looked like an EKG. The company's overall NPS variance was within 4 points over the past rolling 12 months.

We asked if they ever did anything with the data and he listed out all the dashboards where the score needed to show up. They did not do any promoter activation or detractor conversion work—just reposted the score.

We asked, if they correlated the NPS score to any other metrics like revenue, customer lifetime value, or retention, to which he claimed, “no, not that I am aware of.” His processes were cyclical and 80% of it could be automated. He was paid $98,000 a year, his total cost to the company was $134,000 and was wasting the company roughly $80,000.

We then interviewed the person on the CX team who monitored the company’s various distribution channel partnership experiences. She was spending most of her time developing charts demonstrating the positive sentiments of their channel partners. She interviewed two partners per week and did this across the year. She did two annual webinars to partners but, in the final analysis, collected survey results (qualitative sentiments from talking to two partners per week), and the rest of her time was spent putting PowerPoint slides together that she needed to send to the CX leader each Thursday afternoon to be included in the weekly report. She made $78,000, cost to the company was $118,000 per year and wasted the company $60,000 each year.  

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How much does "performative CX" cost companies?

For a CX team of nine people, we estimated a total annual process waste of $850,000. Here is the irony. The CX team lead had full awareness of this and had been lobbying heavily to restructure with SMART (simple, measurable, actionable, repeatable, time-based) goals, scale back the performance reports from weekly to quarterly, and put resources where they could achieve more significant outcomes. In fact, our recommendations in the Process Audit Report were eerily like her goal list of activities she preferred her team to work on but never was greenlighted by her COO.  

It was our recommendation to the CMO and the COO, the team go through a restructure, redo their CX Strategy, develop CX metrics and governance and begin to focus on:

1. Customer Journey Mapping:

1. creation of detailed maps of their prospect, customer, partner, and employee journeys, identifying touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

2. Capturing and understanding these key end-to-end experiences helps optimize interactions at each stage.

2. Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program Reset:

1. Refactor the collection of smarter feedback directly from B2B customers and partners through better surveys, interviews, and feedback forms.

2. Develop a simple executive dashboard with automated inputs that free the team up to do far more than reporting.

3. Analyze VoC data with AI (Artificial Intelligence) augmentation to boost insight creation and use data models to prioritize action items.

3. Account-Based Marketing (ABM):

1. Personalize CX strategies for specific segments and accounts.

2. Use journey mapping outputs to enrich all inbound and outbound communications.

3. Use ABM best practices along with captured CX data to align marketing efforts with individual customer segment needs, enhancing overall satisfaction.

4. Customer Segmentation:

1. Bring segmentation into the CX area to begin re-segmentation efforts based on experience data.

2. Tailor CX strategies to meet the unique needs of different segments.

5. Customer Success Management:

1. Understand prospect, customer, and partner expectations through interviews and surveys (begin to include leading inquiry-” what are your expectations?” as opposed to only capturing lagging inquiry- “how did we do last time?”)

2. Proactively ensure customers and partners have what they need to achieve their desired outcomes/meet their expectations.

3. Provide ongoing support, training, and guidance.

6. Digital Experience Optimization at Product Level (UX):

1. Begin to ask stakeholders about their experience with the company’s digital services ecosystem.

2. Enhance website experiences, portals, and mobile apps.

3. Streamline navigation, improving content, and optimizing user interfaces.

7. Personalization and Customization:

1. Deliver personalized experiences based on prospect, customer, and partner preferences and behavior.

2. Provide empirical experience data to help customize product recommendations, pricing, and communication.

8. Employee Training and Engagement:

1. Train employees to deliver exceptional CX.

2. Educate, Engage, and Empower employees to positively impact customer interactions.

9. Data-Driven Decision Making:

1. Leverage data analytics to make informed CX decisions.

2. Monitor smarter KPIs (Key Performance Indicator), tracking performance, and adjusting strategies accordingly.

10. Collaboration Across Departments:

1. Break down silos between sales, marketing, customer support, channel partner support, and product teams.

2. Ensure a cohesive approach to CX.

3. Train the executive team and middle managers on the value of “good CX.”

11. Proactive Issue Resolution:

1. Identify potential issues before they escalate.

2. Address prospect, customer, and partner concerns promptly and effectively.

12. Thought Leadership Content:

1. Develop and share valuable insights, whitepapers, and industry expertise.

2. Establish credibility and build trust with prospects, customers, and partners.

What not to do if you are an executive

If you are on an executive team, do not force your CX team to demonstrate the value of their work to you. It is a colossal waste of money. Instead, set better accountabilities against smarter workflows and do a monthly check-in. 

If you are concerned about the efficacy or output of your CX team, ask yourself the question, “How well are we resourcing our CX function and can we trust that with the right strategies, processes, focal points, and levels of funding—and how well can we accomplish more extraordinary things with CX management?"  

I am here to tell you, you can. Chances are your CX team knows exactly what they need to do—they just need the resources, trust, and space to make it happen.

If you feel this is not possible, we recommend beginning a CX function reset dialog. Anything is possible if given the opportunity for better ideas to flourish.  

1. CXindex.com (20 Statistics to Understand the Rise and Value of CX – CX Index)

2. Ibid

3. Ibid

4. CX Pilots 2022 research CX Team Effectiveness

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