I wrote the other day about what I thought was a conclusion drawn about the impact of automation and AI and all that stuff on CX, from a conversation I’d had with a colleague.  Briefly, I noticed that, absent the incentive of increased costs (tied to increased Customer interactions, which, with automation would now not need costly humans to handle), the new technology would actually decrease CX in the long run because brands would be less driven to address the root causes of issues.  Why spend the time, money, and resources, after all, if we’ve got robots to take care of all those messy cleanups, right?

Then I slept on it.

The next day I wrote back to my colleague and said, Wait a second… Not so fast.

I realized that my initial impressions on the matter were driven by an antiquated, older perspective not necessarily on Customer Experience as a discipline, but rather Process Engineering itself.

As a bit of background (skip this if you’ve heard it before), I came to the world of CX as a profession because I’m a Process Engineer (Lean Six Sigma Black Belt):  Traditionally such folks as I would leverage this skillset to improve our clients’ efficiency and reliability.  We’re looking to drive improvements to their processes with the end goal being to remove waste and irregularity in their business systems.  That saves money and resources, and drives better reliability.  It also helps find people to lay off, frankly:  More efficient processes frequently means fewer people needed to execute or even oversee those processes.  Voila!  You’ve driven bottom-line improvements and saved on payroll. (Sound familiar, AI?)

But CX uses those same tools and approaches rather for the more beneficent goal of driving alignment between your Brand Promise and your Brand Delivery:  Improve your systems and processes?  Sure!  But now you’re prioritizing the projects you take on based on where your Customers are highlighting that misalignment.  The double-benefit is that you’ll also improve the efficiency of your processes (you can’t help but to do so!), and thereby saving some costs as well.  It’s just the selection within the portfolio of potential improvements that changes.

You can see why, if we’re looking at the traditional approach, considerations like, “It takes our agents in the Contact Center the equivalent of 10 FTEs to handle this particular issue every day,” would weigh into the calculation of why this particular issue should be high on the list of things to fix, right?  It costs us money to (for example) replace, ship, restock, repair, whatever.  But add on top of that that we need to employ an army of agents to simply intake and handle the requests as they come in.  That cost will be part of what lands this issue higher on that prioritized list for sure.

The argument I made the other day considers that that part of the calculation is neutralized since it doesn’t cost us any more no matter how many times we get that call because we’ve got these robots doing all that intake and handling at the front end (it wouldn’t necessarily remove any of the other costs associated with any particular issue, but that initial human capital cost in your Contact Center is a doozy!).

What I realized on reflection, though, was that this argument misses the very important first tenant of Customer Experience as a discipline altogether:  We’re approaching Process Engineering with a different purpose in the first place.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how good things like automation and AI and all that will do on behalf of Customer Experience, if it’s done in the proper spirit (granted, quite a presumption, that).  In fact, by removing one of the traditional considerations (How much manpower do we put into this or that situation, and by nature of that, what’s it costing us?), we’re even more at liberty to consider the real reason we should be “doing CX.”  That reason, being to remove every impediment we can to delivering on our Brand Promise to our Customers.

Whereas things like the traditional green-eyeshade concerns about how many people we have to employ in order to clean up after our operational messes keep us wound up in past ways of doing things, replacement—to the degree it happens—of those positions with robots can be a dramatic demonstration of how we can become more Customer-focused…if we’re willing to.

In fact, removing yet another part of that money-focused incentive structure may free you up to more deliberately consider your Customers’ experiences more specifically.  The more cost falls out of that equation altogether, the more you’re able to concentrate on what really matters: How well you’re delivering your Brand Promise.

If an organization is truly embracing the concept of Customer Experience in this way, likely the cost of its contact center wasn’t necessarily driving its choices in the first place.  Surely saving money (because fewer issues meant fewer contacts from the Customer, which meant fewer agents needed, which meant less headcount) came along as a benefit, but it never was the original intended purpose of “doing CX.”  For a company like that, it’s never been a matter of dollars-and-cents (at least on the cost side of the ledger)…it was about fulfilling the Brand Promise.

So I take it back:  If you’re doing CX the way (and for the reason) you should be doing it, AI and all that is likely to have a positive impact on your Customers’ Experiences.

So go for it!