Customer experience shifts as automation grows
Bots promised efficiency, but they are leaving many customers with the feeling of not being heard.
Automation is advancing in contact centers, while frustration over impersonal responses and fragmented processes continues to rise.
There are calls that end before the issue is resolved, leaving the user with the sense of not having been listened to. In this gap in service — increasingly common in digital interactions — a growing frustration is building up, directly affecting the relationship between consumers and brands.
The tension between operational efficiency and service quality has become more visible as companies adopt bots, automation, and fragmented systems that make it harder to reach a human agent.
In that context, 32% of consumers abandon a brand after a single bad experience, while 73% say customer experience is a decisive factor in their purchasing decisions, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey.
Digital customer frustration.
Digital consumer behavior is also changing: today, users expect faster, smoother, and more personalized interactions, even when these are handled through automated channels.
In this context, César López, CEO for Iberia and Latin America at Covisian, warns about a recurring mistake in recent business strategies.
“Many companies thought that replacing people with technology was the fastest path to efficiency. But when human judgment is removed without redesigning the experience, what is reduced is not costs, but conversion, loyalty, and customer value.”
According to the executive, the growth of business automation without an integrated strategy is affecting user experience, with consequences for customer retention and revenue, even amid increased technology investment.
Automation and experience.
He explains that the debate is not only about adding artificial intelligence tools to existing systems, but about rethinking the service model.
This means moving away from viewing customer experience as a collection of isolated channels, and instead seeing it as a system where human and artificial intelligence work in coordination to resolve requests more smoothly.
Under this view, customer experience stops being perceived as an operational cost and becomes an area of opportunity: each well-managed interaction can strengthen the customer relationship, increase loyalty, and even open new revenue streams.
AI in contact centers.
López states:
“At Covisian, we have been researching and investing for more than 17 years in the development of proprietary and patented technology that combines artificial intelligence with human talent, culminating in a new model: Supervised AI. This unique approach presents the agent like never before, transforming them into a CX professional capable of handling multiple conversations simultaneously supported by AI, intervening when necessary and monitoring customer satisfaction in real time.”
The company argues that the next step in the evolution of contact centers is their transformation into AI Operation Centers, where artificial intelligence progressively takes over part of the conversational workload, depending on its ability to resolve requests and maintain defined quality standards.
In this new balance, companies would no longer need to see efficiency and experience as opposing forces. Those that manage to integrate strategy, technology, and people could turn every interaction into a competitive advantage, in an environment where the difference lies not only in automating more, but in how the time and quality of each customer interaction is managed.
|
|
