Reflecting on 12 Years of CX Days

Happy CX Day! Tomorrow (today in Asia) will be the 12th annual Customer Experience (CX) Day.

It makes me feel extremely proud to see all of the people around the world participating in the celebration. CX Day has grown into exactly what I hoped and envisioned it would become when we launched it in 2013 (you can read a bit more about the history of CX Day below).

You may be asking: What is CX Day? It's one day every year (usually the first Tuesday in October) when CX professionals around the world take a moment to celebrate great customer experience and the people who make it happen.

Last year I shared these 11 reflections on the first 11 years, all of which still remain true today. So I am replaying those while adding an 12th item to the list:

1. CX/XM professionals are awesome. Some things never change, and this is one of them. There's nothing more energizing than getting together with a group of CX pros. You won't find a more sincere, positive group of people. Of course, I now think of CX pros as part of a larger group of Experience Management (XM) pros, and the additional family members from EX (employee experience), BX (brand experience), and PX (product experience) pros are also pretty awesome.
2. XM skills have blossomed. When we first launched CX Day, there were only a handful of people who truly understood how to build a voice of the customer program, do journey mapping, or drive change in an organization. While we still have a lot of learning and maturing to do, these types of skills are now widely held by XM pros around the world. It's been fantastic to see the growth of so many wonderful XM pros, whether they’re focused on customers, employees, products, or brands.
3. It’s time to modernize our efforts. The underlying capabilities that we deliver to an organization is the ability to sense and respond to changes in what people are thinking and feeling. While we are delivering a lot of value today, there is a lot more we can be doing that taps into leading practices and technologies. To evolve into the future, we’ve defined a blueprint called Modern XM built on dynamic instrumentation, actionable intelligence, and adaptive processes.
4. We don't celebrate enough. We are all change agents... trying to make organizations operate more effectively and better serve the people that they touch. Those are ambitious goals. But the world doesn't change that fast, so we are locked into ongoing state of frustration. We need to spend more time appreciating what we've been able to accomplish, and not always focusing on the changes that have yet to occur.
5. We need to focus more on outcomes. No matter how mature CX becomes, it will always be a means to an end. Great customer experience can be a very compelling end state, but we need to view it as a mechanism for helping organizations achieve their larger goals. Whether it's helping a retailer sell more additional products, a hotel chain capture more overnight stays, a tech company increase its renewal rates, a government agency increase access to its services, or a health system deliver better care to more patients, CX needs to be seen as a core tool for driving success.
6. Journeys are under-appreciated.?I've been discussing the need to focus on journeys versus individual interactions for more than a decade, well before most people even knew what I was talking about. Today, "customer journeys" is a standard component of the CX vocabulary. Even with this adoption, there's more work to be done to focus our data, analytics, and decision-making around journeys. We need to embed journey thinking in everything we do.
7. We need more experience design. In 2010, I wrote a blog post about the design of little things that discusses how even the best made plans can fail if we don't apply even a little bit of good design. All of the insights we uncover won't deliver the value we want unless we focus a bit more on how we engage with human beings' intuitive decision-making processes, from customers to employees and other stakeholders.
8. It's time to tout our strategic agility. As we’ve seen over the last few years, the world is full of uncertainty. During COVID it became clear that organizations need to better sense and respond to input from all the human beings that they touch, from customers to employees. This need is not going away. That’s why XM professionals need to make the case that our efforts aren’t just about improving specific experiences, but are maybe more importantly about providing substantially increased capabilities for organizational agility.
9. The world needs our empathy and humanity. I knew CX was an untapped goldmine of value for organizations more than a decade ago, and while we are creating enormous value already, there's a lot more gold left to be mined in the future. In addition to the compelling economics, there's an even more compelling opportunity to improve the human condition. Our collective focus on the needs and desires of people brings more empathy and humanity to the organizations we touch. And the world is in dire need of more empathy and humanity.
10. I’m super proud and energized. Looking back at my career, I feel incredibly lucky to have helped create the CX/XM movement and to participate in its evolution. Collectively we’ve had an amazingly positive impact on the world. I look forward to what we can do together in the future! There's a lot more work for us to do.
11. Gen AI is an important part of our future. I've tracked and advised companies during many waves of technology disruptions, including the Internet, ecommerce, smart phones, cloud computing, and social media. Gen AI appears to be more disruptive than any of those other technologies. As I wrote in a recent post, Gen AI won't live up to the hype in the short-term, but it will be more transformational than imagined in the long run. So every CX professionals needs to be learning how to incorporate Gen AI into their plans within the next 3 years.
12. We must/can/will improve humanity. Over the previous decades, technology has made it easier to understand and connect with other people, whether through social media, digital adoption, or with the increasing use of AI. At the same time, human interactions have become more polarized, with growing levels of political and social conflict. At the end of the day, every organization exists to meet the needs of human beings. The better that we can help leaders understand those needs and the impact that their efforts have on the world around them, the better they can optimize their efforts to improve humanity. Read more about my Humanty@Scale movement.

The History of CX Day

Here’s an excerpt from a post that I wrote in 2017:

I started thinking about a CX Day in 2012 because I felt like the profession needed to have the opportunity to celebrate itself. I believed that the creation of an event like CX Day would provide the motivation and backdrop for CX professionals to raise awareness of customer experience in a coordinated, high-energy way.

In early 2013, I introduced the concept of CX Day to the CXPA board and outlined its design, which combined a number of online and local events. We decided to launch it in the Fall because we already had the very popular Insight Exchange in the Spring. This new event would provide an additional benefit of galvanizing our membership for a second time in the year.

We kicked off CX Day on October 1, 2013, and didn’t know what to expect. Luckily, it turned out to be a lot of fun. We actually received a proclamation from the US House of Representatives recognizing CX Day. Pretty cool!

That first CX Day looked a lot like the current model, with webinars, giveaways, online content, awards, and many local events. As part of the CXPA’s activities, I had a great webinar with Sprint’s CEO, Dan Hesse,?and wrote a post for the blog carnival. Temkin Group offered a bunch of free things including our first annual Ultimate CX Infographic and an eBook with 50 CX Tips that are still valuable today.

It was a huge success, as we energized our global base of CX professionals. In subsequent years, we pushed for more companies to internalize the event by celebrating it with their customers and employees. That part of CX Day has expanded immensely since 2013, which has been wonderful to see.

Over the years, the volume of participants and activities has grown. It has matured into the wonderful event that I envisioned that it could become… a celebration of great customer experience and the people who make it happen.