Keeping promises: How to align operations, marketing, and CX

Confusion around the meaning of CX is one the greatest – and most persistent – challenges facing practitioners. There are those who use the terms CX and service interchangeably, there's ongoing debate about the relevance of the CXO role, then there are those who say CX is the new UX. Or vice versa. 

Now there's another challenge. According to research conducted by Jeannie Walters and Dr. Alyona Medelyan, CX is being misdiagnosed as a marketing initiative, when it is an operational management discipline. 

Medelyan, CEO of Thematic, and Walters, founder of Experience Investigators, teamed up to find out what airline reviews reveal about the gaps that exist between a brand promise and the experience reality.

To do so, they used Thematic's customer intelligence platform to analyze 1,907 reviews from six major US airlines in 2025. They then traced customer brand perceptions directly back to specific operational moments and considered each airline's AirHelp score. 

Their key findings include:

• Top airlines generally deliver on their promise: The highest performing airlines combine strong AirHelp rankings with strong financial performance – and their backend policies support their public messaging.
• There is no single CX struggle among the studied airlines: Those with the lowest scores all failed on "different dimensions" of their brand promises.
• Operational moments strongly shape emotional perception of a brand.
  Empathy is critical to delivering service recovery that resonates; and it preserves brand promise.
• Value is more complex than price.

In this interview with CX Network, Medelyan and Walters explore some of the key findings and talk about the gaps in CX understanding, three things all brands can learn from airlines, how to align CX marketing and operations to drive better customer outcomes, and how practitioners can create a CX mission statement. 

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Why is CX so misunderstood?

The core case made in Thematic's research is that CX is widely misdiagnosed as a marketing initiative, when the data shows it's an operational management discipline. 

According to Medelyan, the misunderstanding occurs because both functions "sit at the visible edges of the experience, and the real work happens in the operational middle where nobody can see it".  

She explains: "Across the reviews [we analyzed], the lowest-scoring theme is refund policies at 1.17 out of 5. Lower than delays, lower than crashes, lower than rude staff. The agent at the counter didn't write that policy. The brand team didn't either. It was written somewhere in finance or revenue management, and it sits there quietly destroying customer trust while the service team gets blamed for delivering the bad news."

She adds: "That's why CX is an operational management discipline. The lever is upstream of everyone the customer can see," Medelyan explains. 

There's also a case of mindset. Walters adds: "Most leaders genuinely believe they're customer-centered. They've told everyone to deliver a great experience, and they assume that's enough. But great means wildly different things to different teams, and nobody has defined it. 

"So, the diagnosis hides in the language customers use. When someone says they're disappointed, that means you set an expectation and didn't meet it. When they say frustrated, that's a loss of control you implicitly promised them. Those words are operational signals, not feelings to manage. The reason service keeps getting blamed is that they're the only ones in the building who hear those words out loud," she continues. 

"Until leaders treat that vocabulary as data about their own decisions, they'll keep mistaking the messenger for the message," Walters adds.

How the agentic customer drives the need for a CX mission statement 

The importance of operational management to CX cannot be underestimated. While the examples put forward by Medelyan and Walters are critical to how CX works today, the emergence of algorithmic buyers is about to place renewed focus on the links between marketing promises and the CX and operational outcomes customers see and feel. 

The use of consumer AI assistants in CX is rapidly changing how consumers search for products, services, and experiences online. To retrieve their recommendations, these engines look far and wide across the web and consolidate all the machine-readable information available to make a decision on whether or not they will recommend a provider. 

To do this, they look for proof that operational reality and marketing promises are delivering CX excellence – and the brand's website is just the starting point. AI assistants also look at customer reviews and third-party content such as press interviews or Wikipedia pages. They draw sentiment from social media posts, and they can even search through company policies, investor information, and financial results to check such things as ESG claims. 

For a brand to feature in AI search results there must be consistent, verified proof that the organization is delivering against brand promises; and AI assistants don't look kindly on vague claims or contradictory information. 

As capabilities expand, consumer AI assistants will act with increasing autonomy, evolving into machine customers, AKA algorithmic buyers. 

In this fast-moving trading environment, unified communication, flawless operations, and aligned CX purpose are critical. 

Yet the research from Medelyan and Walters found a disconnect between marketing, operations and CX in many organizations. To close the gap, they say organizations need a CX mission statement; a succinct statement that captures the exact experience you want to create for every customer, every time. 

Walters explains: "It's your North Star for internal alignment. It has to be grounded in your brand promise. As the research shows, the airlines that performed best weren't just making public commitments. They were building operational systems that delivered on them consistently."

Walters says that how leaders create the statement matters just as much as what it says. The work should involve a cross-functional team of leaders, including operations, product, marketing, and others. This team effort "is what earns organizational buy-in when the mission rolls out, because they helped write the decision rules they will be held to". 

She adds: "If CX tries to draft these guardrails alone in a room, the statement stays a poster on a wall instead of a tool for daily execution."

It isn't just about collaboration and ownership. Medelyan says access is also important. 
"Give every team direct access to the feedback about what they own," she advises. "Put the raw customer voice in front of the people who can act on it, scored and traceable, so for example, the engineering lead reads what customers actually said about the app, not a secondhand summary they can wave away. 

"When every function works from the same customer truth instead of its own version of the story, the feedback loop finally closes," she adds. 

The price-driven persona doesn't exist

Another key finding in he report is that value is more complex than price. Walters says many leaders fall into the trap of creating customer personas that are disproportionately driven by the lowest price tag. However, that customer doesn't exist.

"Real people comparison-shop constantly, and they're weighing the whole experience, what it took, how it felt, whether it was honest, against the price. And customer needs change based on the context of the experience," says Walters. 

"The mistake compounds when leaders become what I call number narrators, reporting that the average price-competitiveness score looks fine while missing that the customer is quietly recalculating value on every trip," she adds. 

The research found that a "great experience" meant something different to a Spirit passenger compared with a first-class Delta passenger, even though both were "technically satisfied on price", Walters says. 

"Value lives in that gap between what people expected and what they got. If you're only narrating the average, you'll never see it move until they've already left," she adds. 

Thematic's research found that the brands that win on value, were the ones that communicate how costs are accounted for. As the report states, their pricing is honest, service holds up, and "disruptions don't become financial surprises". 

Medelyan cites three lessons from this result that brands beyond the airline industry can learn from: 

1. Stop trying to win on price: Instead, Medelyan says: "Customers reward the brand that  keeps the promise it made, every time."
2. Treat every fee as a promise test: Medelyan says that when an unexpected charge is applied, brands are "not earning revenue", but "spending trust". She explains: "The pattern is surprise add-ons and pressure to upsell, and none of it is about the price being too high." 
3. Service is a value driver: This is the one most people miss, Medelyan says. "When the human in front of you is helpful, the whole thing feels fair, even at a higher price," she explains. "Service isn't a cost to cut. It's part of the value."

The future of CX is delivering the dream

CX is heading at speed into an era that is defined on substance and performance. While this may be music to ears of many practitioners, it also raises old challenges in new ways, specifically around ownership of outcomes, alignment, and fostering a cross-functional customer focus.

Walters says the airline industry provides an "exceptionally clear" case study on truth vs reality that is applicable across industries, from financial services to retail and healthcare. 
"Travelers firmly believe you've made them a promise whether you ever formalized a slogan or not," she says. "The promise exists in your customers' minds regardless of whether you've defined it. So, the choice is simply whether you define what good looks like first, or let the marketplace define it for you after something has already gone wrong."

As always, she says the leaders who win "learn to listen to the unfiltered voice of the customer across every channel, early". 

"The ones who wait for a board report to tell them the experience is broken are reading the story of a company that has already started losing its buyers," she concludes.

You can download a copy of Experience Is the Promise, here.

Quick links  

• CX is chasing ROI – but still thinking reactively
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