AI Will Kill CX!

One Big Question I hear a lot these days is about AI and automation.? “How will AI impact CX?”? How the heck should I know?? It’s clear I’m the one writing all these articles, isn’t it?? I wonder if we’ll reach the singularity and the world will implode if someone uses AI to write an article about AI and the impact it has.? Surely it’ll be a glowing review.

But discussions about AI are becoming boring to me frankly, simply due to their ubiquity:? How will AI affect education?? How will AI affect marketing?? How will AI affect sales?? How will AI affect dessert toppings?? How will AI affect floor wax?? (Hat tip to anybody who got that last reference.)

If nothing else, AI has brought back to the surface at least one of my longest-standing writing struggles.

Nevertheless, recently I had a very cool discussion with a friend of mine in the CX/UX space, and I posited the following theory, almost right off the top of my head as I was thinking it while I spoke:

AI may actually make CX worse in the long run, or at least impede better Customer Experiences.

Automation is making everything easier and more seamless, especially in the Customer Care/Support/Service realm:? Bots, self-help, online automated solutions and even guides, etc.? That’s pretty awesome and somewhat revolutionary for the CS world.? These improvements are streamlining and making more pleasant (or at least more efficient) their interactions with our brands when they need help.? It’s not totally new, even IVRs have been around forever it seems.? But obviously the acceleration of the tech is making things slicker all the time.? They’re so good that at times you may not even know you’re chatting with a bot rather than a person.

That’s awesome, but it occurred to me that shifting everything to a ‘robot’ doing the job of service and support may actually disincentivize a brand from actually addressing real root causes of the problems with their systems.

As I pulled that thread mentally, it rubbed me the wrong way as pertains to my approach to CX.? Keep in mind that, if you’re “getting CX right”, you’re leveraging the insights you gain about your Customers to improve the systems and processes and procedures of your operations in order to better deliver on your Brand Promise.? That’s the heart of CX.

One of the greatest sources of those insights, I always like to say, is from your Customer Care organizations, be that Customer Service, Support, Success, or the Contact Center.? I joke all the time that, one of the most effective (and frankly, cheapest) things you can do to ascertain where your Customers are feeling pain or otherwise experiencing a gap between your Brand Promise and your Brand Delivery, is simply to visit your Contact Center and ask for a readout on what issues Customers are calling in with.? How do your agents spend all their time?? What issues do your agents spend most of their days helping your Customers with?? What’s taking up all those resources?? Use that as guidance in steering your Process Engineering and Improvement efforts and resources.

In fact, taking this approach can help incentivize these improvements because you can point not only to the poor experiences your Customers are having (that are leading them to contact you for help), but also you’re using your own resources (time, money, manpower, systems, etc.) to take care of these issues as they’re brought to your attention.? In fewer words:? More problems for your Customers costs you more money to have to deal with them.? In the end, then, that extra cost adds urgency to finding the drivers for these issues, and fixing the root causes of your Customers’ problems.

But if there’s no marginal cost in helping more Customers with any particular problem they may be having, what incentive is there to fix those root causes?

Think about it:? If you have an old-fashioned (on-shore, let’s go for broke!) call center that receives, say, 10 calls per week on a particular issue (for example, tracking a package shipment), there’s a cost in time, resources, energy, etc., for those calls:? some fraction of an FTE.? But if that volume increases to 10,000 of those calls per week, that’s going to result in a much bigger pinch for you.? You may have to hire more agents or offshore or somehow else augment the team that handles these inquiries.? (Hopefully that increase coincides with a huge influx of sales to help offset the new costs for you.)? Traditionally, this sort of incentive would light a fire under your logistics or fulfillment team to make the process of tracking orders more user-friendly for your Customers.? That’s fundamentally how CX works.

But if you had that whole system automated via AI and all that, you may not notice any increased marginal cost by virtue of that increased volume of calls:? It costs you the same (since it’s robots handling everything) to take 10 of those calls as it does to take 10,000 of them.? The miracle of modern technology!

So where’s the business incentive to improve the root cause of your Customers having to engage with you in the first place?? Since there’s no increased cost to the company for more Customers having this particular problem, why would the organization invest in the improvement that’d cut such issues off at the pass?

Therefore, CX would suffer because, while there may be other incentives to fix your systems, the marginal costs of an increase in negative Customer experiences is negligible and therefore not an impact in the equation.? We’ve lost one of the major drivers in business improvements.

Or have we?...

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...To be continued.

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