CX Strategic Knowledge · CX Methods
Common pitfalls & anti-patterns
Scaling a product with CX holes only scales the problems and the attrition.
The most common CX failures are patterns, not accidents: untrained staff doing specialist work, shipping speed over experience quality, workshops replacing research, and analytics replacing understanding. Each one substitutes something cheap for something that actually explains customer behavior.
- The Anyone Can Cook fallacy: assuming user-centered design tasks need no professional training
- Feature Factory: prioritizing release speed over experience quality, chasing short-term revenue metrics
- Solution-by-Workshop: 50 people guessing why users behave a certain way instead of observing them
- Groupthink in focus groups: participants prefer consensus over honest disagreement
- The Data Trap: app analytics without the upstream reasons behind the behavior
The counters are practical. Intervene at the moment of struggle with behavior triggers, before users abandon. Treat handle time and NPS as symptoms and track leading indicators like real time to resolution. Keep specialized CX work with people qualified to hold a professional CX job. And fix the holes before scaling, because scale multiplies whatever is already there.
Scaling a product with holes in the experience only scales the holes.
Apply this
Reading about common pitfalls & anti-patterns is one thing. Seeing where it applies in your journey is the useful part.