The stampede by companies into CX, with massive associated investments into martech, specialists teams and organisational overhauls, is having little impact on customer experience scores – and big banks, telcos, and car brands are at best benchmarked as average, despite investing billions collectively. CSBA Managing Director, Paul van Veenendaal, has seven years of CX performance data from 12,000 annual assessments across 200 Australian firms and it’s a sobering read for those firms heralding their commitment to connecting up and improving the experience across all customer contact points. In short, all that tech investment is simply not hooked up to customer contact centres – and NPS scores, which many leadership teams have linked to performance and bonuses, are “being gamed”, he warns, for better but hollow CX benchmarks. No big brands feature in the top 10 of CSBA’s CX rankings, and only one, a superannuation company, makes the top 20. Chatbots aren’t up to scratch yet, says van Veenendaal, and companies have “pretty much parked” speech analytics. Meanwhile despite heavy investment in digital transformation, call centre volumes have not declined over the last seven years – and those call centres are focused on the wrong outcomes and metrics, he says. Hence underwhelming CX scores across CSBA’s rankings. But some sectors are nailing it: Universities and colleges, utility companies and local authorities – the latter at least partially due to the policies of a one-time adman and former Victorian Premier. Here’s where van Veenendaal thinks it’s all going wrong – and how to fix it.