The 7 most common technology-based customer experience mistakes...and how to avoid them

Unsurprisingly, customer experience (CX) technology can drastically improve the experience you offer your customers. But if your business wants to create tangible customer experience benefits, you need to deploy CX technology strategically and judiciously.

Although businesses are spending more money on CX (according to research by Metrigy), they can struggle to make their CX moves deliver measurable performance gains.

At a time when 86% of customers say a brand experience is as important as the product or service, according to research from Salesforce – the cost of those customer experience mistakes can be momentous.

To help you avoid these pitfalls, we explore the crucial things you need to know first: what CX is, why CX matters, and how CX technology fits into the equation for CX success.

Then we throw the spotlight on the common customer experience mistakes businesses make with technology:

We also explore top customer experience tips and customer experience use cases to help you on your journey.

Let’s dive in…

The term ‘customer experience’ (often abbreviated to CX) covers all the ways that your customers interact with your business—this includes all touchpoints across all channels. 

The experience you offer customers begins the moment they come into contact with your brand or marketing materials, the way they move through your sales funnel, their purchasing experience, your support services, and (in some business models) how you maintain a relationship with them down the line.

Customer experience is the biggest differentiator right now. 

In fact, 89% of businesses compete primarily on the basis of customer experience (CX) and 73% of consumers say that CX is a factor when making purchase decisions, according to research by SmartCarrot. 

So in short, successful companies are those that take customer feedback seriously, assess customer pain points, and deliver the exceptional experiences that customers expect.

But the standards are high. You need to offer empathy-led experiences that are seamless across all channels. And—most of all—they need to be personalized experiences. A huge 76% of consumers actively get frustrated when confronted with products or offers that are irrelevant to them, according to McKinsey and Company.

Customer experience technology means any piece of software (and hardware, in some cases) that can be employed to improve CX.

Examples of CX technology include in-call technology such as interactive voice response (IVR) and artificial intelligence support for agents, CX management apps, and contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms.

In short, no.

CX technology can cover any piece of hardware and software that is employed to boost customer experience.

Customer management technology focuses on customer relationships, customer service, and streamlining internal processes. The most prominent example of customer management technology is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

The biggest customer experience mistake is the overuse of CX or customer experience management (CXM) technologies. Why? Because tech overkill frustrates customers and damages your CX. For example, while chatbots are a key element of improving CX in many sectors, there are some situations in which customers overwhelmingly still prefer the human touch.

In fact, nearly 90% of people prefer speaking to a live customer service agent, according to research from Clutch. So when implementing CX or CXM technologies, they have to be used in ways that actually improve CX outcomes and are based on customer needs.

You’re going to run into trouble if you’re ignoring feedback, making assumptions about customers, working simply for cost reduction, or from an internal drive for innovation.

The driver for decision-making should always be customer data. Gut-reaction decisions, or those based on surface-level observations, often lead to investments in technology that don’t actually solve problems or improve CX.

One of the most common mistakes is overlooking the fact that customer experience and customer experience management technologies will require employees to change their behavior and adopt new skills. 

For example, in-call artificial intelligence solutions can revolutionize both CX and an agent’s calling experience through smart, real-time recommendations. Don’t believe us? Check out this case study. 

But if that agent hasn’t been given adequate time to understand how the in-call artificial intelligence will help them and how best to use it, chances are they won’t use it at all. 

Worse still, if employees can’t opt out of these solutions despite their lack of training in them, it will decrease employee experience, which will in turn negatively impact CX. 

Click here to jump to our page on how employee experience impacts customer experience.

Isolated, incompatible CX tech initiatives produce minimal gains. To be effective, CX and CXM technologies need to be used as part of a wider customer experience strategy focused on customer needs.

For example, businesses in all sectors have rushed to develop apps for their customers. But unless the app is fully integrated into a wider customer experience strategy, it’s unlikely to succeed. In fact, only 0.5% of apps are successful, according to Zippia.com.

This is especially the case if the customer support for the app itself has not been considered. How bad is this problem? Almost 30% of app users abandon them after just one use because of inefficient or insufficient customer support, according to Net Solutions.

This lack of strategic planning will not only impact your customers’ use of the app, it’ll drag your whole CX reputation through the mud. That means this single customer experience mistake will cause a drop in customer satisfaction for the customers you have, as well as make it harder to attract new customers.

So make sure your use of CX technology is part of a wider strategy and is always linked to customer data—and real customer needs. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, check out our CX solutions page.

As part of your overall CX strategy, the design of your CX programs will go a long way to determining their success.

Take interactive voice response (IVR) as an example. When designed and used correctly, IVR systems provide visibility into customer journeys and more context on their reason for contacting your business—this can then inform how an agent approaches the customer.

The result? An uptick in first-call resolution and customer satisfaction, a reduction in operating costs, and more efficient service overall. But, use it wrong and you’ll be left with frustrated customers and, before long, negative customer feedback.

There are numerous ways that poorly designed IVR will leave customers dissatisfied. These include: making them wade through irrelevant action options, laborious or overly long menus, or getting through to an agent that doesn’t have enough data or decision-making autonomy to actually help.

The lesson here is that simply throwing an IVR system into the mix and thinking your CX will improve is naive at best, and neglectful at worst. Because ultimately, customers get frustrated when they see CX technologies as all cost-cutting upside for the business and all experience downside for them.

So approach CX technology from a customer-first lens by asking yourself CX-first questions like:

With these as your guide, you can build the kinds of CX programs that actually solve problems for customers.

Want to find out how we help businesses do this? Check out our approach.

CX technology can help you get a more detailed picture of the impact and success of your CX. This great example from Vertiv’s Gary Niederpruem in Forbes highlights how effective this can be: “[Sporting] venues are fully leveraging the proliferation of the smartphone to enable touchless entry, fast and easy ticket transfers, and mobile ordering and payment for concessions and merchandise.”

By using an app to connect these CX touchpoints, you’re able to measure and map interactions across them. For example, you can discover concession stand favorites (and the volume, frequency, and seasonality of trends as well).

If you’re not using CX technologies to help you measure these things, you’re leaving yourself at a serious disadvantage. But equally, you need to understand that the cadence of your measurements needs to be right. You have to keep fine-tuning what you’re measuring to ensure you’re keeping pace with customer behavior.

Your CX technology choices need to tangibly improve CX. That means they need to be perfectly matched to specific customer needs.

Sounds simple, right? And yet, enough businesses get it wrong, as mismatching solutions is one of the most common mistakes of CX technology initiatives.

A key contributor to this is when technology choices are based on an internal desire for innovation that’s disconnected from customer needs. And when that happens, you often see unnecessarily complicated or advanced tech solutions being used when there’s a “less flashy” solution that actually solves the problem better.

This example from Microsoft illustrates this point perfectly. They identified a strong customer need amongst train passengers in India, to be able to manage and get updates on their journeys. Many businesses would turn to an app to solve this problem.

But because Microsoft used customer feedback and customer needs as its starting point, they also knew patchy internet connectivity on the journey (a global problem) was a source of major frustration for passengers. So they turned to the humble SMS and were able to totally overhaul the passenger experience. The result? Passengers could get smart reminders, track their train even when offline, and even book food in advance.

If you’re collecting lots of customer data, you need to use it.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of long-form capture experiences, in which we were asked to hand over large amounts of data for relatively simple services. Such experiences not only frustrate customers, they can also erode trust.

But in spite of this, it seems one of the major reasons we hate handing over data is that we don’t always see tangible benefits from doing so. In the retail sector, customers are increasingly willing to share personal information in exchange for better experiences, according to research from Salesforce.

This makes it particularly striking that only 32% of data available to enterprises is put to work. The remaining 68% is unleveraged according to research from Seagate.

The imperative for businesses here is clear. Customers are ready, and so is the tech. So make sure your CX technology choices help you:

The goal is feedback loops that are actively using your data to improve customer experience—whether internally or with a CX-first outsourcing partner.

So, in a nutshell: If you want your CX technology choices to actually improve the experience you provide your customers, you need to: