July 15, 2026
CX Vision 2035: Can you buy your way out of a Failure Rate of 60- 90 per cent?
Two sessions at CX Vision 2035 arrive at the same conclusion from opposite ends of the day. Neither of them thinks you can buy your way out of this.
Experience management initiatives fail at a rate somewhere between 60 and 90 per cent, depending on which source you trust. That is the premise Tom DeWitt brings to the CX Leaders stage at CX Vision 2035 this November. The range itself tells you something interesting: nobody is measuring this closely enough to narrow it down.
However there is a second part of this story. The CX profession has never had more experts. More consultants, more certifications, more platforms, more frameworks, more conference stages than at any point in its history. Expertise has grown steadily. The failure rate has not moved with it.
Two sessions at Wembley on 5th November take that contradiction seriously, and they reach a similar place by very different routes. Sign up for CX Vision 2035 here.
The mismatch
DeWitt’s session is called Learning from Our Failures: The Top 10 Reasons Why XM Initiatives Fail, and its framing is unusually direct. Practitioners are being deluged with proposed solutions by consultants and technology providers, he argues, while very few people are willing to discuss the obvious: the initiatives are failing anyway.
The session sets out ten recurring reasons why, then does the part that matters. DeWitt examines the mismatch between those reasons and the solutions currently being sold to address them, including technology platforms. Then it turns to the operating practices that organisations should focus on instead.
A list of failure causes is useful on its own; plenty of practitioners could assemble a rough version from memory. The harder claim is that the industry’s supply of remedies has drifted out of line with the problem it is meant to solve, and that buying more of what is on offer will not close the gap.
Whether the ten hold up is for the room to judge on the day. The premise deserves the airing either way.
Not technology, not your organisation
Nienke Bloem, CCXP, has prepared a panel that opens by rejecting the same assumption, though she arrives at it from an entirely different place.
The future of customer experience, her brief begins, does not start with technology, nor with your organisation. It starts with you.
Her argument is that knowing CX is no longer sufficient. The professionals who will define the discipline’s next decade, as she puts it, are not the best managers but the boldest leaders. The panel maps the development path from CX manager toward strategic CX leader. Two CX leaders who have already made that move join her to talk candidly about what they did differently and how their impact changed as a result.
The practical takeaway is a leadership growth ladder and an honest sense of which rung you are standing on. It is a personal session in a way most agenda items are not.
The same refusal, from two directions
DeWitt’s case is that the market’s answer to CX failure has been to sell more solutions, and that those solutions are mismatched to the causes. Bloem’s case is that the answer was never going to be found in technology or in organisational design, because it starts with the practitioner. One argues the supply side is misaligned. The other argues the demand was pointed in the wrong direction from the beginning. Both are refusing the same proposition: that a failing programme can be fixed by procurement.
That is a serious challenge to how the profession has spent the past decade, and it deserves a proper hearing. There is a potential counter-case though. Programmes can fail for reasons that sit well above the practitioner: budgets cut mid-flight, sponsors who move on, mandates that never arrive. A diagnosis that lands on individual leadership can let organisations off the hook for structural underinvestment, and it would be convenient for everyone senior if the answer were that CX managers simply needed to be bolder.
The honest position is probably that both sessions describe a real constraint, and neither describes the whole one. Which is a better place to start than where the industry currently sits, answering a 60 to 90 per cent failure rate by buying the next ‘thing’.
Why this belongs at CX Vision 2035
This is exactly the type of signal CX Vision 2035 aims to create. Visitors connect and learn when they walk out of one session and into another, carry an idea across the corridor, and put it to someone who was in a different room all morning.
That is the case for CX Vision 2035. The premise of the day is that the next decade of this profession should be defined by the people who will have to live with it, rather than by the vendors and analysts currently doing most of the defining. The next decade belongs to the boldest leaders, the kinds of leaders willing to show up and define their market. That is why CX Vision exists!
