CX Is Trapped. AI Won’t Save It. People Will.

Customer experience (CX) is trapped between metrics that few understand, dashboards that are barely used, and committees that repeat themselves in a loop. This is the core observation in my new book with David Arconada, HumanX.¹

Even though we’ve all been talking for years about “placing the customer in the center” or, as Amazon puts it, “start with the customer and work backwards,” in too many cases, CX has become a ritual with lip service. The results are crystal clear:

• Complaints lodged against U.S. airlines hit another recordin 2024. In fact, last year marked the fourth year in the last five that complaints against U.S. carriers increased to new highs, as travelers sounded off about problems including canceled flights, lost baggage and stalled refunds.²
• Across all U.S. industries, overall customer satisfaction has declined over the past several years, returning to its 2013-2019 pre-COVID results.³
• NPS is no longer the go-to metric, even though many companies still use it. “The question for CX leaders isn’t whether Net Promoter Score (NPS) is alive, but why it’s still alive, how it’s being used and what its persistence says about the state of customer experience measurement. With dissatisfaction rising sharply across North America and teams under pressure to understand customers at a deeper level, the gap between predictions and practice is worth examining.”⁴

Let’s examine that last quote about “practice,” since it’s one of the keys to unlock and apply HumanX.

We are seeing the explosion of CX AI, sometimes helping, sometimes missing parts, but AI is not the problem. AI is probably the greatest opportunity we have ever had. In this new HumanX context, we found that the true differentiation is once again in the human element. The companies that are winning and will win are not those that have the most artificial intelligence, but those that know how to use it to be more human, not less.

From that tension — between an exhausted CX model and a unique opportunity — HumanX was born. Not as an evolution of CX, but as a response to its limits and its successor. It’s an approach that starts from a simple idea: Experience is not created by systems or technology, it is created by people for people. In some ways, HumanX is like the movie classic, “Back to the Future,” where human connections in the 1950s proved to be more engaging and durable than the self-service and tech trends in the 1980s.

HumanX introduces something we’ve ignored for years: Customers and employees are all part of the same system. They are not at odds; they need to work together as protagonists. The goal is no longer simply to optimize interactions but to design coherent and meaningful relationships capable of generating a real impact on people’s lives.

Let’s dig into these ideas in more detail by addressing these three questions.

How is HumanX different?

HumanX challenges CX reporting, metrics, and meetings with direct connections to your customers and employees. It moves away from averages and audits to a census of behaviors and needs, and surfaces how well you are anticipating and meeting them. It also elevates the huge payback from co-creation with your customers and your staff, instead of telling them what to do or what you think they need.

Moreover, HumanX restores a purpose-led approach to CX and employee experience with eight steps, the last of which redefines measurement away from efficiency to the real impact on people’s lives. It relies less on surveys (which we all know are producing lower response rates and have always been skewed) and more on what we call “Voice of Data”.

HumanX also attacks friction as a “whole of business problem” with constant simplification.⁵ And, it replaces NPS with deeper metrics that “measure what matters, not what’s easier,” including Customer Trust Score and Employee Trust Score.

What are some HumanX examples I can begin to adapt to my organization?

There are plenty of “bad stories” from U.S.-based and international-based companies you can use to do the opposite. Instead of revealing the “bad stories,” here are some good ones worth studying for another one of HumanX’s steps, co-creation:

• LEGO’s uncanny ability to co-create with its fans, most visibly through LEGO Ideas. Fans submit original designs, vote on each other’s concepts, and winning submissions are produced and sold commercially with the creator receiving a royalty. The result is a product line that fans already want before it launches.
• John Deere products being built from the field users’ points of view. Engineers are embedded directly with farmers and operators during product development to observe real working conditions rather than relying on post-purchase surveys. Equipment is shaped by the people who use it daily, not by assumptions made at headquarters.
• Fluke applying extensive voice‑of‑the‑customer usability research to its digital experiences, bringing technicians and engineers into the design processso navigation and content reflect how they actually search for solutions, rather than Fluke’s internal product catalog structure.

Four changes to pursue HumanX

There are several “Monday morning” changes you can make.

1. Score your organization’s current state

Understand the gaps for each of the eight steps. Here are three of the self-diagnosis 10 questions under “Designing Human Experiences”:

• Do your journeys integrate the customer and employee perspective on a single map?
• Do customers and employees tell memorable stories about interactions with your brand?
• Do your AI systems incorporate clear human-in-the-loop mechanisms into sensitive decisions allowing for real human intervention and not symbolic?

2. Capture time spent with your customers and employees

Directly with people, not from surveys. Glean new ideas that come from your customers and employees, especially when you engage with them.

3. Pair NPS perceptions with actual improvements delivered

These improvements should be reflected in operational and structural indicators, such as effort reduction (Net Customer Effort Scores after reducing friction points), first point resolution (not transferring the customer nor having to call/chat customers back or, worse, telling them to call/chat back), and effective process completion rates.

4. Identify and track “Silent Sufferers”

Compare them versus the other type of non-complainers, “Happy Campers,” as I previewed in my last CustomerThink article.⁶ While we obsess (quite correctly) over handling customers who do reach out to contact us, whether to complain or to ask routine questions, many times more customers won’t even bother. These “silent sufferers” give up, don’t know where or how to complain, are hesitant to voice a complaint, or fear retribution. You will need to find ways to re-engage with them before they leave, because they won’t give you an exit interview.

These steps apply equally to employee experience (EX) and its causal connection to CX. Both EX and CX will benefit from restoring the human element.

Footnotes:

¹ David Arconada & Bill Price, as translated into English, even though the book is only available at this time in Spanish, HumanX: The End of CX (As We Know It): How to Reconstruct the Customer Experience from a Human Perspective, Involving Frontline Employees to Generate Value (LID, 2026).

² Teresa Murray, “Plane Truth 2025: Airline complaints rise,” accessed 28 April 2026.

³ American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), “U.S. Overall Customer Satisfaction,” accessed 28 April 2026.

⁴ Scott Clark, “Wasn’t NPS Supposed to Be All But Gone This Year?,” CMSWire, accessed 28 April 2026.

⁵ Detailed in Bill Price & David Jaffe’s The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort (Berrett-Koehler, 2022), which encourages organizations to reduce the number of processes by 50% and their steps by another 50%.

⁶ Bill Price, “Beware of Silent Sufferers! First Contact and Digital Containment Rates are Worse than You Think,” CustomerThink, November 13, 2025.