How Technology Failed Customer Service
The misuse of technology in customer service has created a mess for consumers. What does the future hold?
In Toronto recently, police were desperately trying to find a child accidentally left behind in an Uber vehicle. As the police queried Uber, they were told to fill out a form, that Uber could not do anything otherwise. The child was found by police using traditional tactics safe and sound. Uber? Customer service fail at scale.
Yet this is more than just a customer service failure; it’s a the logical end of a decades-long retreat by corporations from human connection, disguised as technological progress. Chatbots, FAQs, customer driven forums. These aren’t really tools to help you, the customer. They’re built to keep customers at a profitable distance.
We may be entering peak customer/brand distancing and a cliff of technological failure. And ultimately? This may be good for the customer. How did this all happen and what’s next?
How Technology Hurt Customer Service
Customer service can be expensive and it’s logical for a business to try and manage those costs as best they can. Yet in someways, that drive to cut costs has benefitted the shareholder and actually cost the brand more. The overuse and misuse of technology in customer service has turned managing customers into an economic transaction rather than human relationships.
Not all automation is bad mind you. Sometimes customer driven forums can be better or easier. Sometimes chatbots work quite well. For any brand, it’s about finding that balance and it won’t be the same for every brand.
Part of what happened was the idea driven by tech companies that technology solves human problems. Never has, never will. Humans solve problems, technologies are just leveraged tools. Platform technologies like social media ones, are designed to scale. To serve many millions, not a few thousand. Yet smaller companies try to copy these tactics. Human connection doesn’t scale this way.
Corporate bureaucracies have co-opted digital tools. What happened is that they’ve ended up creating greater alienation between the brand and the customer. Companies thought however, that technology would create more one-to-one relationships with customers. But they’ve been used to create more friction, not less.
The use of technologies in customer service created digital barriers to insulate themselves from direct human contact, while maintaining the illusion of accessibility. This has been driven by the metrics of “reduced call time” or “increased self-service rate”. All metrics designed to push humans away, not build loyalty. This is the “what get’s measured gets managed” mindset.
We might say that modern customer service has shifted from “human assistance” to the “technological management of problems.” When a brand designs a chatbot workflow that makes it harder to reach a human, they’re making a value statement, one that says actual human connection isn’t where their values lie.
The Results of Technology Overuse in Customer Service
So what happens and has happened as a result? As brands increasingly throw up digital barriers and create more friction, they may end up in a sort of relationship recession. This leads to declining loyalty and trust.
When a brand uses too much technology, in the wrong ways, switching costs decrease, which could disrupt a business more than help it.
Eventually, AI tools like Large Language Models, may bridge this gap, but they are not there yet. AI tools like chatbots are not contextually aware or emotionally intelligent.
There’s also no standards or consistency in how companies are using technologies in these ways. The result is a mess of different systems, policies and approaches that each consumer must navigate in different, often frustrating ways.
The Possible Future of Technology and Customer Service
So what is ahead for brands? We may well see brands who adopt a more human-centric approach finding it as a key differentiator. Consumers may even be willing to pay a premium for better customer service, where the human comes first.
We are already starting to see a sort of layering of customer service approaches where filters are used to manage more complex customer relationship strategies. As consumers form sort of “tribes” around helping one another, it’s an opportunity for brands to listen to those discussions, see what’s happening and adjust their approach accordingly. If they listen, they will learn vast amounts.
The companies that thrive in the near future are the ones that see customer service not as a cost centre, but as part of their ecosystem and way of being as a brand. That customer service can be an excellent way to gain critical feedback and acts as relationship nutrients.
Key for brands is to understand their scale, product complexity and when they’re designing customer service for their own benefit over that of the customer. And do they see customer service as an annoying cost-centre or as opportunity to build better products and services?
It also means brands need to understand that technology doesn’t and never will, solve problems. That more data isn’t necessarily better. That internal metrics are not a way to measure external activities of customers. A customer does not care about a brand’s bureaucracy, but they do care when a brands systems create greater friction.