There is no greater chasm than the one that lies between common CX beliefs and reality

We wanted a candid sit-down with our professor, Aarron Spinley. He didn’t disappoint.

With the September 2025 intake still fresh from celebrating their graduation from the Mini MBA in Customering, its program director is already busy meeting with corporates as they plan the professional development of their teams in 2026.

It can be a perilous business, navigating home truths, career aspirations, and team dynamics all at once, he tells Field Bell Institute’s enrolments manager, Daniela Salcedo. A grin is never far away.

Spinley is not one for the orthodoxy of the industry, something he doesn’t offer any false bravado about. Earlier on, it was, in his own words, “deeply uncomfortable”, but as he put it when speaking at the Martech World Forum earlier in the year, if the science and economics are at odds with popular industry narratives, it’s not the science that needs to change.

“Anyone who is familiar with the history and literature of our field finds that there is no greater chasm than the one that lies between common CX beliefs and reality.

Working with data from IMD Business School, Accenture, the UK Customer Service Association, and others to deduce the extent of corporate losss from faulty customer programs, he found that they are now in the many trillions (USD) and are due to the three primary causes.

Unnatural customer attrition, failed digital transformation projects, and the resultant erosion of company profits - and thereafter shareholder return.

“Despite the quite weird claims to the contrary, there is no path to ‘zero-churn’. That’s literally impossible. People move away. Leave the category. They die. No - it’s not churn that’s the problem, it’s the amount of unnatural churn – the loss of customers due to service failure, outside the usual distribution of customer loss”. 

He cites studies that place this between circa 1.6 trillion in 2016, and 4.3 trillion in 2021. A clear trajectory that, when married with marketing ineffectiveness, presents a double whammy. 

“A short jab, then an uppercut”, he says.

The second issue is perhaps a defining one at this point in history. The forecast spend on digital transformation is tracking toward 13 trillion US dollars, with some estimates putting the customer related projects at over 70% of that expenditure. Spinley cites IMD Business School Professor, Didier Bonet.

“Bonet’s work is very important. Across all such projects, he found the failure rate is a whopping 87.5%.

“But for customer transformations, managed and delivered by teams without specialist higher education in the very field that they are applying all that technology to, the logical contention is that the rate of failure is likely higher, and that success criteria can be dubious to begin with”.

Those with an understanding of factors that drive or erode company profit, will start to recognise the size of the loss that this represents. Spinley cuts to the chase. 

“When you look at the data, we’ve known for a long time that we have a significant workforce deficiency. This financial data simply makes plain the consequences of that, over time”.

‍Death by Kool-Aid

One of the self-disabling characteristics of the field is the sense held by many that they already possess a kind of expertise despite an obvious gap in credentials when compared side-by-side to other colleagues in business.

In marketing management, only a quarter are formally trained, yet this is relatively well-performing compared to digital, marketing technology and customer experience, where it’s closer to zero. The digirati get by on a diet of vendor badges and, in some cases, association certificates - albeit taught by those with vendor badges! – while the troubled ‘CX’ fraternity has arranged its own associations, issuing itself certificates that are heavily, if not totally, influenced by the survey software category. It’s a sorry state.

There are even some traditional business schools that have imported these errors, in lieu of teaching the field critically, as a low-cost way to enter the market.

“You just can’t escape the systemic lack of training,” says Spinley. “They’re literally making shit up, or repeating other people’s shit, because it's popular. You can’t be doing that and then raging on LinkedIn about why you have no seat at the table, or what your ROI is”.

I told you he was candid.

A Spinley points to a common language as an indicator. A hyperbolic, almost juvenile diction has sprung up where disciplinary language should b

“I can’t quite decipher if those chanting customer ‘obsession’ are a smidge over-medicated, or if they think they’re selling cologne”, he says. “Can you imagine accountants screaming about a numbers-obsession? It’s child-like.”

It’s his view that this misplaced energy is just a bell weather for the industry’s hunger for better recognition and utility, and he cautions against writing these folks off. 

“Are they distinctive, in that they have a natural affinity for the nuance of customer-focused work, and are likely to learn faster than others?  The answer is almost always yes. There are often very good skills that can be leveraged and applied more effectively as well.” 

He says that part of the problem is that customer leaders don’t have the vocabulary or the ability to translate that to corporate value. “As Byron Sharp once said, ‘ROI is a stupid metric that can send you broke’. Nowhere is that truer than in customer management.” 

‍Belief versus reality

Errors in beliefs about ROI are just one of the many pitfalls that a decent education can weed out from otherwise promising careers.

There’s often real shock when students discover for the first time, that customer satisfaction does not, in general, lead to loyalty; that an emphasis on sales activations can actually reduce sales; that points and rewards programs are always negative to both brand and company value; and that it’s scientifically impossible to manage any asset, inclusive of a customer base, using feedback. 

While none of these are subjective, Spinley says that the beliefs  they challenge have been so ingrained, for so long, that if you ask someone why they think a certain thing, they can never remember. 

One hypothesis for these wayward belief systems is that the industry tends to skew quite young, in a field that is still comparatively new itself. It surmises that the relative youth of the workforce can mean there’s a bit less experience, and perhaps a higher propensity to be taken in by exotic technology hoopla. 

Spinley’s not having it. 

“I’m not sure that’s still true, but either way, I know plenty of folks in their 50s who are just as prone to being victims of the echo chamber. Just look at most of the analyst firms and industry media articles. No, I don’t think it’s an age thing”. 

But he does have time for the idea that the field suffers from a knowledge gap as new recruits move into it, and inevitably, the conversation returns to the underlying trend that people continue to mistake product marketing for management theory. 

He describes “pseudo-research by pseudo thought leaders” and cites the daily claims that AI is revolutionising the field, made by people who never understood it to begin with. 

“But if you try telling that to a room full of tech people, as I have, some will want to punch you in the face. They’re like, ‘oh no one needs a formal education anymore – I have YouTube, and Chat GPT, and my CDP rep gave me a certificate that says I’m a strategist’.”

Thankfully, no one has punched him in the face just yet, and we think it’s unlikely. Exit data from the last intake gave his Mini MBA in Customering a satisfaction score of 98%, well above the higher education industry average of 78%, and the wider education sector of just 53%. Around half of all enrolments were from digital, e-commerce, and martech teams, followed by marketing managers and executives, then retail leaders. CXers in their various ilk made up around 20%.

“It’s a punchable face, though, to be fair”, he says. 

For team training options, make an appointment with Daniela today.