The American president, Joe Biden, targeted poor customer service recently when he said companies were playing hardworking Americans for “suckers.”
Biden announced several proposals aimed at easing customer service pain points, part of a “Time is Money” initiative. The initiative will include rules and potential regulations aimed at tackling the “general aggravation” caused by substandard customer service.
A few of the proposed actions focus specifically on customer self-service technologies such as chatbots. The briefing states: “While chatbots can be useful for answering basic questions, they often have limited ability to solve more complex problems and disputes. Instead, chatbots frequently provide inaccurate information and give the run-around to customers seeking a real person.”
The implications of American customer service policy will not greatly impact the United Kingdom or Europe, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore these actions. The initiative points to real customer pain points felt across the globe – specifically where technology is making the customer experience worse. The problem I see is that too many companies are thinking technology first and customer second, and that’s always a mistake.
How did we get here?
It’s no secret that customer experience is suffering, and it’s not for lack of spending. Back in 2005, Bain and Co found that whilst 80% of CEOs believed they were delivering a superior experience, only 8% of customers agreed. This reality check kicked off two decades of significant technology investment aimed at elevating customer experience delivery.
Fast forward to today, and many organizations are not seeing the customer experience benefits they expected. In the 2024 edition of the Forrester Customer Experience Index, average customer experience quality now sits at an all-time low. Compared to a year ago, nearly 40% of brands in the Index received lower average quality scores from their customers across the categories of effectiveness, ease, and emotion.
So, what is happening here? It turns out most of these poor-performing investments share one thing in common: they focus on technology adoption, not customer experience transformation. The difference between these two approaches is subtle, but critical for understanding how high-performing customer experiences come together. Initiatives that are laser-focused on technology adoption and ignore the operational, data, and change management strategies to back it up fall short of true customer experience transformation.
Technology can and should be constantly improving customer experiences by increasing personalization, decreasing friction, and driving productivity. However, businesses cannot simply apply technology like a bandage and expect these outcomes. Technology adoption must be underpinned with a customer-first mindset and the strategies and teams to back it up, otherwise businesses risk creating even worse experiences for their customers.
Customer-first technology integration in action
So, what does customer-first technology integration look like in practice? If we think about chatbots, which are one target of the “Time Is Money” initiative, we see that older iterations certainly have shortcomings. Traditional chatbots are rule based. When a person asks a question, the bot searches for the right rule, and responds with a scripted reply based on a set of known keywords. This type of chatbot is limited in its conversational ability, cannot handle complex queries, and feels robotic and impersonal.
Today, with conversational AI, chatbots can use data, machine learning, and natural language understanding to recognize text and speech inputs. The result is that they have wide-ranging conversational ability, are able to handle complex questions, and they can even “remember” past interactions to provide more personalized responses.
Even with these advances, simply swapping an older chatbot for a newer model will not address root customer experience problems. To extract value from chatbots, businesses must start with a strong customer experience foundation. They need to understand the customer journey and balance efficiency gains with customer experience optimization.
Avoid technology investment mistakes
In part, integrating more advanced technologies, like AI, can help businesses bridge the gap between customer expectations and what brands deliver. However, technology can’t do this on its own. To realize business outcomes like higher productivity, lower costs, and improved customer satisfaction, businesses must take a step back, look at the customer experience as a whole, and apply technology thoughtfully where it can have the most impact. Only then can we avoid the mistakes of past CX technology investments.
About the Author
Wayne Kay is vice president, sales leadership, at TTEC Digital, a global leader in customer experience orchestration, combining technology and empathy at the point of conversation. With decades of innovation experience across the world’s leading contact center technology platforms – plus in-house expertise in CX strategy, data and analytics, AI and more, TTEC Digital delivers an unmatched skillset for organizations looking to forge deeper customer relationships and drive better business outcomes.
