AI in customer experience won’t help if you’re solving the wrong problems

A funny thing happened on the way to the “Golden Era of Customer Experience”: Customer experiences (CX) got worse. Despite rising investment in customer engagement platforms, omnichannel orchestration and AI personalization—not to mention universal agreement that experience represents a critical strategic driver for business—customer satisfaction and trust are declining.

So, what’s going on here?

If you ask a dozen companies what constitutes a world-class customer experience, you might get a dozen different answers. And that’s OK. Companies naturally define CX by the measurable outcomes they’re trying to drive, and that will look a little different depending on the company.

But while the expressions may vary, the best experiences share a common set of principles that allow companies to deliver those outcomes in a way that’s relevant to customers, scalable and consistent with a company’s brand promise.

With CX, what a company does matters less than how it made the customer feel and what they remember. Did they feel seen or surveilled? Helped or harried? The best engagements should feel purposeful, relevant, coherent and—most of all—human.

Three principles make purposeful engagements possible.

1: CX leaders remove customer barriers, relentlessly

Customers today aren’t moving neatly through stages in a predetermined journey. They’re seeking solutions to specific challenges in moments they define for themselves. CX leaders focus on anticipating those moments and removing whatever is stalling progress.

Wayfair realized its customers were consistently snagging on a subtle but stubborn barrier: They couldn’t articulate their personal style or describe what they were looking for. Using a single user-uploaded room photo, Wayfair’s Decorify tool generates multiple design options, which allows customers to visualize possibilities they didn’t know how to describe in words.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, United Airlines created its Travel-Ready Center to give flyers a platform to upload documents, understand testing and vaccination requirements and confirm they were cleared to fly. Rather than offering logistical support, the platform gave anxious travelers a semblance of control at a topsy-turvy time.

The key in both cases is clarity of purpose. You don’t eliminate barriers by adding interactions for the sake of interaction. You do it by identifying the barriers that block behavior—such as ambiguity for shoppers or anxiety for travelers—before the customer even perceives them. Because when you solve a customer’s problem with minimal friction, you often build more trust and loyalty than if the problem had never arisen.

But even with strong data and intent, many organizations still misdiagnose the customer barrier. One pharma client assumed doctors weren’t ordering enough diagnostic tests, causing lower-than-expected uptake of its new biomarker-directed therapy. It turned out the real barrier was something else entirely: Doctors were ordering plenty of tests, but results were coming back as PDFs—which doctors didn’t have the tech to scour for the biomarker.

You can’t solve what you can’t see, and you can’t improve customer experience if you’re engaging at the wrong moment or removing irrelevant barriers. Getting to this level of specificity allows CX leaders to manage journeys that are connected, coherent and continuous—because they have to keep evolving. Great CX senses when a hurdle has been scaled and then anticipates the next one.

2: CX leaders manage journeys, one customer at a time

The old approach to journey mapping based on tidy, linear progressions made sense in a world of manual execution. But today’s customer journeys are fluid, fragmented and constantly evolving with real-world events and shifting personal context. Now, companies can detect customer barriers in real time and use them to shape dynamic, personalized journeys that flex as customer needs shift.

Because just as medical knowledge doubles every 73 days, customer information, preferences and contexts are constantly changing. Each Memorial Day holiday in the U.S., retailers saturate customer inboxes with offers related to things they’d bought in the past year. But those purchases reflect a point in time that’s gone, each one having fulfilled a need that may no longer be salient.

Companies aren’t steering today’s journeys; their customers are. This means companies need to get comfortable relinquishing control.

In this world, channels can’t be managed in a fixed sequence or treated as rigid instruments with a set purpose. If we’re truly committed to removing customer barriers, then our channel strategy needs to be fluid enough to support whatever combination of barriers the customer is facing at any given moment.

Here are three companies doing it well:

Nordstrom treats its store, app, social channels and stylist services as one interconnected ecosystem, rather than separate channels. The goal isn’t to replace humans with automation but to empower frontline teams with digital tools that surface relevant preferences and inventory, which allows stylists to focus on connection rather than logistics.

Microsoft’s customer engagement platform (via Lumen) enables dynamic, composable experiences. Instead of designing full journeys in advance, it allows customers to assemble services in real time to create on-demand experiences that shift with need and usage.

Eli Lilly is reimagining its digital front door with LillyDirect, an ecosystem that connects its branded websites, support programs and field resources into a unified experience. Rather than treating digital and human channels as separate lanes, Lilly is equipping reps and service teams with the same real-time insights patients and HCPs see online. This powers more seamless, personalized support across touch points.

These organizations are rethinking what orchestration means through:

• Systemwide memory, so no moment is ever a restart
• Clear internal role definition across digital and human actors 
• A shared organizational expectation that everyone serves the customer, not the org chart

For CX leaders, each interaction is an opportunity to make progress toward the customer’s end goal. And when customers jump from one interaction to the next, sometimes unpredictably, successful companies are ready to respond, guide and support … but never control.

Getting there demands better signal use. Many companies don’t lack data—they lack orchestration. CX leaders pair AI with first-party data and then make sure it’s actionable. This means designing systems that not only detect behavior but also act on it at the point of interaction. This way, the next moment always reflects what’s just happened.

3: CX leaders know the heart of customer experience is human

Not every moment on the journey represents a customer pain point or an opportunity to drive behavior. The moments that customers remember (and, by extension, create trust and loyalty) are the ones that feel unmistakably human, even when “human” doesn’t mean “delivered by a human.”

Because it’s not about the channel; it’s about sensing who a customer is in each moment and responding with relevance, empathy and care. Customers should feel seen, not watched. Even the most finely tuned interaction will fall flat if it feels creepy. That’s why every customer touch point needs to feel human, helpful and timely.

Often, it can mean knowing when not to sell.

A brand reaching out with the right offer at the wrong time—a Father’s Day promotion for someone grieving the loss of their father, say—isn’t just unhelpful. It erodes trust. A brand that knows how to show up when it matters, on the other hand, builds trust.

The online personal styling service Stitch Fix earned one of our colleague’s enduring loyalty with a simple but profound gesture after her baby arrived dangerously early. After she’d updated her profile to signal she no longer needed maternity clothes, this colleague left a brief, unembroidered note informing Stitch Fix she’d given birth. Taking note of the unexpected change, the stylist—without fanfare—sent her client the book “Tiny but Mighty” to read to the baby while in the NICU.

When the stylist took this initiative, she wasn’t “solving a customer problem.” She was simply acknowledging the human being at the other end of the interaction. The companies who can pierce the noise are the ones that never forget there’s a person on the other side, not just a persona.

Designing for customer experience is only the first step. Here’s how companies can get started on delivering it:

1. Elevate customer experience and align it with the customer strategy. In too many organizations, customer experience is “everyone’s job.” In practice, this usually this means it’s no one’s. What’s often missing is the role of a customer experience leader with equal prominence to those overseeing sales, marketing and digital. If this role is absent, add it. If it’s present, elevate it and ensure CX is designed to deliver against the customer strategy.
2. Build your intelligence layer to understand your customer in context. Unless a company is missing critical primary data, most companies aren’t falling short on data collection. They’re falling short on data connection. Only by building a complete picture of each customer can a company grasp what’s going to resonate in the moment. This intelligence layer becomes the differentiator that helps companies orchestrate meaningful interactions exactly when and where they count.
3. Stay in love with the problem. Some moments require you to lead the customer; others just demand a quick response. We once identified 180 distinct problems pharma customers face. Too often, companies create a plan and then measure themselves against it. CX leaders don’t try to solve everything at once. They build the vigilance, insight and infrastructure to detect and address the right problems, in the right moments, over time.

The companies that offer best-in-class customer experience don’t just engage. They build identity. They earn trust by knowing when to be helpful, when to be quiet and how to make a human feel seen. Loyalists, after all, are just consumers who’ve been moved at the right moment and for the right reason.