There’s a piece of Amazon service lore I want to introduce you to.
A few years ago, Amazon’s service metrics and leaders said customers were reaching customer service in under a minute. But customers were saying it took much longer. So in the middle of a leadership meeting, Jeff Bezos picked up the phone and called the number himself. The room sat and waited. And waited… for more than 10 minutes.
I thought about that a lot while watching Duncan MacLean and Jeff Tropeano on the mainstage at Execs In The Know’s Customer Response Summit (CRS). Johnson Controls had strong scorecards and results in the green, but… the stories coming from customers, and even from their own executives, didn’t match. So Duncan, Executive Director, Central Operations, Schedule & Dispatch, Global Service Practice, asked his team a hard question:
“Are we measuring what actually matters in the customer’s journey, or just what is easy to measure and looks good?”
JCI and COPC Inc. approached the problem starting from the foundation, following real customers from end to end, through every handoff, every system, and every wrong door.
What did we uncover?:
- Most customers weren’t coming in where the journey was designed to start. They called the wrong number, picked the wrong option, or landed in a queue built for a different service line.
- “Resolved” didn’t mean what everyone thought. One flat metric averaged very different teams together, hiding exactly where customers were struggling.
- The surveys only heard from the happy calls. The customers having the worst experience were never asked.
- The technology was doing its job. It just wasn’t designed around how customers actually ask for help.
Once the team could see the real journey, the fixes followed: a front door that routes customers based on who they are, clear ownership of the end-to-end path, and measures matched to what each customer actually needs. The result was better for customers and better for the business. Customers got to resolution with fewer steps and fewer handoffs, and JCI took real cost out of the operation, because every misroute and repeat call was work nobody needed to do.
What does this have to do with AI?
Almost every leader I talk with is hearing some version of “Go Do AI.” I get it, and the potential is real. But AI scales the gaps in your customer journey. It doesn’t fix them. If customers are getting lost between your teams today, putting a bot at the front door just helps them get lost faster.
That’s why COPC is passionate about starting with the foundation: understanding the journey your customers actually take, closing the seams between teams and systems, and making sure your measurement can see the people having the worst experience. We do that work together while selecting and aligning the right technology.
So here’s your challenge: This week, call your own front door, or trace one real customer from first contact to resolution. If what you find doesn’t match your dashboards, I’d love to compare notes. Send me a message, and I’ll walk you through how COPC would approach closing the gap.
Guest blog post written by Jessica Cash, VP, Integrated Solutions, COPC Inc.
