Customer Experience No Longer Sees the Human – Because It Was Never Built to

Customer experience measurement is often presented as a neutral activity. Metrics are assumed to describe reality as it is: customer satisfaction, service effectiveness, or the quality of interaction. This assumption, however, is misleading. Metrics do not merely describe reality; they actively shape what we come to recognize as experience in the first place.

This is not a methodological detail but an epistemological question. Every act of measurement involves a choice about what counts as relevant and what is excluded. In customer experience research, these choices were made in an environment where human behavior was assumed to be relatively stable, context limited, and interaction temporally well-defined. Even though these assumptions no longer hold, measurement continues as if nothing had changed. Information accumulates, but understanding thins.

The Implicit Bias of the Linear User Journey

Most customer experience frameworks still rely on a linear user journey. The user enters a system, progresses through stages, and exits. Experience is understood as a sequence of events that can be optimized step by step.

This model is no longer merely imprecise; it is conceptually wrong. Digital reality is not sequential but simultaneous. Humans do not move from one context to another in a controlled manner but are constantly exposed to overlapping stimuli, interruptions, and competing signals. A service is not a closed environment but one signal among many.

When a user journey is mapped retrospectively, it does not describe lived experience but rather a rational explanation of what is assumed to have happened. It is a narrative, not an observation. The user journey is a historical fiction through which we explain chaos in the most favorable way after the fact. This distinction often goes unnoticed because the narrative appears orderly and manageable. Reality is not.

Static Comparison in a Dynamic Reality

Customer experience measurement is almost always based on generalized reference points. Results are interpreted relative to averages, benchmarks, and assumed normal behavior. This approach presumes that the user is a relatively stable actor over time.

In reality, every human operates in a continuously changing state. Cognitive load, physiological condition, stress, time pressure, and environment influence decision-making from moment to moment. In this sense, there is no single stable baseline for a person, but multiple situational reference points.

Static metrics cannot capture this variability. They flatten dynamic reality into averages that correspond to no one’s lived experience. A paradox emerges: the more data is collected, the further the individual disappears from analysis. The human becomes noise within their own experience.

In this context, static comparison is like trying to measure the speed of a sailboat without accounting for wind direction. The measurement produces a number, but it detaches the result from the forces that actually determine movement. In customer experience, those forces are cognitive load, contextual variation, and situational tension—not the internal stages of the system.

This is not a misuse of metrics but their inevitable consequence. Static metrics are built for static realities. When applied to dynamic human behavior, they shift attention away from the human and toward the system. Responsibility does not lie with individual designers or researchers but with a structure that compels us to ask customers for ratings instead of observing the cognitive tension and rhythm with which they operate within the system.

The Fundamental Limitation of Surveys

Surveys play a central role in customer experience research. They are assumed to provide a direct channel to human experience. This assumption overlooks a crucial fact: surveys do not measure experience; they measure memory of experience.

Memory is not a passive recording but an active, reconstructive process. This means that experience is not stored as it occurred but reconstructed anew at the moment of recall. Experience does not return as it was lived but as it can be meaningfully organized afterward.

Remembering is interpretation. It is influenced by outcomes, subsequent events, current emotional state, and the framing within which recall is requested. In practice, we do not ask customers what happened; we ask them to construct a story that fits our questionnaire. Surveys therefore do not capture lived experience but a momentary narrative about experience. Memory is a process of interpretation, not an archive.

This does not render surveys useless, but it places strict limits on them. When surveys become the primary source of understanding, the temporal and embodied dimensions of experience disappear. What remains is a narrative, not experience.

Measurement as a Producer of Control

One reason for the persistence of metrics is their psychological effect on organizations. Metrics create a sense of control. They offer clear numbers in complex environments and give the impression that human reality can be managed rationally.

This sense of safety is attractive but dangerous. When metrics begin to replace genuine understanding, critical reflection diminishes. Uncertainty, which was originally the research foundation of customer experience, comes to be seen as a disturbance rather than a source of insight. Organizations learn to reward the feeling of certainty instead of understanding.

Behavior Is Not Experience

Another structural problem in customer experience thinking is the systematic conflation of experience and behavior. Clicks, conversions, and dwell times are observable behaviors. They are not experiences.

When behavior is interpreted as a proxy for experience, a serious interpretive error occurs. A frustrated user who completes a task is classified as successful. An indifferent user who does not complain is interpreted as satisfied. The system rewards adaptation and interprets it as approval.

When we reward adaptation, we build systems that survive but never flourish. This directly extends the argument introduced in the first part: metrics do not reveal the quality of experience but the human capacity to tolerate dysfunctional systems.

The Metric Becomes the Goal

Once a metric exists, it inevitably becomes a target. This is not an organizational failure but a human consequence of measurement. Teams learn to optimize what is visible, not what is meaningful.

Over time, the metric becomes more real than the phenomenon it was meant to describe. Decisions are justified with numbers. Qualitative observations are dismissed as anomalies. Organizations begin to trust numbers more than people.

Why This Cannot Be Fixed with Better Metrics

It is tempting to assume that the problem could be solved with more sophisticated tools or more refined metrics. This assumption misses the point. Every measurement simplifies. Every simplification excludes aspects of reality. This cannot be eliminated through technology.

The problem is not that customer experience metrics are poorly designed. The problem is that they cannot measure what they claim to measure without simultaneously reshaping the phenomenon itself. Measurement is not a neutral window into reality but part of that reality.

Toward a Different Starting Point

This does not mean that customer experience thinking is at a dead end. An epistemic crisis is also an opportunity. It forces a return to foundational questions: where does experience arise, when does it arise, and under what conditions can it be understood at all?

Perhaps customer experience should not primarily be modeled as journeys but as states. Perhaps instead of measurement we should attend to the intensity, rhythm, and accumulation of signals. Perhaps understanding does not emerge from asking more questions but from learning to observe without immediately interpreting.

This is not a solution but a change in direction. And it is precisely here that a rethinking of customer experience can begin.