Customer Experience: Do Robots do it best?

If you are unhappy with a company (their product, service, or comms) and they aren’t proactively trying to set it right, you are probably going to publicly slam them then forbid yourself from engaging with them again. The customer of 2020 wants to feel valued and looked after, with personal, consistent, and instantaneous interactions across all channels (phone, mobile, social, web, live chat, in-store).

COVID-19 has accelerated our digital engagement and virtual consumer behaviours, but there is a quiet optimism in the market that chatbots, algorithms, AI and self-serve applications are emerging top of the customer experience food chain. As automation is expanding into more customer-centric-intensive industries such as retail banking, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), health, and mobility, it poses the question are robots doing a better job at delivering exceptional customer experiences? Are organisations facing a trade-off between efficient technology and a lack of human personalisation?

I have spent some time exploring what the gradual removal of human customer service will mean for the world of Customer Experience (CX), and of course how to strike the right balance between human and bot. CX can be defined as the entire journey of a customer’s interactions with a brand, everything that they touch, see, taste, smell, and hear physically and…