Technology Investments Don’t Stop CX Decline

Despite the countless dollars companies are spending on artificial intelligence and other contact center technologies, as well as agent and supervisor training, the quality of the experiences they provide to their customers continues to decline, according to separate studies from CCW Digital and Forrester Research.

The promise of AI-driven improvements has yet to be realized in the eyes of many customers, leading to widespread dissatisfaction and frustration. This critical disconnect, revealing that the anticipated benefits of AI have not materialized for consumers, can be found in the following results from CCW Digital’s research:

• Only 7 percent of consumers feel experiences have improved over the past year, and more than half (55 percent) feel they have worsened.
• Nearly 60 percent of consumers say they share details of bad experiences with personal contacts, while 29 percent actively rant about poor performance on social media. Other consumer reactions include attempting to switch providers (48 percent) and writing negative reviews (39 percent).
• Roughly a quarter (26 percent) of consumers expect to reach successful resolutions using messaging, while only 17 percent have faith in the value of a chatbot/web self-service interaction.
• Less than one-fifth (19 percent) of consumers feel they can immediately access help from a human agent, and when given the opportunity to speak with an agent, only 24 percent believe that the typical customer service employee is happy, engaged, and knowledgeable.
• More than a third of consumers will take their complaints directly to the company’s contact center, further burdening agents with inefficient, hostile conversations.

And further highlighting the point, AI, once hailed as a transformative solution, is exacerbating the issue, according to CCW Digital’s research. In fact, in the eyes of the customer, the most notable mistake was not providing a human touch. A staggering 52 percent say it is difficult to reach a live agent, establishing lack of humanity as the No. 1 pain point in 2024.

“Despite the advancements in AI, the essence of customer experience hinges on genuine human connection. Technology should enhance, not replace, the empathy and responsiveness that define exceptional service,” says Mario Matulich, president of Customer Management Practice (CMP), the parent organization of CCW Digital. “These findings are a wake-up call for businesses to harmonize technological innovation with human-centric strategies to elevate customer satisfaction and loyalty.”

“In a time when AI and automation promise so much, it’s concerning that businesses are still missing the mark on delivering meaningful customer experiences. The reliance on technology without the balance of human touch has increased frustration among consumers,” explains Brian Cantor, managing director of CCW Digital. “Truly customer-centric brands—those that design experiences from the outside-in—have a unique opportunity to improve key contact center metrics and build significant brand cachet.

“Eighty percent of the report that we just published would mirror some of the things we were writing about 15 years ago: issues with long wait times unprepared agents, lack of focus, forcing customers in the wrong channel,” Cantor says further. “Unfortunately, the technology that’s supposed to solve these problems is only making it worse.”

Great CX doesn’t mean being able to speak to a human agent; rather it means that the company recognizes the uniqueness of the customer’s situation and then delivers support in a form that fits his individual needs, Cantor explains. “Unfortunately, a lot of the trend toward lower-touch digital channels, or AI-driven chatbots, is to try and provide a one-size-fits-all resolution.”

Even customers calling in for relatively simple issues don’t want to be forced into a box, Cantor says. “They want to feel special; they want to feel honored; they want to feel recognized; they want to feel heard. Until technology is able to properly provide that level of personalization, people are going to continue seeing it as a lesser option.”

That doesn’t mean that CX would improve simply by pushing more interactions to live agents, Cantor says. “A lot of people will treat empathy as an abundance of sympathy and abundance of conversation, when in reality empathy is putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.”

Sometimes the customer is dealing with an urgent issue and wants a solution as quickly as possible, whether through a digital channel or a human agent, Cantor explains. “The empathetic thing to do is not to make them go through hoops, not to make them have to wait for a person, but to bring the answer, bring the support right to them through digital channels or automation.

“On the other hand, if you know it’s a situation where they want to be heard, then the empathetic thing is not to just dismiss their issue as simple because, technically, it’s in the knowledge base. But instead, make sure that you provide someone who can really connect with them,” Cantor continues. “The human touch is not always a demand for longer conversations with a lot of feelings being shared. Sometimes it’s just recognizing the context of their situation.”

Forrester’s CX Index findings reflected similar consumer dissatisfaction with contact center interactions:

• CX quality in the United States has fallen to its lowest point ever following a third consecutive year of decreases. The average score dipped by a statistically significant 1.6 points, from 70.9 to 69.3 on a 100-point scale.
• Declines at the brand level were broader and steeper than ever, with 39 percent of companies seeing significant declines, compared to 17 percent in 2023. The average drop in 2024 was 3.9 points, which is slightly more than the previous record decline of 3.6 points in 2023. Thirteen companies lost five or more points.
• Industry-level declines were also broader and steeper than ever. Ten industry averages significantly declined, beating the previous record of eight set in 2022. Five industries dropped two or more points, compared to one in 2023. Four other industries dropped between one and two points. Only the airlines industry improved.
• Even elite companies struggled to maintain their status. Six of the 11 elite companies had flat scores, and four had significant declines from 2023. (Only one company, Tesla, moved into elite status following a significant improvement in its CX Index score.) These shifts reflect the challenges that even top companies faced in maintaining high CX this year.
• In 2024, the average effectiveness of experiences fell by 4 percentage points, to 64 percent, and the average ease fell by 3 percentage points, to 66 percent. Companies also struggled to connect emotionally. Elite companies evoke, on average, 25 positive emotions for each negative emotion, down from a 29 to 1 ratio in 2023.
• Additionally, performance dropped in all three dimensions of Forrester’s CX Index score: effectiveness, ease, and emotion.

Cantor and Rick Parrish, a Forrester vice president and research director, both see promise in the ability of AI to improve CX, stressing that the payoff is in the future, as the technology is still in its embryonic stages of improving CX.

“The challenges and possibilities before us are greater than ever. CX quality is at a low, while—with the fusion of human and AI capabilities—the possibilities of improving are greater than ever,” Parrish writes in a company blog. “To thrive in the world of boundless experiences and generate customer-obsessed growth, organizations need a unified approach.”

Neal Keene, chief technology officer of Gryphon.ai, is concerned about the heavy investments in AI and chatbots rather than people. By focusing on improving agents’ experience with technology, as well as call centers that take a thoughtful approach to consumer privacy, businesses can help improve the trust that has currently been lost with consumers, he says.

“A multitude of factors, including inflation, productivity demands, and the rise of AI, has led to companies over-indexing on chatbots without properly testing the technology, determining the value of the product, or considering what consumers actually want,” Keene explains. “While chatbots are getting more intelligent every day, a majority of today’s customer base prefers to speak to a human agent to resolve a customer service issue because of their being more trustworthy, personal, and reliable”

Therefore, contact centers would enhance CX more by arming contact centers and agents with AI-powered technology or tools to help them do their jobs better, rather than implementing chatbots that may often route customers to a human anyway, according to Keene.

Building customer trust will also improve CX, Keene adds. “Consumers’ trust in a brand’s interactions and the ability to resolve customer service issues is declining every day, due not only to increased reliance on chatbots but also a rise in robocalls and overall concerns about digital privacy. The challenge is that contact centers are also struggling due to staffing shortages and a lack of technology and training that would help them improve. By starting with the contact center as your first line of defense—making sure every outbound and inbound call is compliant, secure, and targeting the right customer—brands can rebuild consumer trust and make every interaction meaningful and valuable.”