CX. Acronyms - typically used by those who are completely full of sh*t...

CX

definition*: According to Forrester - "The customer experience team at Forrester has been debating the definition of customer experience for a while now, and it took us until recently to reach consensus. We now define customer experience as: How customers perceive their interactions with your company."

That's the definition (according to the company that defined it). And while I am going to try, try not to deviate from the intention of this blog and begin to focus on how much I detest Forrester (I've already done that), I will quickly reiterate one, relevant point - when companies create new acronyms, they do so as a means to support their marketing efforts, allowing buzz over made-up terms, to masquerade as relevance. They then create new profit centers off of this nonsense and between useless certifications and fictional job titles, they have gone off the deep-end with CX.

I want to stress that my issue is with CX as a function or term. CX has always existed and the baseless innovations that have been created only further ensure marketers and businesses keep their eyes completely off the ball. 

Here's an example for you:

Customer Experience Enablement at GE. They add the word "enablement" as if this does anything other than add more fluff to the already fluffy. 

GE defines this as -

"Customer experience enablement is the set of customer experience management components for acting extensively on voice-of-the-customer to earn customer engagement and enduring customer experience business results."**

Here's my definition -

you enable the customer experience by selling your shit. 

But let me prove my point even further. I own a GE refrigerator. This is the most poorly designed fridge I have ever seen. There is no ideal place to hold a 2-liter bottle because you can't set any of the shelves to the proper height. It has a really cool feature where, as I place a cup under the water dispenser, it counts the number of ounces on the screen. The problem is that when I reach 8 oz on the screen, I've actually only filled 7 oz. It is only that perfectly timed moment, just before it reaches "9 oz" on the screen that I will have an (actual) 8 oz. Oy - I hope that made sense.

The point here is simple...the customer experience has ALWAYS mattered and no amount of tables or graphs is going to tell you anything. Go out and interview your customers. Ask them what they want and deliver on it. And if you need a certification to take these steps...well...I'm sorry but you've lost the plot as Gordon Ramsay would say.

Thanks for reading!

*https://go.forrester.com/blogs/definition-of-customer-experience

**https://customerthink.com/customer-experience-enablement-at-ge