Customer service is getting worse, CX veteran warns
LANCASHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM — Customer loyalty is eroding despite years of investment in customer experience programs, and companies must return to the fundamentals of service delivery to reverse the decline, according to contact center veteran Alex Mead.
In an interview with CX Today, Mead said organizations have blurred the line between brand experience and operational service, weakening the day-to-day interactions that ultimately determine whether customers stay or leave.
“There are two distinctly different aspects to a customer’s experience — there’s their customer service experience, which is getting help, support, complaining, assistance at every lifecycle stage … and there’s the brand and marketing experience. They’re two very different things,” he explained.
Why customer service falls behind CX initiatives
Mead argued that the rise of chief customer and chief experience officers, often with marketing backgrounds, has sidelined operational customer service leadership.
“Very few of them had any idea what it’s like to be a customer who just wants a simple answer to a question,” he said, pointing to common frustrations such as poorly designed chatbots, disconnected apps, and rigid interactive voice response (IVR) systems.
“You look at every major brand … they still drive you either to a bad chatbot or a bad chat experience,” he added.
Research consistently shows customers are becoming less satisfied with service interactions, he added. “It’s not just my opinion… customers are getting less happy with their service experience.”
Rather than focusing on net promoter scores or journey mapping alone, Mead urged executives to “walk in the shoes of customers” and frontline staff to identify operational breakdowns that cause friction.
Why GenAI in contact centers needs strategy
While generative AI has dominated boardroom discussions, Mead warned against treating it as a plug-and-play solution.
“People think there’s this new thing called GenAI — buy it, plug it in, off you go,” he said.
“You have to start with the vision… and then Gen AI can make that incredible. But if you don’t start with that vision, you just plug them in, you’re going to fall off a cliff,” he added.
He called for real-time knowledge management, seamless system integration, and agent empowerment, arguing that frontline teams need “time, information, motivation and empowerment” to deliver what he describes as “easy, personalized, intuitive, contextual” service.
“Don’t build an IVR where you can talk to an agent that can give you an answer and rebook for you,” Mead said. “Put it up front so you don’t even need to make the call.”
For the global outsourcing industry, which handles millions of customer interactions daily, Mead’s argument carries particular weight.
As enterprises look to modernize contact centers with AI-enabled platforms, service providers may find opportunity in repositioning themselves not just as CX operators, but as strategic partners focused on operational service excellence, the layer that, Mead contends, ultimately determines customer loyalty.
