Happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2025 with #25 of this newsletter (timely!). We hope you had a chance to recharge so you can tackle this year with renewed energy. Let’s catch up on what happened around the industry over the holidays:
CX Insights
UK’s worst customer service awards
This is an award you don’t want to win. The Guardian has rounded up a list of organizations in the UK with the worst customer service for 2024. Some egregious offenses on the list include:
- failing to make pension payments to teachers
- failing to make disability accessibility policy changes known to travelers
- botched car towing
- unempathetic responses when brands made errors with grieving customers’ orders.
Ouch.
How can organizations come back from blunders like these? Deliver on the promises you made, think about policies from the end user, and above all else, have empathy.
Airlines avoid disaster
Two airlines faced issues this holiday travel season: An American Airlines system outage and a Cyberattack on Japan Airlines grounded flights and delayed thousands of holiday travelers.
Fortunately, both airlines had a swift recovery, with 93% of AA flights taking off within 2 hours of the scheduled departure times, and only 24 JAL flights having delays of 30+ minutes.
It’s a far cry from the 2022 holiday season travel meltdowns caused by severe weather and outdated systems from Southwest Airlines that exacerbated the issue. Strong business information systems, procedures, and training can speed up recovery from issues and avert customer service disasters.
As expected, customers still took to social media to complain, with a common sentiment being wanting more information from gate agents about the delays:
Turning crises into opportunities
Communicate with customers to keep them in the loop as much as possible when things go awry. Invest time in producing crisis or outage communication plans, and have empathetic policies to ease the sting of disruptions. That can go a long way to rebuilding trust with consumers.
AI Insights
MIT supports human-in-the-loop
MIT Technology Review Insights is jumping in the conversation about customer support and accurate AI outputs, and advocates for a human-in-the-loop approach to AI. The report imparts that, “The true value of generative AI emerges when human strengths—like judgment, creativity, and empathy—complement AI’s efficiency, creating a seamless blend of technology and human expertise.”
However, the report states that most organizations do not rate themselves a “highly prepared” for generative AI across multiple functions:
This means you can still be ahead of the curve. Explore AI solutions to supercharge your CX and make your plan to implement them in 2025.
AI - a boon for grocery revenue
A new study found that AI-powered connected retail strategies in grocery stores can lead to growth of 8%. Connected retail combines predictive and generative AI to tailor recommendations and the customer experience.
Some consumers online have shared thoughts that this will lead to price gouging, and it comes at a time when consumers are price sensitive with recent grocery inflation.
For industries that offer low margin staple goods, this is a meaningful growth opportunity.
OpenAI changes its corporate structure
OpenAI, behind ChatGPT, will be changing its model to be a public benefit corporation so it can raise the funding needed to stay ahead in the AI race. In 2015, OpenAI started as a nonprofit, but has found that structure limits the opportunities for growth.
It’s just the latest indicator that AI is moving fast despite being a gargantuan innovation. For organizations that use OpenAI’s LLMs - such as to power automated customer service tools - this could spell changes. Saas companies may be moving toward a usage-based pricing model rather than seat-based pricing to account for the changing makeup of technology usage.
