What In Tarnation Is CX?

Bruce Ediger

I got two similar ads on June 4, 2023, in one single article, from The Guardian.

confusing ad #1

I refuse to love any brand. I also feel bad for the stock photo model whose image got used in these ads.

confusing ad #2

The acronym/neologism “CX” means Customer Experience, which, of course, “encapsulates everything a business or an organization does to put customers first, managing their journeys and serving their needs”.

That hollow, meaningless prose is from McKinsey, a notoriously soulless management consultancy. I have to wonder about what kind of pathology would allow you to create something as information free as that definition. “Managing their journeys”. Oof.

The advertiser is “Five9”, apparently a call center software vendor. By their own admission, Five9 is:

a leading provider of cloud contact center software. We are driven by a passion to transform contact centers into customer engagement centers of excellence, coupled with a deep understanding of the cost and complexity involved in running a contact center.

Looks like Five9 drank McKinsey’s koolaid. Nobody, and I mean absolutely not a single human on earth, has such a passion. It’s possible to obtain the call center understanding they describe, but not a single person got that understanding willingly.

Back to the ads themselves: some poor soul actually made two different ads. The model’s position is slightly different in each ad. I’m going to guess that the “What’s your CX promise” was the first one. The graphic artist had to move the model somewhat to the right for the “Be the brand everyone loves” ad. Purely as a composition, the “Be the brand” ad is the lesser of the two: the back of the model’s head is trimmed off. Awkward.

The text of the “Be the brand” ad reads badly. I imagine the first draft had text like “Be the brand everyone loves”. Maybe there were two candidate slogans, “Be the brand everyone loves” and “Transform your CX”. A committee or an executive with poor taste forced the artist combine the two, moving the stock photo of the model to a less aesthetic position.