In the quest for better customer experience, many organizations are looking to artificial intelligence, hyper-personalization, and new customer-centric strategies to reduce churn and boost sales. But many are overlooking a crucial area that measurably improves CX: simple operational clarity.
It only takes one badly-handled CX failure to drive customers away. In fact, PWC's 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 52 percent of consumers stopped buying from a company because they had a bad experience with its products or services, and 29 percent stopped due to poor customer experience.
As an example, consider the following scenario: While on vacation my parents purchased a high-end new jacket not realizing the zipper was broken. When they discovered this they reached out to the company's support team for a resolution, which ideally would have been a repair, refund, or replacement. An automated response informed them the company was busy and would get back to them. It didn't. A month later, there was still no response. The company's web page offered no clarity around whether they were experiencing heightened inbox states, what kind of response time customers could expect, or what the proper path was for returns or refunds. The company had different web sites for its New Zealand, U.S., and U.K. businesses, and the company's retail stores and online customer support teams operated with separate procedures, and thus were unable to action returns or refunds. My parents went so far as to call the original physical store where they purchased the jacket, offering to pay to ship it back and pay for a replacement to be shipped to them, only to be told no.
The saga continues: Understandably, months of calls and attempts to resolve the issue destroyed trust and entirely ruined the brand experience. The expensive new jacket remains unworn and disliked, and my parents will never buy that brand again and have, of course, not only shared the experience with friends but ended up purchasing a replacement from a competitive brand. So, not only has this company ensured its own reputation damage but also negated any hope of future business with this couple when it could have been so easily resolved.
This entire negative experience could have easily been avoided and could even have been turned into a brand loyalty win. According to the service recovery paradox theory, a successful service recovery after a service failure can result in higher customer satisfaction than if no service failure had occurred in the first place. In other words, had the company offered clear guidelines for returns and acted swiftly to remediate the problem, my parents would likely have forgiven the broken zipper and been delighted with their new investment.
Simple Steps to Improve CX
With clear rules and clean plumbing, organizations can remedy the loss of trust that occurs when things go wrong and turn bad experiences into improved customer trust and loyalty.
Customer loyalty grows when policies are effective and predictable, escalation journeys are obvious, and every CX channel shares one brain.
Addressing a lack of operational clarity to improve CX is relatively simple: Start by publishing your returns promise on your website; make the talk-to-a-person path obvious, unify "where is my order' into one flow; and document how outsourced teams and AI are supervised. You can do so with a document in your help center or right within the context of a conversation.
It's easy to put documentation online outlining the returns process and to set up an automated response that lets customers know what's going on with their returns. The deeper fixes include internal automation to prioritize tickets and giving customer service teams one centralized location for information, including purchase information and customer journey data, with clear guidelines on which support processes should be followed and the autonomy to make decisions on returns.
It's also important to note that with AI it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the path to talk to a person, which many customers want to do when their problem is complex or they find themselves stuck in an AI chat loop.
I found myself trapped in such a loop over the holidays when an airline got my name wrong on my flight ticket. I joined a lengthy queue at the airport and, in an effort to use the time productively, I attempted, while queueing, to resolve the problem online via the airline support platform. This proved to be a futile exercise. I found myself having to share the same information repeatedly. The AI asked me to verify my flight number and my known traveler number six or seven times, with no option to leave the endless cycle and speak to a human. Fortunately for me, there was a real person to assist me at the airport, but experiences like this can cause significant frustration for customers.
To avoid this, it is important to make it easy for customers to speak to a person if the AI path isn't working for them.
While AI makes things easier in many ways, as the lines blur between people and machines, it is increasingly important to document how your team works and make that transparent for your customers. This could mean stating that conversations are triaged by AI to make it easier for your team to find the tickets that need to be prioritized, or explaining that every chat starts with AI but if you want to talk to a human you can easily click the button that enables you to do so.
Transparency and disclosure, backed by sleek processes and empowered customer support teams, are all crucial for a good customer experience, possibly more so than new chatbots and hyper-personalization.
Mercer Smith is senior director of customer experience strategy and solutions at Boldr.