When a CX migration goes sideways, the post-mortem almost always points the finger at technology.
If this were a whodunit, technology would be the butler, the obvious but usually innocent culprit.
You’ll likely hear things like ‘The platform wasn't ready,’ ‘The integration was more complex than expected,’ or ‘The vendor overpromised.’
It's a comforting narrative because it keeps the responsibility at arm's length. But it's usually wrong.
McKinsey research puts the failure rate for major transformations at 70%. In CX specifically, the pattern is well-established: projects run over time, over budget, or simply never deliver what was promised.
And while technology tends to carry the blame, practitioners who have seen the inside of enough challenging migrations will tell you the real culprits were waiting in the org chart long before a single workload moved.
“The thing that most organizations that struggle get wrong, is that they don't fix how they work before they start fixing the technology,” says Rupert Adair, Director of Product Management at Enghouse Interactive.
“They focus on the tools and the platform and the cloud, but they never really agree on who owns the customer experience, who makes the decisions, and how IT and the business are supposed to work together.”
The result, he says, is entirely predictable;
“Things take longer, people pull in different directions, and you end up redoing things.”
The Ownership Problem
Unfortunately, gaining universal agreement on exactly who should own a CX modernization project is also something of a Herculean task.
Adair has seen this indecision undermine projects more than almost any technical failure.
“Too often, IT drives the solution without the ownership of other people,” he says.
“It should be rounded ownership. Call center leaders, the people driving the teams, the people responsible for the KPIs – they should have a key part.”
Many failures come down to a lack of alignment between IT and CX teams on priorities, ownership, and success metrics. When this gap opens, even well-funded programs stall or fragment.
The alternative is a migration that gets technically delivered but operationally rejected. In other words, a system that works on paper but frustrates everyone who uses it in practice.
Getting there takes real effort before anyone even opens a project plan. Adair's view is that the companies that succeed don't start with the technology at all:
“They start with getting alignment on ownership, priorities, and what good actually looks like. They nail down exactly what they are aiming to achieve before they hammer out how they are going to do it.”
It's only once the objectives are agreed on that the technical decisions start to make sense.
The Integration Blindspot
One of the more expensive surprises in CX migration projects is the discovery of integration complexity – not before go-live, but during it.