CX Insight Magazine

April 2025
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Are Legacy Systems CX’s Biggest Roadblock?The Customer Experience Cliff: How to Reach the Peak Without Falling OffBrand Spotlight: WalmartPrivacy-First CX: Building Trust Through DesignKIA Spotlight: The Black Tux Back to Table of Contents

The Customer Experience Cliff: How to Reach the Peak Without Falling Off

Why the relentless pursuit of efficiency is pushing brands to the edge and how to strike the right balance before it’s too late.

by Execs In The Know

Imagine you’re climbing a mountain. Every step is calculated, optimized, and backed by the latest technology. You’ve streamlined your route, leveraged automation to reduce friction, and implemented efficiency at every turn.

And then, just as you reach the summit, you realize something is wrong. The ground beneath your feet is crumbling. Customers, once loyal, are slipping away. Satisfaction scores are plummeting. Your systems are running at peak performance, yet your brand is teetering on the edge of irrelevance.

This is the experience cliff, the moment when companies, in their relentless pursuit of automation and efficiency, erode the very relationships that built their success. It’s not just a theoretical risk. Some of the biggest brands in the world have fallen victim to it, and the fallout has been brutal. But those who recognize the warning signs, strike the right balance, and put people before processes? They’re the ones who stay on top.

So, the question is: Are you climbing toward success, or walking toward the edge of the experience cliff?

The Rise: Allure of Automation

For years, business leaders have been told that efficiency equals success. Faster service. Lower costs. Scalable solutions. Who could argue with that?

And it’s true — to a point.

Automation, artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, self-service portals, and workforce management tools have revolutionized customer experience (CX). They’ve reduced costs, streamlined operations, and allowed companies to handle customer needs at unprecedented speed.

Consider the rapid rise of AI-powered customer interactions:

  • AI chatbots resolve a large percentage of customer queries without human intervention, reducing call center costs by millions.
  • Predictive analytics anticipate customer needs, optimizing marketing and service delivery.
  • Self-service portals empower customers to troubleshoot issues instantly, cutting down on human agent workload.

“We partner with our customers to track many metrics to ensure that they are protecting the customer experience while implementing automation. Our technology focuses on supporting what I believe to be one of the hardest jobs in the world, frontline, customer-facing agents,” says Jennifer Lee, President & Co-CEO at Intradiem. “We have a robust change management program that guides our customers to ensure their agents and supervisors understand the ‘why’ behind implementing our solution and how it will benefit them. This encourages adoption of the platform and its solutions and ensures that communication, support, and reinforcement remain central to the implementation.”

This is the golden promise of automation: better experiences, greater scalability, and a more cost-effective operation. For a while, everything runs like clockwork. Customers appreciate the efficiency. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) hold steady. The bottom line looks great. Until suddenly it doesn’t.

The Warning Signs of the Experience Cliff

According to Forrester,1 brand loyalty is expected to decline by 25 percent in 2025 due to rising prices, a staggering forecast that reflects deeper cracks in the customer experience foundation. This drop isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s unfolding alongside a now three-year decline in overall CX quality across U.S. brands. Why? Because many companies, in their rush to cut costs and move faster, are leaning too heavily on automation, pushing customers to navigate bots and rigid systems when what they crave is connection.

As Forbes reports,2 corporate America’s fixation on extreme efficiency and the overuse of technology in place of human interaction is eroding trust. And customers aren’t leaving quietly, they’re taking to social media, reviews, and word of mouth, amplifying every failed interaction in ways that hurt retention, reputation, and revenue.

“There are several KPIs that serve as strong lead and lag indicators of drops in consumer sentiment: CSAT, NPS, and LTV. All of these metrics should be closely monitored as brands implement automation and AI to ensure any negative impacts are identified immediately,” explains Lee. “There are also other engagement metrics that can vary depending on the business, measures of how often customers interact with your brand in meaningful ways. If you observe reductions in engagement metrics, which can differ by industry but may include aspects like logins and click-through rates, it should be a glaring red flag that something is going wrong.”

At first, the cracks are barely noticeable. A slight dip in NPS. A few more customer complaints than usual. An uptick in social media frustrations about impersonal customer experience.

Then it snowballs.

  • Customers start feeling like transactions, not relationships. Chatbots can’t grasp nuance. Automated phone menus lead to endless loops. Customers feel unseen, unheard, and unvalued.
  • Support escalations rise. Frustrated customers demand human interaction, but your automation-first model has made it difficult to reach a real person.
  • Brand sentiment shifts. Customers, once advocates, start voicing dissatisfaction. The trust you spent years building unravels, and fast.

This isn’t speculation. It’s already happening to some of the world’s biggest brands.

McDonald’s AI Drive-Thru Meltdown

McDonald’s placed a bold bet on AI-powered drive-thru automation,3 aiming to revolutionize the customer experience and boost efficiency. Through a 2021 partnership with IBM, the fast-food chain rolled out automated voice bots in over 100 U.S. restaurants. But by 2024, the company made a sudden pivot, announcing plans to end the pilot and remove the technology from all locations.

The decision followed a wave of viral videos that drew widespread attention to the system’s shortcomings, glitches that left customers with chaotic orders, like dozens of unintended items or an infamous $250 McNugget mistake. Despite claiming an 85 percent accuracy rate for the automated order-taking (AOT) system, the brand faced mounting scrutiny, reinforcing the risks of deploying AI without adequate human oversight.

McDonald’s hasn’t officially cited these public misfires as the reason for shutting down the program, but the timing suggests the backlash may have played a role. IBM, meanwhile, continues to stand behind the performance of its technology.

Zillow’s AI Disaster

Zillow’s ambitious AI-powered home-buying platform, Zillow Offers,4 was meant to automate real estate transactions. Zillow was so confident in its pricing algorithm that it said its Zestimates would serve as the initial offer price on eligible homes. That didn’t last. Instead, its flawed pricing algorithm led to massive overpayment for homes, resulting in a write-down of over $500 million and the eventual shutdown of the program. The company announced in 2021 that it was exiting the iBuying business. Zillow may not have been explicitly manipulating the market, but it was certainly trying to use technology to outsmart it. Zillow’s flipping flop should serve as a reassuring reminder that not everything can be automated.

“All industries are vulnerable to this, because everyone serves a customer of some kind, and customers have been clear that they expect to be treated as more than just a number or a line item. That said, I would highlight industries that deal with particularly sensitive or emotionally charged issues, such as healthcare and financial services. When you are touching people’s health or finances, extra sensitivity is required,” adds Lee.

How to Stay on Top: Avoiding the Experience Cliff

To stay off the cliff, brands must stop thinking of CX as a series of isolated fixes and start treating it as an ongoing relationship.

CX doesn’t begin or end with a support ticket. It spans the entire life cycle, from discovery to renewal. Yet many organizations continue to focus narrowly on isolated moments of efficiency instead of viewing CX as an ongoing relationship. Without meaningful feedback loops and a full-picture view of the journey, brands risk optimizing for the wrong things and accelerating toward the experience cliff.

Even a brilliant product can fall flat if you fail to listen. Whether it’s deploying chatbots without testing usability or introducing automation that burdens customers rather than freeing them, the intent may be innovation, but the result is often alienation. And in a landscape where customer patience is thin and switching costs are low, the consequences of getting CX wrong show up fast.

So, how do brands avoid this fate? The key isn’t avoiding automation; it’s humanizing it.

“This may sound overly simplistic, but it’s crucial: it all starts with a leadership team committed to human-centric innovation,” says Lee. “There is a lot of noise out there right now, making it easy to get caught up in the hype. Leaders who care about preserving human connections need to be thoughtful and block out that noise, allowing them to focus on finding solutions that support a human-centric tech strategy, which inherently drives human connection. Keep the customer at the center of everything you do; map their journey, understand the pain points, identify where technology can address these issues, and determine where a human touch is needed. It is an absolute fact that if you care for the experience of your agents, they will care for the experience of your customers. Some specific ways our customers do this include creating space for proper training and coaching, monitoring their agents’ days to identify when they may need a mental health break, and using our Burnout Dashboard to flag and proactively address agents who are on the cusp of burnout while assisting customers.”

Staying off the edge of the customer experience cliff isn’t about rejecting automation. It’s about applying it with intention, balance, and a relentless focus on the customer. The most future-ready brands are building CX strategies that don’t just scale but sustain. Here are five ways they’re doing it:

1. Human-in-the-Loop Automation Smart brands don’t replace humans, they elevate them.
Smart brands don’t replace humans, they elevate them.

  • AI handles routine tasks and frees humans to handle complex issues.
  • Instead of forcing customers into automation-only models, brands benefit from offering seamless escalation paths to human support.

Are you using AI to replace human interaction or to enhance it?

2. Customer-First, Not Cost-First
Too often, automation decisions are made from an operational standpoint, not a customer experience perspective.

  • Instead of asking, “How do we cut costs?” consider: “How do we make this effortless for the customer?”
  • The best brands optimize for loyalty, not just efficiency.

When was the last time you measured success beyond cost savings?

3. Intelligent Workforce Management
Automation should support employees, not replace them.

  • AI-driven workforce management can help agents work smarter, not harder.
  • By removing mundane, repetitive tasks, automation can free up human agents to handle high-value interactions.

“Effective workforce management involves deploying resources efficiently and effectively, ensuring that agents are well-prepared and supported as they assist customers. These tools can automate tasks that the human brain may overlook, resulting in a smoother agent experience and ultimately an enhanced customer experience,” explains Lee. “Effectively implementing these capabilities requires emphasizing change management, communication, and reinforcement. Involve operations and IT teams early in the project, showcase the value it will bring to their areas, and consistently collect (and genuinely consider) their feedback on their experiences. These tools are valuable only if the business adopts and integrates them as a standard part of their operations, making buy-in crucial.”

Are your employees empowered by or are they fighting against automation?

4. Continuous Feedback Loops
Your customers will tell you when automation is failing … if you listen.

  • Implement real-time feedback mechanisms to monitor frustration points.
  • Track CSAT trends, chatbot accuracy, and self-service effectiveness.

How often do you reassess your automation strategy?

5. Long-Term Thinking: The CX Journey
The most successful brands don’t see CX as a one-time optimization project. They see it as an ongoing commitment.

  • They iterate, test, and refine.
  • They balance tech-driven efficiency with human connection.
  • They resist short-term gains at the expense of long-term relationships.

“The key is not just to reach the top, but to build a CX strategy that keeps you there,” says Lee. “I believe AI is here to stay, and it will eventually revolutionize how we interact with brands. Agentic AI is coming, and there may very well be a day when my personal AI agent interacts with the AI agent at a brand, working through a solution on my behalf. However, that day is far in the future. It requires acceptance of this technology by customers, and there is a significant barrier of skepticism that must be overcome first. In the interim, in the mid-term future, my best advice to brands is simple: When considering CX strategies, remember that for now, CX is about human connections; find solutions and strategies that enhance those connections, and you’ll thrive while others fall off the cliff.”

Final Thoughts: The Future of CX

The brands that win the future aren’t the ones that automate the fastest. They’re the ones that automate with intention.

So, take a hard look at your CX strategy.

  • Are you truly making things better for customers or just more efficient for your business?
  • Are you climbing toward a better experience or heading straight for the cliff?

The choice is yours.

Origin of the Customer Experience Cliff

The concept arose from conversations I’ve had with customers and prospects. I started to notice a theme: the fast-movers in adopting customer-facing AI were sharing their experiences, and almost universally, they rolled things back just as quickly as they rolled them out. The bottom line is they realized that their customers were not ready for this leap, and it was actually hurting their businesses. We also had two customers who ended our partnership in the last three years, stating that they were eliminating their contact centers altogether and going fully digital. Recently, both have returned to the table with us because they are rebuilding their contact centers for the same reason – their customers didn’t respond well to, and adopt, the digital-only service they were offering.


Jennifer Lee
President & Co-CEO Intradiem		 In my experience leading CX organizations in the past, I always knew that I had to balance two things: efficiency, as contact centers are largely viewed as cost centers, and experience, since contact centers are on the front line serving customers every single day. That balance has always been challenging, but it struck me while hearing these stories that now, with AI in the mix, it is harder than ever. The specific metaphor of the cliff came to me on the airplane on my way to CRS as I was contemplating how to discuss this challenge in my opener. I visualized businesses rapidly scaling a mountain, stacking innovations to drive efficiency, without noticing that their customer experience was suffering as a result.

Links

  1. https://www.forrester.com/predictions/b2c-cx-digital-2025/
  2. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2025/01/15/the-cost-of-poor-cx-why-businesses-must-rethink-customer-journeys-to-survive-2025/
  3. https://www.cxtoday.com/conversational-ai/mcdonalds-stops-using-ai-for-drive-thru-orders-whats-next-for-fast-food-cx/
  4. https://www.wsj.com/articles/zillow-offers-real-estate-algorithm-homes-ibuyer-11637159261