There is a sociology term that has been sitting in academic literature for over a century that nobody in CX is talking about. That needs to change.
Émile Durkheim introduced anomie in the late 1800s to describe what happens when the social norms and expectations people rely on to make sense of the world around them suddenly stop holding. He was writing about industrialization, about what happens to people when the structures they built their lives around change faster than new ones can form. The result was not just confusion. It was disconnection, disorientation, and a profound erosion of trust in the systems that were supposed to hold things together.
That description should feel familiar to anyone working in CX right now.
The unprecedented times of it all.
Think about what the last few years have handed people as customers. Brands that changed their return policies without warning. AI is replacing the human on the other end of the chat before anyone asks whether customers are ready for it. Fee structures have been restructured. Loyalty programs overhauled. Processes that worked one way for years now work differently, or do not work at all. Subscription models that added tiers nobody asked for. Honestly, how has everything turned into a subscription?
Support channels that disappeared and were replaced with chatbots that cannot answer the actual question. Each of those moments might feel manageable on its own, but they have been happening in rapid succession across nearly every category and every brand customers interact with. The norms customers relied on to know what to expect have been disrupted so many times that many of them have stopped expecting consistency at all.
That is anomie. And it’s the lived customer experience happening right now inside your customer base.
What makes it particularly damaging is that customers do not typically name what they are feeling. They do not say "I feel normless" or "the implicit contract of this relationship has broken down." They say things like "I just don’t trust them the way I used to" or "I feel like they used to be better" or, most commonly, they say nothing and leave. The signal is quiet until it is not, and by the time most organizations notice it, the customer has already decided. The churn report reflects it weeks or months later, and by then the window to repair the relationship has usually closed.
This is also why satisfaction scores can look reasonable while trust is actively eroding underneath them. A customer can complete a transaction, rate the interaction a four out of five, and still be reassessing whether the relationship is worth continuing. Satisfaction measures the moment. Anomie operates at the level of the overall relationship, and most organizations do not have a way to measure that until it shows up as attrition.
The damage is worth looking at variable by variable. Anomie attacks consistency first because the expectation of a reliable, predictable experience is exactly what erodes when norms break down. When customers cannot count on getting the same quality of experience regardless of which channel they use, which team member they reach, or which day of the week it happens to be, they stop building their expectations around you. And when they stop building expectations around you, they stop trusting you. Response takes the next hit because customers already bracing for disappointment read a slow or scripted reply as confirmation of what they feared. It is not just that the response was late. It is that the late response proves the story they were already telling themselves about you. Connection collapses because you cannot feel connected to something you do not trust to behave the same way twice.
The warmth of a good interaction gets discounted when customers cannot rely on it being repeated. Value gets questioned because when everything feels uncertain, people start auditing every relationship in their lives and asking whether the return justifies the risk. And friction, which was already quietly doing its damage before any of this, becomes genuinely intolerable for people who have no patience left for systems that seem designed around internal convenience rather than their actual experience.
Every one of those variables is something an organization either invests in or neglects. There is no neutral position. And in a climate of widespread anomie, neglect compounds faster than it used to.
Durkheim's answer to anomie was restored social cohesion, the rebuilding of shared norms, reliable structures, and a sense that the rules of the relationship are stable and can be counted on. In CX terms, that is not a campaign or a messaging refresh or a new tagline about putting customers first. It is a genuine audit of every variable in your customer relationships, an honest look at what you changed without communicating, what you removed without replacing, what became harder without acknowledgment, and what your customers used to be able to count on that they can no longer find.
That audit is uncomfortable because it requires organizations to look at their own decisions clearly. A lot of what is driving customer anomie right now was not accidental. It was a cost-cutting measure, a process change, an efficiency play that made complete sense internally and created confusion and friction externally. Naming is the starting point for fixing it.
The organizations that come out of this period ahead are not the ones with the best marketing. They are the ones willing to treat the trust recession as the structural problem it actually is, rebuild the norms that made customers feel safe, and invest in the consistency, responsiveness, connection, demonstrated value, and low-friction experience that trust requires in order to form and hold.
That work is not glamorous, but it’s the only thing that actually works to restore and rebuild customer-brand relationships.
The Customer Trust Equation (Trust = Consistency + Response + Connection + Value − Friction) is an original framework by Christina Garnett. Learn more at customertrustequation.com