Putting the customer lifecycle at the heart of the business

With artificial intelligence (AI) transforming how business operate and how they engage with their customers, many leaders have been calling for the humanization of automated and machine-led CX. But many are unable to describe what that means.

The second edition of Designing Customer Experiences with Soul explores this very point. It also includes comprehensive architecture that positions the customer lifecycle at the heart of organizational decision-making.

In this interview with CX Network, its authors Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson (pictured below), explain what customer centricity means in 2026, how to reassign agents to "meaningful work" without causing burnout, and why the customer lifecycle should run the business.

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CX Network: You have just published the second edition of Designing Customer Experiences with Soul. Why did the original require an update?

Simon Robinson: AI has fundamentally changed the mechanisms of engagement at every stage of the customer lifecycle. CX professionals now need to shift their thinking from constructing journeys to enabling adaptive environments in which AI helps customers achieve their goals. That shift required us to expand significantly on how intelligent systems participate in customer interactions.

We also took the opportunity to deepen our work on leadership experience – the inner lifeworld of leaders. The new section on upstream observation is a sensemaking exercise that changes the quality of leaders' attention long before products are launched and long before data starts to appear. When real customer understanding starts that early, the effects on strategic decision-making are direct and quantifiable.

We are particularly delighted to include a new foreword by Marcelo Castelli, Executive chairman of Copersucar and one of Forbes' Top 25 CEOs in Brazil.

Marcelo captures something we feel deeply about: that creating value for customers is, above all, about creating alignment and integrity within the organization itself.

Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, as he writes, "is essential reading for those in leadership roles who wish to guide their organizations with greater humanity, coherence and strategic depth".

That level of endorsement from an executive of his seniority can genuinely help CX professionals move their own conversations from the call center to the board level.

CX Network: Your book includes the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework – a comprehensive architecture that positions the customer lifecycle at the heart of organizational decision-making. Explain how it can support leaders in their work.

Maria Moraes Robinson: While journeys describe experience, the customer lifecycle runs the business. That distinction is the heart of the CCSF, and it addresses one of the most persistent challenges in our field: the disconnect between customer experience practice and the strategic planning processes that senior executives live in every day.

For too long, "CX strategy" has meant only how tools like journey mapping or Voice of the Customer are deployed. What we have done is integrate my work on the evolution of the Balanced Scorecard with Simon's pioneering work on customer experience strategy, creating a complete operating system that positions the customer lifecycle as the primary strategic framework. This shifts CX from being seen as a purely operational activity to one of central strategic importance, capable of aligning people and processes across every team, department and division. At that level of coherence, it becomes possible to remove the true root causes of friction, delay and customer frustration.

The CCSF also makes explicit something that is too often overlooked: any major CX project is first and foremost a change initiative.

I have seen organizations invest significantly in new IT systems without considering the impact on people and their workflows. That is why senior leaders from across the organization must be involved from the start.

Rodrigo Linck, CEO of Pravy, experienced this directly when using the CCSF to transition from a design house to a global creative agency, sharing that "implementing it led us to win global accounts, secure major contracts, and deepen long-term partnerships".

CX Network: Human-centric business models are often discussed in CX, but what does the term mean in practice?

Simon Robinson: The problem right now is that many thought leaders are calling for more humanized approaches to business without being able to describe exactly what that means. In Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, we answer that question precisely through the Holonomic Circle.

The Holonomic Circle is a systems-based design tool that integrates leadership experience (LX), employee experience (EX), and customer experience (CX) by classifying soul at three levels:

1. Authenticity
2. Tools and techniques
3. Transcendental qualities such as relationships, beauty, truth, goodness and wholeness.

CX professionals need this depth of thinking because you cannot engineer experiences in a mechanistic fashion. In complex, human-centered systems – healthcare being an obvious example – experience emerges from leadership behavior, organizational culture and the quality of relationships over time.

Without an understanding of people's "life worlds", emotional dynamics, cognitive biases, ethical clarity, and systemic perception, leaders cannot translate strategies into CX programs that are truly meaningful for either customers or employees.

The integration of LX, EX and CX enables organizations not simply to deliver experiences, but to embody a more humanized way of doing business.

CX Network: As a new generation of AI tools become available, how do we develop skills, protect jobs and ensure that "freeing up agents for more meaningful work" doesn't lead to burnout?

Maria Moraes Robinson: The team that sits at the center of this challenge is one that CX programs often overlook: Human Resources. When HR teams understand how to use the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework to integrate CX, EX and LX, their work becomes elevated to a strategic level, well beyond their more usual operational activities. The way the CCSF enables this is by interlinking the customer lifecycle with the employee lifecycle.

This matters because research shows that hiring of the workers in their early twenties has already slowed in AI-exposed occupations.

Entry-level roles are quietly disappearing before displacement becomes visible in unemployment statistics.

This is precisely where the burnout risk becomes real: when organizations stop hiring junior talent and ask existing teams to absorb that work assisted by AI tools, productivity gains do not automatically translate into meaningful work. They translate just as easily into expanded scope, thinner teams and exhaustion.

If HR understands the customer journey deeply enough, they can design learning experiences and career pathways that genuinely prepare people for the roles AI cannot do – judgment calls, relationship-building, complex escalations and cultural stewardship. These are not productivity tasks. They are irreducibly human ones. Done well, that is what "freeing up agents for more meaningful work" actually looks like in practice.

CX Network: With so many new experience features and CX technologies available today, what does customer centricity mean in 2026?

Simon Robinson: Customer centricity locates the customer at the heart of strategy, aligning every aspect of a company's operations – product development, marketing, sales, customer service – around delivering value to the customer. In 2026, that definition has not changed, but the discipline required to live it has become considerably more demanding.

It should not be confused with customization, which now means the use of intelligent systems to tailor services and products to the unique needs of each customer. Customer centricity applies at every level of granularity, from the mass to the boutique.

For us, it results in leaders who understand that customer experience must evolve from isolated efforts into coherent systems of practice, organizing execution around what customers actually experience, ensuring that strategy, behavior, investment and communication reinforce the same meaning.

When applied with discipline, fully coherent customer centricity enables organizations to build experiences that last, where relevance grows and value earns distinction in ways that customers recognize and trust.

CX Network: What is one customer-centric strategy or tip you swear by?

Maria Moraes Robinson: If there is one idea that underpins everything we do, it is this: while journeys describe experience, the customer lifecycle runs the business. Understanding that distinction is what finally elevates CX practice to the executive level.

Once leaders grasp the logic behind it, they are better placed to identify what genuinely differentiates their business in the market and to propose meaningful interventions at every stage. It creates the conditions for collective reflection on where and how to improve.

My practical tip is simply to ask one question in every strategic conversation: are we mapping where the customer has been, or are we designing the conditions that enable their success? That shift in question changes everything.

When leaders from every area of an organization contribute to developing the customer lifecycle, every person – in every function – understands their role not only in delivering excellent customer experiences, but in offering something deeper: experiences with soul.

Designing Customer Experiences with Soul is available to buy on Amazon

Quick links

• Experience is everything: The 3 steps that prevent CX failure
• 101 practical principles from behavioral science
• How to use AI to build trust and make service more human