Bad customer experience is an executive choice in the age of AI

With the proliferation of AI over the past two years, if your company’s customer experience hasn't seen dramatic improvement, it’s because of choices your leadership is making.

Did you choose to use AI to do the same with less people? 

------- OR ------

Did you choose to use AI to empower your people to do more?

Going into 2025, every company had room to improve their CX. Even best in class companies aren’t actually perfect. However, we’ve seen scores of executives and vendors touting how many heads they’ve been able to reduce. (Let’s try to keep in mind that these are people, not widgets that you’re so excited about reducing)

When the dust settles, the winners are going to be the companies that leveraged AI to accomplish more then they could have before. The ones that become better, faster, more personal will win, while the ones that just made it cheaper to provide the exact same service will fall behind.

If you want to be customer focused: Here’s what executives should have invested in when AI started hitting the market.

Understand Exactly why customers are contacting you!

Make sure that you are accurately and specifically identifying the reason for every chat, call, text and email. And I don’t mean broad categories like “Account Management” or “Billing”. Leverage the new AI based automated Quality Assurance (QA) systems to tag exactly why a customer reached out. Your categories should look more like “Prorated Billing Question”. This is specific enough to build an action plan, and a response plan around.

If you are still relying on your agents to tag and classify contacts, I can already tell you that your numbers are inaccurate and skewed. The better and more precise your data gets, the easier it is to build out resolutions and customer journeys.

Understanding your customers’ pain points?

Too many companies today are still doing QA the same way we’ve done it for decades. Manually reviewing around 2% of total contacts coming in. This does not help you move the needle or optimize your business. Find a vendor, and get to 100% QA reviews. The insights will be beyond powerful when done well.

This is especially important for any contacts that end in churn. Every churn contact should be classified, investigated and have strategic plans built around them. Depending on your industry, attracting new customers is between 5 to 25 times as expensive as retaining your current ones. AI tools allow you to be more obsessive with Churn then ever before. Take advantage or those capabilities.

Map processes your agents follow to resolve customer issues?

We all have written processes to help resolve customer issues. But, how often are they truly being followed? Before you try to automate what you think are the processes your agents take, leverage new technology like Calltree AI to actually understand what your agents are doing.

Tools like Calltree will provide deep analytics into what your agents are doing on every call, not just what they’re telling you.

• What steps and tools are they using?

• What steps and tools take the longest to use?

• What customers issues don’t actually have a set process?

If you want to improve the customer experience, or automate processes, you need to truly understand your employee’s pain points, and what the resolution journey truly looks like.

Audited your internal and external support documents?

The sad reality is that most companies have put support and self-service on the back-burner for the past couple of years. When was the last time you audited your support content that’s available for agents and customers? Do you have articles and videos that are 2 years, 3 years, 5+ years old? A lot of companies have content that’s more than 10 years old. Unless you’ve really been sleeping on support, I’m going to guess your websites, user portals and apps have been updated since then.

If your support content is outdated, then what are you going to train your GenAI agents on? Use the data from the rest of this list to update and clarify your self-service.