CX is Broken
Escaping the Illusion of Control
Customer Experience was designed for a world where humans noticed, reflected, and reported.
That world no longer exists.
In modern digital systems, experience is shaped by algorithms before awareness begins, behavior is constrained before choice is perceived, and disengagement starts long before anyone complains. CX frameworks continue to report success because they measure stories, not system dynamics.
CX Is Broken explains why customer experience does not fail due to poor execution, but because its underlying assumptions no longer match reality.
This is not a book about improving CX.
It is a book about why CX can no longer explain what is actually happening.
Coming January 2026
Available soon on:
Amazon
Apple Books
Google Play Books
Who is this book for:
- For decision-makers who increasingly sense that dashboards describe outcomes but explain less and less
- For professionals in CX, strategy, or design who recognize a growing mismatch between prevailing tools and lived system behavior
- For those working with complex, adaptive systems where causality is nonlinear and delayed effects dominate
- For readers who question dominant frameworks rather than focusing on incremental optimization within them
Customer Experience was built for a world that no longer exists.
Classical CX models rest on a linear assumption: that individuals first experience, then reflect, and finally report that experience in a form suitable for measurement. This assumption no longer holds. In contemporary digital environments, experiences are increasingly pre-configured by algorithmic systems before conscious awareness occurs.
CX systems therefore do not measure experience itself. They measure reconstructed memory, narrative rationalization, and behavior shaped by prior system intervention.
In CX Is Broken, Jan Theon argues that modern CX fails not due to poor execution, but because its conceptual foundations are obsolete. The discipline continues to operate as if experience were a stable, reportable phenomenon, when in reality it is a transient system state governed by timing, constraints, and control mechanisms.
CX frameworks focus on stories rather than mechanisms. Personas reduce dynamic identity formation into static fiction. Touchpoints are treated as stable entities, despite being algorithmically generated and continuously reconfigured. Metrics such as NPS and satisfaction scores institutionalize retrospective bias, reinforcing organizational self-confirmation rather than insight. Churn, when it is finally observed, appears only after its causal dynamics have already dissipated.
Through structural analysis and real-world examples, the book demonstrates how organizations mistake algorithmic influence for customer satisfaction, and how this misinterpretation becomes embedded in dashboards, reporting practices, and consulting methodologies.
This is not a book about improving surveys or optimizing customer journeys. It is a structural critique of CX as an ontological model.
The book advances a central claim: experience is not a path to be mapped, but a system-controlled state to be understood. Once this distinction is made explicit, the foundational assumptions of the CX industry no longer hold.