How Blurred Lines Between CX and Support Are Undermining Growth Strategies

In the race to break down internal silos, companies are blurring the lines between customer success, support, and experience, and in the process, undermining the very customer-centricity they’re trying to achieve. The culprit is a simple but costly confusion over what "customer experience" actually means. At its core, customer experience is the overarching journey that encompasses every interaction a prospect or customer has with a brand, from the first marketing touchpoint to procurement, onboarding, and renewal.

We spoke with Erik Vogel, an executive who has spent his career helping customer experience teams deliver results. As the Founder and CEO of VistaXM, and with a history of CX leadership at tech giants like Qualtrics, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Cisco, Vogel has a practical perspective on what separates successful programs from those that fall short. For Vogel, this confusion is the primary obstacle preventing CX from delivering on its ultimate promise: driving revenue.

“Honestly, that’s why we’ve seen pullbacks in CX investment," he says. "Teams are good at collecting metrics, talking about moments that matter, NPS scores, and CSAT, but companies don’t spend NPS points. They spend dollars.”

• The language of growth: Instead of dwelling on abstract metrics, Vogel insists that CX professionals must speak the language of the C-suite, focusing on tangible business results. "CX should be articulated in terms of customer retention, customer expansion, and new customer acquisition. The goal isn’t a better NPS or CSAT score; it’s keeping customers happy, loyal, spending more, and reducing churn," he explains.

According to Vogel, this disconnect reveals a crucial strategic insight. When organizations view customer success as the entirety of the journey, they inadvertently focus on just one piece of the puzzle. This narrow view often misses the high-impact interactions, from the first sales call to the contracting process—that shapes a customer's loyalty long before they ever need support. "Customer success or support is about making sure customers, after they’ve made a purchase, continue to be successful with our product or platform. We see customer success as a component of the overall experience. It is one set of touchpoints in the broader customer journey," he outlines.

• Lay the foundation: Vogel points out that the foundation for customer loyalty is often laid much earlier than many realize, in interactions that are typically overlooked by customer success and support functions. "The first purchase experience is highly correlated with future renewals. Interactions that happen long before a prospect ever touches success or support, like the sales process, contract redlining, and documentation, all directly impact their desire to buy from you again," he observes.

• The last mile: Getting customer feedback is easy. Acting on it is hard. Vogel calls this gap between insight and action "the last mile of CX"—and he says it's a core execution problem for the industry. Vogel highlights a common pitfall: the chasm between gathering customer insights and effectively acting upon them. "Collecting data and deriving insights is easy, but the process breaks down when teams hand those insights off with little follow-through. That handoff creates a backlog of priorities that never get executed," he cautions.

So how do the best companies overcome it? According to Vogel, they use a simple, incremental playbook. To bridge this gap, Vogel suggests that successful organizations adopt a strategic, incremental approach to implementing CX improvements. “Industry leaders handle this differently. They take the laundry list of hundreds of potential improvements and pick two or three high-impact, easily implementable items. By proving success in small increments, you start earning buy-in across stakeholders, creating a culture of customer centricity. That incremental success builds momentum and shifts culture,” he recommends.

In Vogel's view, the ability to navigate that last mile depends on a company's organizational maturity. He outlined a framework for modern CX, which forms the basis of his company's CX Maturity Assessment. But for companies that do the work and climb the maturity curve, the payoff can be transformative. "There are three things. First, real-time listening. Business moves too fast for annual surveys. Today, organizations need continuous monitoring and action. Second is unstructured data. Most customer experience data now comes from unstructured sources like ticketing systems and portals that can be mined with AI. Third is process and methodology. Since CX is a new practice, having structured playbooks and methods is critical to run a program effectively," he says.

For companies that successfully climb this maturity curve, the financial rewards are substantial, demonstrating a clear link between advanced CX practices and market outperformance. “ROI on CX programs really kicks in at higher maturity levels—level 4 and above—where investments translate into measurable improvements in retention, expansion, and new business," he concludes. "Leaders outperform laggards significantly. Publicly traded CX leaders can outperform the S&P by 300%. Level 4 maturity is where the big bang for the buck occurs.”