The Customer Experience discipline is being quietly killed. Here are the two murderers.

Every week for the past five months, one or two CX managers have landed in my DMs. Fired. Looking for coffee. Asking who I know who could move them to their next role.

The killing is being done by two forces. One is inside the CX function itself. The other is the industry selling to it. This is the story of both.

The first murderer: The CX manager who never learned to speak business

When budgets tighten, positions that do not visibly drive business results or move the organisation closer to strategic goals get flushed first. If you talk about satisfaction scores without a clear line to revenue, churn, cost, growth or employee retention, here is the uncomfortable truth.

You are on the chopping board.

Not because you are bad at your job. But because you were never focused on the primary customer in your business. The company that employs you.

Customer Experience is a business discipline. The word "experience" in the name gives cover for soft approaches. Magic moments. Happy customers. Delight. NPS programmes that track a score while the pain points behind it never get fixed.

Magic moments and frontline training belong in a business where the customer experience has no friction. NPS belongs where leadership actually uses the comments and data behind the score to fix what is broken. And it should never be your only source of data.

If you have not already fixed the major pain points your customers experience, stop. You are wasting money by putting lipstick on a pig. You are also killing CX as a business discipline.

A score, even a high one, tells you nothing without focus on the pain points behind it. I know many NPS pushers said otherwise. They lied. They were selling you a product. Not change.

Top management does care about customers. But they do not care about you, if you cannot show the effect of your work in the language spoken at the decision table. If your work does not visibly support the business strategy, I will see you in my DMs.

CX people, we built the cage we are sitting in.

The second murderer: the CX consulting industry

Yes, this is ironic coming from a consultant. But I was a practitioner long before I was a consultant, and in both roles I have spent years cleaning up after concepts that looked great on slides and died in real operations.

Too much of what the CX consulting industry sells is performance theatre.

Journey maps that never drive cross-organisational change. Service training designed to inspire, not built around real frontline moments, leadership behaviour or sound change management practice. NPS dashboards, and a score chased by top managers like it was oxygen, even when no one can show what the score changed for the business.

Credit where it is due. The NPS crowd did brilliant marketing. But marketing is not business impact. When budgets tighten, whatever looks nice but does not deliver clear value gets cut.

The pattern is depressingly familiar. The consultants bring a framework. The framework fails. The CX manager gets sacrificed.

Journey mapping, service training and NPS are not the problem. How they have been sold is. Packaged as strategy. Priced as transformation. They can be powerful, but only when tied to operational decisions, leadership rhythms, accountability and implementation. Most are not.

The industry is walking away from its own playbook

The evidence is in plain sight. Forrester shifted its language from journey mapping to journey management. A quiet admission that a pretty map never changed a process, backlog or KPI. Journey management connects insights to delivery and measurement, so they hit roadmaps and metrics.

Fred Reichheld, the father of NPS, introduced Earned Growth in 2021. His own signal that a score on a slide is not enough. Customer metrics need a business number attached.

The methods are evolving. The language is evolving. But many consultants are still selling the old wine. And too many executive teams and CX leaders are still buying it.

Experience Management Community is built for operations

That is what we are changing inside our community. It is not about scores, inspiration or magic moment theatre. We built it for operations. A place we could share experiences, proof and roadmaps so we could learn from each other and succeed faster.

And at Experience Management Nordic Summit, every speaker is selected for one thing:
A case the room can learn from. A case that moved the numbers.

Join us either on the inside of the community or at the Experience Management Nordic Summit. A community and a Summit built around one promise:

You leave with a roadmap to turn customer experience into commercial impact your board can see.

Because the alternative is turning the CX discipline into one long LinkedIn coffee speed-dating event. And I hate coffee.