Most CX programmes that fail to deliver growth start in the wrong place.
Causal CX starts with the drivers of customer choice rather than the quality of customer experience.
Most CX investment fails to deliver growth because it starts in the wrong place. It optimises experiences based on what customers say, what they complain about, and what journey mapping reveals – without ever establishing what actually causes customers to choose you and stay with you.
The discipline of choice first, experience later is what we call Causal CX, and it’s how we make sure your CX investment starts where it should.
Without understanding customer choice, every experience improvement is a guess about what matters, presented with the confidence of evidence. Better journeys, smoother touchpoints, higher satisfaction scores – and the growth numbers don’t move.
That gap between effort and outcome is where most CX investment quietly disappears, and it’s the gap we close before we design anything.
The functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the progress customers are trying to make. The reasons they hire your offering, the reasons they fire it, and the reasons they never consider it in the first place. Everything we do is built on that belief. This is not a new idea. It’s the most rigorous academic thinking in the field, drawn from Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done and applied with discipline. We call it Causal CX, and it’s the foundation of everything we do.
Our approach to experience design applies wherever behaviour needs to be understood before it can be improved.
Our core experience design services are customer experience, employee experience and user experience.
We offer CX consultancy, designing and optimising experiences on the dimensions that drive customer choice and business growth.
We help to research and design employee experiences that strengthen culture, boost productivity and drive better business outcomes.
Our senior UX researchers, designers and strategists are experienced at balancing the needs of your customers with your business.
Jobs to Be Done is a theory of customer choice developed by Clayton Christensen. It holds that customers don’t buy products or services for their features, they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance.
In practice, that means we start with a diagnosis grounded in Christensen’s framework, identifying the causal drivers that determine whether a customer hires you, fires you, or never considers you in the first place. From that, we design experiences that target the dimensions that actually move customer behaviour, along with the performance frameworks to prove they’re working. Classic CX practice sits inside this approach, not alongside it.
Journey mapping, service blueprinting, qualitative research and measurement all do real work, but only when aimed at the choices that drive growth.
We meet clients where they need us. Some come to us with the suspicion that their CX programme is making the wrong things better and need the full diagnostic. Others have the strategy set and need experience design that delivers against it. Others have a specific service or touchpoint that isn’t performing and need help working out why.
The frameworks underneath the practice are consistent. The depth and shape of the engagement flexes to fit what the work actually needs.
Causal CX is a consulting discipline that starts with the drivers of customer choice rather than the quality of customer experience. Grounded in Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done, it identifies the functional, emotional and social dimensions of what your customers are actually trying to accomplish, and refuses to redesign a single thing before that’s understood. Most CX programmes work backwards from the experience. That’s the problem we’re here to fix.
Conventional CX starts with the experience (mapping journeys, measuring satisfaction, fixing friction). Causal CX starts with the choice, establishing what actually causes customers to hire you, stay with you, or leave, before a single experience is redesigned. The difference is not methodology, it’s starting point.
Jobs to Be Done is a theory of customer choice developed by Clayton Christensen. It holds that customers don’t buy products or services for their features – they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance, and understanding the functional, emotional and social dimensions of that progress is the most reliable way to identify what actually drives customer decisions. It’s the foundation of everything we do.
Both frameworks come from the same intellectual tradition and Ulwick’s Outcome Driven Innovation is a serious, rigorous methodology. The difference is in what each treats as the unit of progress. Ulwick’s ODI focuses on the activities customers are trying to perform, and measures progress as doing those activities better or more efficiently.
Christensen’s view goes deeper – progress is about the functional, emotional and social dimensions of what customers are fundamentally trying to accomplish in their lives. That distinction matters because it opens up the possibility of a solution that replaces the current one entirely, not just a better version of it.
If your ambition is to improve what you have, either framework will serve you. If your ambition is to understand what customers would switch to and build it, Christensen gets you there.
If you’re not sure whether your CX programme is starting in the right place, that’s a conversation worth having. And if you’ve watched CX investment fail to shift the dial before, we’d like to talk.
Book a 30 minute conversation with our CEO Bim, who can give you an honest read on where you are, and what matters next.