Why I Stopped Believing in Frameworks

The companies with the best CX frameworks I have ever seen also had the worst customer experience.

Not despite the framework. Because of it.

There is a certain kind of consultant who walks into a broken CX situation and immediately reaches for a model. A journey map. A tiered escalation structure. A feedback loop borrowed from a company three times your size operating in a completely different market. 

It gets presented in a clean deck. 

The founder nods. The team gets trained on it. Three months later, the same customers are still complaining about the same things.

The framework was not wrong. It just had nothing to do with the actual problem.

Here is what I have learned after working across healthcare, fintech, SaaS and HR tech: no two CX breakdowns look the same. The symptoms sometimes do. The root cause almost never does.

One company's problem was a founder who was still the approval layer for refunds.

Another's was a sales team that was promising things the product could not deliver.

Another's was a support team that was genuinely trying but had no visibility into what the customer had actually purchased.

None of those problems have a framework solution. They have a diagnosis. Then a fix that is specific to that company, that culture, that moment.

The most useful thing I bring into an engagement is not a model. It is the ability to sit with the mess long enough to understand what is actually broken.

I have started calling this pragmatism, even though I know it is not the word that wins rooms.

Pragmatism does not have a deck. It does not come with a certification or a catchy acronym. What it has is a bias toward the specific over the general, the fix over the framework, the customer in front of you over the archetype in a journey map.

Frameworks tell you what good looks like. They do not tell you why your specific company is not there yet.

That gap is where the real work lives. I have stopped optimising for how unsexy that work looks from the outside.