The Year Customer Experience Died • TechCrunch

It was a hard year for customer experience.

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

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

And make no mistake: your customer service is inexorably linked to your customer’s perceived experience. We are constantly asked for feedback on business performance, but this thirst for information never seems to be linked to improving the experience.

Consider the poor people who bought tickets for Southwest Airlines flights this week. A video showed airline employees killing police on their own passengers. Consider that the airline sure screwed up, but a representative of the same airline actually called the police on the passengers to be at the gate. When it comes to abusing your customers and destroying your brand goodwill, this example takes the cake.

For too long we’ve heard about how data will improve experiences, but is that data still available to the people who deal with customers? They don’t need data – they need help, training and advice, and there clearly wasn’t enough of it in 2022. It seemed like companies were cutting back on customer service at the expense of experience of their customers and, ultimately, of the reputation of the brand.