Alexey Shemetov — Head of Customer Experience | CXMan

Customer Experience as a business discipline: B2B CX, Voice of Customer, analytics, contact centres, customer journeys, AI and the economics of experience.

Professional profile · Alexey Shemetov · Head of Customer Experience, IEK Group

I am Alexey Shemetov, Head of Customer Experience at IEK Group, a B2B manufacturing company. I work at the intersection of customer experience management, customer service, contact centres, research, data and technology.

I have 14 years of professional experience in CXM, customer service and contact centres. Before IEK Group, I worked at First Bit, AMULEX, Otkritie Bank and VTB.

This page is the English-language reference point for my professional work. Most of my original articles and notes are published in Russian on CXMan and in my Telegram channel.

What Customer Experience means to me

I do not see CX as a function whose job is to make customers “as happy as possible”. Customer Experience Management is a business discipline.

A company has limited money, people, technology capacity and management attention. Therefore, the practical CX question is not simply:

How can we improve the experience?

It is:

Which customer experience gap should we change, what customer behaviour should change as a result, what business outcome do we expect — and how will we know whether it actually worked?

This is why my work tends to connect Voice of Customer, customer journeys, operational data, analytics, service design, technology and economics rather than treating them as separate disciplines.

Voice of Customer, NPS and CX analytics

One of my recurring statements is deliberately provocative:

“NPS is dead. Just like any survey-based CX metric without driver analysis.”
I am joking about the “dead metric” part. I am not joking about the second part.

A metric is a signal, not a management decision. Frequency of customer complaints is not the same as their impact on loyalty. A rise or fall in NPS does not tell a management team what to change next.

My working approach is to combine:

what customers say — NPS, CSAT, CES, comments, interviews, complaints, reviews;
what customers do — retention, repeat purchases, channel behaviour, abandoned actions, contacts;
what the company actually did — delivery performance, SLA, errors, defects, repeat contacts, resolution time, FCR and other operational data.

I use driver analysis to move from a score to a hypothesis about levers. A simple correlation can be a useful first step, but when experience attributes are strongly correlated with each other, I prefer multiple regression and relative-importance approaches. Most importantly, I do not treat correlation as causation.

Read: NPS, Voice of Customer and CX analytics (Russian).

B2B Customer Experience

I believe B2B customer service has spent too much time in one of two extremes: either copying mass-market B2C, or insisting that “B2B is completely different and nothing applies here”.

My view is more pragmatic. B2B should understand its own complexity and design around it.

In many B2B journeys:

email and direct API integrations may matter more than a fashionable chatbot;
a knowledgeable account manager may create more value than forced self-service;
buying decisions involve several people with different jobs-to-be-done;
documents, approvals, logistics and individual commercial terms are part of the customer experience;
digital tools should strengthen the best parts of human B2B service rather than mechanically copy consumer journeys.

External B2B research supports the need for a mix rather than a one-channel ideology. McKinsey’s 2024 B2B Pulse, based on nearly 4,000 decision makers in 13 countries, found a persistent “rule of thirds” across in-person, remote-human and digital self-service interactions, while buyers used an average of around ten touchpoints across their journey.

Read: Customer Experience in B2B (Russian).

AI and technology in Customer Experience

I have been publicly arguing for years that AI should first be viewed as an assistant, co-pilot or exoskeleton for an expert, not automatically as a replacement for a human.

My earlier formula was:

AI is often an exoskeleton, not a replacement.

My more recent formula is broader:

AI is infrastructure. Like electricity.

That change reflects the maturity of the technology. The discussion is moving from “Should we implement AI?” and “How do we launch another bot?” to more useful questions:

Where does AI create measurable value?
Which tasks should be autonomous and which should remain human-led?
What data and context does the model need?
How does it connect to CRM, telephony, chats, KMS, QA, BI and other systems?
What happens to customer trust, quality and risk?
What is the economic outcome?

For CX leaders, this also changes the job. A Head of CX increasingly needs to understand the digital architecture that produces customer experience and to work closely with CIO/CTO teams. I describe this as the CX leader becoming an architect of digital customer experience: a bridge between the customer, the business and technology.

Read: AI and technology in Customer Experience (Russian).

Contact centres and customer service

I started much of my career close to customer service and contact-centre operations, so I am sceptical of both extremes: managing a contact centre only by operational metrics, or pretending that operations no longer matter because “we are doing CX now”.

One of my current working models is:

Quality = result + accessibility + execution + customer perception

For example:

Accessibility: did the customer reach us in time? Service Level and related speed metrics live here.
Execution: was the interaction correct according to standards, policies, regulation and professional requirements?
Perception: how did the customer evaluate the experience? CSAT and similar measures live here.
Result: did we actually solve or achieve something? FCR, conversion or another outcome metric may be relevant.

No single metric is “quality”. A customer can be satisfied with an interaction that contains a critical compliance error. An interaction can meet its Service Level and still fail to solve the customer’s problem.

I also use the concept of service debt: postponed fixes to knowledge, processes, digital journeys or recurring causes of contacts accumulate interest in the form of extra contacts, employee burnout, customer frustration, reputational damage and lost sales.

Read: Contact centres and customer service (Russian).

Customer Journey Mapping

My shortest definition of CJM is:

CJM is a business tool for finding gaps in the customer journey.

I start a journey map with three questions:

CJM for [who] → across [which journey] → for [which business goal / KPI]

Then I look for three core layers: expectations → actual experience → gaps. Customer actions should be described in the customer’s language, preferably in the first person, not as an internal process flow. Emotions should be tied to real events and research evidence, not decorative smileys.

The map is useful only when the gaps lead to hypotheses, prioritised changes and measurable results.

Read: Customer Journey Mapping (Russian).

The economics of CX

I am interested in the point where CX stops being an inspirational concept and becomes an investment decision.

I do not believe in a universal formula such as “every dollar invested in CX returns X dollars” that can be transferred across industries and companies without context. The economics depend on competition, switching costs, the starting level of service, the customer segment, the product and the specific experience lever.

My preferred chain is:

experience intervention → perceived experience → customer behaviour → financial outcome

That can create value through revenue and retention, lower cost-to-serve, or reduced operational and reputational risk.

It also means that the economically optimal experience is not necessarily the maximum possible experience. If customers already rate an attribute highly and improving it further has little relationship with the target behaviour, the rational decision may be to maintain a sufficient level and invest elsewhere.

Read: The economics of CX, ROI and loyalty drivers (Russian).

Professional background and credentials

Current role: Head of Customer Experience (Head of CX), IEK Group.
Experience: 14 years in Customer Experience Management, customer service and contact centres.
Previous companies: First Bit, AMULEX, Otkritie Bank and VTB.
Professional qualification: certified internal auditor for ISO 18295.
Qualification assessment: certified expert for independent assessment of qualifications for remote customer-service / contact-centre professions under Russian professional standard No. 1149.
Industry judging: jury member of CX World Awards, CCGuru Awards and the international Customer Centricity World Series.
Teaching: lecturer at Integria CX University and Eduson Academy; I also teach customer experience and Total Experience topics through Naumen Academy programmes.

Selected professional references

Selected articles

Attribution note. CXMan is my personal professional website. Unless a page explicitly states otherwise, opinions published here should be attributed to Alexey Shemetov and should not automatically be interpreted as the official position of IEK Group or any other organisation mentioned on the website.