It's the End of Customer Experience as We Know it. And That’s a Good Thing.

How often do you answer a call from an unknown number? Or click on (yet another) promotional text from a brand you bought from once? I’d guess hardly ever.

Digital communications may be the de facto medium for most industries, but when it comes to building customer relationships there’s a disconnect. In trying to pin the blame we point to rapid technological advancements, shifting consumer preferences, or sky-high standards. The reality is customer expectations have always been high. Businesses have just never been able to catch up.

Customer Expectations Aren’t the Problem

Think of your own expectations as a customer. When you need to contact a business you’re not thinking about channels. You’re thinking about what’s convenient at that moment. This determines whether you pick up the phone, send an email, or click on a chatbot. And even if you like a brand, goodwill starts to fade when you’re getting generic messages multiple times a week.

These aren’t unreasonable standards. So, is the problem customers’ expectations or the infrastructure behind engagement? I’d say the latter. Siloed systems, fragmented data, too much reliance on one-to-many personalization campaigns. It’s the same list of usual suspects.

But let’s go back to how these issues affect the customer experience. It could lead to people repeating themselves at every stage of support (i.e., wasting their time). It creates disjointed marketing campaigns, like someone getting an ad for an item they just returned (i.e., wasting money). A brand could start to be seen as “spammy,” which is hard to recover from.

As consumers, we’re subjected to so much noise, and it’s become our responsibility to sift through it all. There needs to be a role reversal. It’s on businesses to tailor communications to each customer and win them over with relevance (instead of settling for repetition).

The Key to CX is a Long Memory

Businesses have a short-term, transactional memory. They’re focused on the next conversion or the following funnel stage. However, they should be thinking of the full arc of the customer relationship. The customer certainly is.

Fragmentation makes it difficult for businesses to understand the bigger picture. This is where a customer profile comes in to contextualize. It consolidates the data that customers share directly (e.g., setting up their account) or indirectly (e.g., web or mobile activity). Crucially, this data updates in real time, so there’s never a lag between a customer’s experience and a business’s understanding of it.

Let’s use the example of a customer receiving a high bill for an unexpected overage. They contact billing, which sends them to customer support. In the middle of this, an account executive reaches out about a contract renewal. If I were the customer, my confidence in this business would plummet.

So, let’s reframe this: A customer receives an unexpected overage and contacts support. Artificial intelligence analyzes the call transcript and identifies a high level of frustration. This incident,  including the customer’s perceived sentiment, is added to their profile (which aggregates every interaction they’ve had with the business to date). Both the success manager and account executive are notified. But instead of getting up to speed on an isolated incident, they’re able to see how it fits into the larger customer journey. As they coordinate on a resolution, they can factor in the customer’s preferred channel, or even the time of day they prefer to be contacted, making the response feel even more personal.

Along with offering something like a credit reallotment, they also have the opportunity to approach the contract renewal with more tact. The account executive could highlight certain add-ons or features that better align with the customer’s current product usage, making them more cost effective. Instead of an out-of-touch sales pitch, it becomes a two-way conversation in which recommendations are rooted in the customer’s needs.

People Want to Feel Listened to, Not Spied On 

We’re all wary of how our personal data is being used. Maybe there was a retargeted ad on a random website that felt Big Brother-esque. Or a promotional text that nearly got us to click … until we realized it was a scam.

Every year, Twilio surveys consumers to understand the effectiveness of engagement strategies. This year, only 15 percent said they "absolutely" trust brands with their data. I don’t blame them. Fraud and phishing attacks are advanced, scaling with robo-callers and deceptive design. It’s made consumers skeptical. Saying “no” is safer than saying “yes.”

Without trust, you lose the customer from the get-go. To prevent that, businesses need to secure their tech stacks and respect individual preferences around data privacy (along with global regulations). This can include everything from regional data processing and encryption to honoring deletion requests and implementing two-factor authentication. Shifting to secure, branded communications like rich communications services (RCS) in native messaging apps adds to greater trust as well.

Then, there’s AI. On the one hand, AI will be instrumental in pre-emptively flagging fraudulent or suspicious activity and scaling personalization. However, just letting AI loose into your tech stack is not a strategy. There needs to be guardrails in place to ensure AI models aren’t processing and sharing sensitive data they shouldn’t have access to. There’s also the matter of transparency. While conversational AI has moved far past rigid, robotic conversations, 54 percent of customers want to know when they’re interacting with AI.

Final Thoughts

For a long time, businesses have been overestimating their customer connections. Someone buys an item once and suddenly they’re inundated with messages to buy more. It’s too much.

To fix this, businesses have to start paying closer attention to the signals customers are sending, both direct and implied. Take a look at your communications: How many messages are being opened? Are people responding or giving them a quick glance before hitting delete?

All it takes is one out-of-touch message for customers to disengage. You may have an idea of what people are interested in, but taking it a step further to understand how timing, context and mood might change their preferences is how you elevate engagement.

It’s also a new way to build trust. The brands that will win loyalty going forward won’t necessarily be the loudest, but the most perceptive.

Inbal Shani is chief product officer and head of R&D at Twilio, a customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands.