The year customer experience died

This was a rough year for customer experience.

We’ve been hearing for years how important customer experience is to business, and a whole business technology category has been built around it, with companies like Salesforce and Adobe at the forefront. But due to the economy or lack of employees (perhaps both?), 2022 was a year of poor customer service, which in turn has created poor experiences; there’s no separating the two.

No matter how great your product or service, you will ultimately be judged by how well you do when things go wrong, and your customer service team is your direct link to buyers. If you fail them in a time of need, you can lose them for good and quickly develop a bad reputation. News can spread rapidly through social media channels. That’s not the kind of talk you want about your brand.

We’re constantly being asked for feedback about how the business did, yet this thirst for information doesn’t seem to ever connect back to improving the experience.

And make no mistake: Your customer service is inexorably linked to the perceived experience of your customer. We’re constantly being asked for feedback about how the business did, yet this thirst for information doesn’t seem to ever connect back to improving the experience.

Consider the poor folks who bought tickets for Southwest Airlines flights this week. One video showed airline employees had sicced the police on their own passengers. Consider that the airline admittedly screwed up, but one representative of the same airline actually called the police on passengers for being at the gate. When it comes to abusing your customers and destroying your brand goodwill, that example takes the cake.

For too long we’ve been hearing about how data will drive better experiences, but is that data ever available to the people dealing with the customers? They don’t need data — they need help and training and guidance, and there clearly wasn’t enough of that in 2022. It seemed companies cut back on customer service to the detriment of their customers’ experience and ultimately to the reputation of the brand.

Some bad experiences

Whatever the reasons, it seemed that Southwest was not an isolated poor customer experience; the entire system deteriorated this year. I’ve been hung up on, lied to and blamed for not following procedures. I’m leaving out the companies’ names because, in truth, these anecdotes could’ve happened with basically any airline, any online retailer and any sports league.

The airline

Last summer I paid extra for a changeable ticket, yet when I tried to change the flight, I ran into frustration and stonewalling. For starters, it took me more than an hour of wait time on the phone only to be disconnected upon finally reaching an agent. If you want to piss someone off, make them wait a long time and listen to the same hold music on repeat for over an hour, then cut them off before they can explain the problem. It also could have been avoided with a decent website where I could have taken care of it myself.

The next day I waited the same amount of time only to be told there were no seats available on a flight that was showing seats available online. To add insult to injury, the same airline lost our luggage on the way home and took 30 days to get it back to us.

Throughout this experience, it took me days to get in touch with customer service to detail my woes about my ticket and my lost bag. I sent emails, tried phoning and engaged in an online chat. The only way I was able to get any attention at all was by shaming them publicly on Twitter. Even if the flight had been flawless, that runaround soured the entire experience and my perception of this brand forever.

The online furniture retailer

When you buy furniture, or anything online, it’s reasonable to expect a smooth experience, and if things go wrong that the online retailer makes every effort to make it right. When it comes to buying a piece of furniture, the least you should expect is that the retailer gets it in the house for you.

I ordered a console, which arrived by FedEx instead of a proper freight delivery. The delivery person dropped the 145-pound box in my driveway. Contrast that with a local furniture store, where we bought a couch: For a modest $20 delivery fee, they brought it into my house and futzed with it for over an hour to get it into the room.

When I called the online retailer’s customer service because a piece of the unit broke (probably due to being dropped from the truck), I was first asked to call the manufacturer myself to order the part. When I complained that it was his job to do that, he finally relented. I was told it would take a week.

When I called back because the piece hadn’t arrived, the customer service person was ready to tell me anything I wanted to hear but in a way that felt like lying instead of accommodation. I eventually learned they would never send the part. The bottom line is I will never buy furniture from this company again, and I will always go local, where I know my furniture is going to be delivered to me. When it comes to customer service, all online retailers have a special obligation to be accommodating because they can’t offer that same level of personalized service.

The sports league

The last example involves ordering a jersey. For starters, the league hasn’t been able to keep popular shirts in stock for months. I get that there have been supply chain issues, but this is a shirt. There aren’t any precious metals in it. I finally found a special edition shirt for a popular player I wanted to give for a holiday gift that came with the caveat that it wouldn’t be shipped until January 4.

I accepted that and ordered the shirt, only to find that it shipped right away in mid-December. That was all well and good, except that the recipient lives in a New York City apartment building where packages have a habit of disappearing from the lobby, and he wasn’t going to be there during the holiday. I tried to reroute the package, something I really should have been able to request online without a call.

I was told that the customer service agent was submitting a “help ticket” to send the package to me instead. I called a second time to see if it got rerouted (it didn’t) and was told if I had wanted to change the address, I should have done it within an hour of ordering it. So now it was my fault. Great experience.

Nobody wins

The trouble with these examples was that nobody won. I was unhappy, the customer service agent had to deal with my anger and frustration, and everyone ended up being stressed. That’s on the company, which set us up for a bad situation.

There will always be times when things go wrong, but that’s when brands have to step up. They need to have enough competent and trained people on staff, not people who will say anything to get you off the line. There clearly weren’t enough competent people around in 2022. And don’t think there’s a tech solution here, because nobody wants to deal with a bot. That’s even worse unless it’s a narrow use case, which customers should be able to deal with themselves online. (They would if they could — who wants to deal with customer service?)

And being asked for feedback after running through the customer service gauntlet only adds to the exasperation. If companies thought they could improve customer satisfaction with more technology or by constantly asking the customer how they did, they couldn’t have been more wrong.

Good customer service takes people — all the tech in the world isn’t going to save you when there’s an angry customer on the line or your staffers call the police on your own customers. Tech has improved our lives in countless ways, but it’s done nothing to improve the field of customer service. In fact, I’d argue it’s made it markedly worse.

Rest in peace, customer experience. It was a nice idea.