The CX Challenge

Learning Objective

Teams can take a real customer-experience problem the business actually faces and produce a defensible, innovative solution — balancing customer value, feasibility, and impact — under competitive pressure.

How to Play

Setup

Collect 4–6 genuine CX challenges your organisation faces (e.g. "reduce first-week churn", "fix the post-purchase silence"). Write each on a brief card with the relevant metric. Form teams of four to six and appoint a small judging panel of senior staff.

Rules

• Each team draws (or is assigned) one challenge card and has 25 minutes to develop a solution.
• Solutions must name the customer insight, the proposed change, and the metric it moves.
• Teams pitch for three minutes; the panel may ask two questions each.
• The panel scores on customer impact, originality, and feasibility — points lost for ideas that serve the org over the customer.
• Highest aggregate score wins; the best ideas are logged for real follow-up.

Debrief

Spend ten minutes converting competition into commitment. Ask three questions in order:

• Which winning idea could actually ship — and who owns the first step?
• Where did time pressure produce a sharper solution than a normal meeting would?
• What customer insight surfaced today that you didn't have a forum for before?

CX Principle Reinforced

Constraints create customer-centric creativity. Open-ended strategy meetings drift; a tight brief, a clear metric, and a deadline force teams to prioritise the customer's actual problem. Competitive framing leverages loss aversion — teams work harder to avoid losing than to win — and the public pitch makes commitment social, which dramatically raises follow-through. The challenge turns abstract CX ambition into specific, ownable next steps.

Format

• Format: In-person or virtual (breakout rooms + shared scoring)
• Players: 4-12
• Duration: 60 minutes
• Level: Hard