What if we killed CX?

Most parts of a business have a clear area that they do. Operations make the wheels turn. Finance / accounting works on the money flows. Growth / marketing gets new customers. I started thinking about the CX realm. What does it do?

In the digital space it's reactive, stepping in for SNAFUs. IRL CX people (the front desk at a hotel or a cashier at a coffeehouse) are the interface between you and the service or good you're purchasing. Companies like Sonder and Starbucks have shown both those roles are just as easily accomplished by your fingers telling buttons what you need rather than using your mouth to tell a human what you need.

CX spans the entire business. But it isn't there to make the rocket go. It's like duct tape. It's there to patch problems with the rocket - problems stemming from an underlying issue owned by another team.

Your card was charged twice? The money people have a glitch, but CX is there to assuage the customer and help make it right.

Your doodad was broken when it arrived? Fulfillment messed up your packaging, but CX is there to empathize and help you order a new one.

Your new gadget broke the first time you used it? Manufacturing has a QA gap, but CX is there to listen to your woes and send a replacement part.

So basically, CX is like the housekeeper of a spoiled child. The child gets to play and build and make messes ... messes that the housekeeper cleans up afterward while the child is off making a new art project.

Well fuck that.

The key word above is "spoiled." That child doesn't appreciate that to make more art tomorrow, you have to clean and put the brushes away today. Their actions are disconnected from reality a bit. Is the same thing happening when we layer in a CX team between customers and the rest of the business?

It reminds me of the scene in Succession where Kendall is talking Tom out of telling Logan about the cruise situation:

You know what my dad always said? He'd say he loved all his employees, but he particularly loved the guys who ate the shit for him and he never even knew it.

You could say the same thing about CX. CX eats shit that the rest of the company doesn't know about.

Ok, not entirely true because there's all that jazz about CX sharing feedback from customer and working cross-functionally, and yada yada yada. Sounds like an excuse to tell people that your shit don't stink. Well, the truth is anything but.

So what if we melted away the middle-man between customer and the rest of the business? What if "CX" was something everybody owned? What if "CX" became a skills like data-analytics or a mindset like innovation that is now expected of everybody, not just a select team?

With more robust AI agents hitting us, I think CX as a domain is dead. AI can do all the things that CX does (asking questions, empathizing, deescalating) in tandem with the domain expert of where the issue is. Now instead of chatting with CX that has general knowledge and might be able to help you, you get straight to the team that knows exactly what went wrong and how to make it right. For you and future customers.

The companies that decide to turn CX into an AI-driven super team will be screwed. They're stuck in the thinking "CX belongs to someone, not everyone." The opposite should be true. CX belongs to everyone.