ABOUT SophosCXO

It's not customer service.

At a meeting at my child's school, a parent explained how hard it had been to find their child's bus pickup information and that they’d called for help. The administrator responded by saying the school was working on its customer service: instead of just telling parents to call transportation, the front office would do a better job of connecting them with the right department.

The administrator failed to see that the school isn't falling short on customer service; it's falling short on customer experience. This is an entirely different discipline. Customer service is how well you help someone once something has gone wrong. Customer experience is understanding what your customer thinks, feels, and needs as they use your product or service, long before they ever need help.

By the time that parent picked up the phone, they had already combed the school website, dug through flyers and emails for the bus schedule and stop location, and probably asked a neighbor or two. They had already invested their time and energy trying to solve the problem.

The administrator also missed what the parent was feeling. Their child was starting kindergarten at a new school, and the anxiety about that first day increased with every dead end, until continuing to wait for an email that might never come was no longer an option. The parent felt behind, and like they were failing their child. However relieved they were to finally get an answer, that first experience negatively colored how they started the school year and perceived the school district - how could it not?!

The discipline of customer experience involves recognizing the lived reality of each customer as they engage with what you offer, then assembling the problem behind the problem across reviews, feedback, help requests, user data, and more to fill in the gaps in the journey: the moments that make what you're selling a little tedious, a little anxiety-inducing, a little annoying. Enough of those moments and customers start to wonder whether it's worth their time, energy and hard-earned money to come back, or whether they should look elsewhere next time.

Yet somewhere along the way, customer experience became CX, and CX became shorthand for "can our frontline team help customers when they call?"

If that's how you think about CX, it's time for a mindset shift.

I’d love to hear from you.

Elizabeth | elizabeth@sophoscxo.com

SophosCXO exists to put executive-level thinking inside organizations that need experience-oriented leadership but can’t yet justify it as a full-time role. We don’t just make recommendations; we become part of our client organizations and are committed to bringing ideas to life and delivering results.

Led by Elizabeth Martyn, MSc

Elizabeth has spent her career at the intersection of service design, operations, and organizational change. Her roots are in hospitality, where the discipline of delivering an exceptional experience while managing a tight labor model is what keeps a business open rather than what sets it apart. The methodology she built under that constraint, diagnosing where products and services fail customers and then redesigning and implementing industry-leading service models, is what she brings to growth-stage organizations across industries.