CX Horror Stories V: The CX Apocalypse

There’s a dimension beyond that which is known to humankind. It is a thought experiment in which all who seek to experience something good, something positive, something comforting, are in fact faced with endless frustration, neglect and fright. This dimension exists in a world between powerlessness and reluctance, ensuring that no customer experience will go unspoiled. Prepare yourself for this world as we enter. The CX Apocalypse.

Steve, where are we?

I don’t know. It’s dark and confusing. There’s creepy music. Oh, wait. I know what’s happening.

You do?

Yep. With all the sound effects and a voice actor doing the intro, that can only mean one thing. It’s time for The CX Horror Stories on this episode of the CX Leader Podcast.

The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Hello, everyone, and happy Halloween. I’m Steve Walker, host of the FX Leader podcast. And thank you for listening. It’s never been a better time to be a leader. In this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. With me on our Horror Stories episode, as always, is my friend, colleague and frequent guest host Pat Gibbons. Pat, thanks for watching my back as we dive into the terrors that are awaiting us.

Well, as always, Steve, it’s truly horrifying to be here. I really don’t know why you put me through this every year.

You know, it’s just easier to have a friend along for this one. So, Pat, what do we have this year?

Well, we decided to do something a little bit different when we were thinking about this episode sometime back, and maybe after throwing a couple of drinks back, we started to think about some crazy stuff, like, what would the world be like without CX.

No customer experience anywhere?

None.

That’s definitely not a world that I want to live in.

Well, me too, but we got kind of curious about what it would look like. So our producer, Chris Higgins, put together a group of Walker experts to perform a thought experiment. Now, this particular group are project managers and technology consultants that we would call our frontline here at Walker. They really know how CX works as they implement and execute programs and technology for many different companies, so their insights are invaluable. Chris met with them at the Walker headquarters and presented them with this question. What would the world be like without customer experience? This is what happened.

Hello, everyone. Chris Higgins here, producer of The CX Leader Podcast. I want to warn you, what you’re about to hear may be disturbing. You have any small children or pets nearby? You might want to send them away. I hate to have them witness the ugly crying you’re about to do while listening to the show. I have with me several CX experts from Walker. They’ve agreed to join me in a thought experiment, something so absurd that it could never possibly happen. At least we think it could never happen. Joining me around the table is TJ O’Neil, Liz Wallshield, Brett DeWitt, and Job Willman. And today, we’re going to explore what would happen if customer experience just disappeared. The CX Apocalypse. Cue cool sound effects. So I have with me these CX experts, and I’m just going to drop it out there. What would happen if customer experience disappeared? Job?

You know, I couldn’t even tell you. It’s just it’s so hard to fathom because, you know, so much of what we do is so important. And, you know, we just love to listen to the customers and get all of the data that we can. And but it’s just it’s unfathomable at this point. But I’ll try to fathom a bit later. I don’t know. Liz, what do you what do you think?

Chaos, screaming clients everywhere. No one’s going to stop giving us feedback, but we won’t have anywhere to put it and we won’t have any way to make sense of it. And so the loudest person in the room is always going to get their way. It’s going to be an out-of-control mob instead of our nice, orderly, actual data. I don’t I don’t know. It’s such a world even worth living in.

Hmm. See, see, see. The nightmare that I keep reliving in my head is, you know, I think back to an experience that I had as a customer where I was calling in to one of those cell phone companies, you understand, and you’re trying to get your phone transferred, the data transferred, whatever. This call lasted 13 hours. I spent my entire day basically turning into a zombie at the end of it, where I was just begging and pleading for the pain to stop. And I think that’s that’s what all customers eventually become, right? If if companies don’t listen and they don’t react or interact with that customer feedback, all your customers just turn to these mindless, droning zombies. They’re like, Please, please give me what I want.

Fix my problem solution.

So is that one of those calls where you had to, like, plug your phone in like your battery was going out?

And it was horrible too, because I had told my buddy I was like, Oh, you know, come over, we’ll get food or whatever. So he’s sitting there like, trying to Google the solution, try to like, tell the guy how to do his job. And it’s like, so like he’s on the support pages. I’m on the phone trying to tell the guy like, Hey, this is what we think we’re trying to do.

And but would there be support pages?

Oh!

Well, that’s the thing is where to CX stop. You know, you’re just thinking of basic customer support. That’s all part of the customer experience. And if it’s completely gone, just self-service checkouts as far as the eye can see.

Oh, no. Yeah, Just all of the beeping and the droning and the constant, you know, when you put in your credit card into the credit card reader and then it makes that vile sound for you to pull it out, It’s. If it’s just that for miles and miles and I think of the outlet stores, you know, lovely places where you can get discounted clothing, you just. Just this empty, vacant warehouse lot. And it’s just the beeping and the beeping and then people walking around like zombies, of course.

And the constant drone of error. Please wait for assistance, but no assistance will ever come.

Of course, whenever you know, whenever you’re at. You do the self checkout at potentially a myer or a Kroger and you want to buy some alcohol, you know, just have a glass of wine, unwind after the day and then nobody comes.

Who will check your ID?

Who will check my ID? The red light never goes off.

So that’s an interesting thought. Would like everything just be automated? Like, completely automated.

I don’t know. What do you think, Brett?

I feel like, would we even be able to buy things?

Would we even be able to automate? I mean, as the resident technology consultant.

Right. Right.

I mean, because there’s always got to be a human brain behind the automation or just does what I accidentally made a survey do the other day, which is redirect to the beginning of itself over and over.

No, the perpetual loop.

I feel like.

Things would break and break and break and no one would be around to fix them.

Yeah, but no one’s around.

But wouldn’t companies still need to make money like. They would. The whole idea is.

I’m imagining a programmer because, of course, I’m a technology person. A programmer off in a corner somewhere, saying finally, no reports, no graphs. I can make the most beautiful code in the world. And they’ll go and they’ll code and they’ll come back with this amazing product that does something that absolutely no one wanted. But there was finally time. But no money.

Yeah, but I just think, you know, companies will still need to make money, you know, but they just won’t care. Know how they make money. I mean, would it just be a a spiral of of just greed and and cost cutting and we don’t need employees anymore. We’ll just set up automated stations.

Because they know the customers are trapped. Right?

Exactly.

They knew. They knew. On that 13 hour call, there was nowhere else I could turn. I had already purchased the phone. I had right. I, like, needed this done. And I was trapped. I couldn’t I couldn’t hang up. Right.

A lot of our websites would start to look like, you know, just it would just look like pop ups everywhere. You know, as as professionals. I’m sure we’ve all worked on some pop ups that are very slick and very nice for the customer just to see. And then they can go away if they don’t want to. But if there’s none of us to help them with that, all the websites will just be pop up, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop up.

And monetize each section of each touchpoint.

Oh, yeah.

Everything has a fee.

Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah. $0.50. Just to call.

In $0.10 an hour a night or know a 900 number instead of an 800 number to get your 13 hours of customer support.

Oh, wow. Wow.

When I see it’s an 800 number now I just run. I’m just like, No, I can’t call in. I can’t do.

It. But what websites? Going back to the website, you know, just kind of as a website designer myself. They’d probably all just look like junk. Why even bother? Yes, we’d be going back to the late nineties. Hello? Yes.

Angel Fire.

Yeah, the Geocities Angel Fire. Everything’s all text and tables and.

And it’ll look like the Matrix.

Every page ends with that.

The Matrix would look better.

Almost every page ends with that little GIF of the little construction stick.

Every page would have an under-construction icon on it.

Or the little Microsoft Paperclip or the pile do you need?

Clippy would come back.

I was going to say with this be the resurrection of Clippy.

Oh, the horror. The horror.

The scandal.

So we’ve been kind of touching on it. It’s been on this podcast a million times that the employee experience is so vital to the customer experience. Well, without customer experience, who cares about the employee? And we’ve already kind of talked about like with everything, just be automated, who would need employees, You know, you’d probably need programmers and developers, but there’d be would there even be a front line at that point?

Oh, that’s tough to think about. Can I have to take a minute just to absorb that information? So, like I said earlier, unfathomable. But I’m sure we can try to fathomable it a bit.

I think you would need like three overworked, terrified frontline employees trying to talk to every single person.

Unpaid interns.

Oh, oh.

Oh. Get the intern out there. No, you have that disgruntled customer. Hey, get out there, buddy. It’s your first week. It’s about time you learn something in the fire.

It’s like. Like forever hazing of the intern.

That’s worse than going out and getting the donuts. I’d rather do the donut.

And who’s going to decide when it’s time to promote the intern if no one salaried is on the front line? Is it the little automated voice inside the phone that decides whether or not you’re ready to, I don’t know, program something?

Or does the automated voice just come up and say you’ve been terminated?

Exactly. I was just thinking of the Terminator, you know, like, like that, that A.I. that exists somewhere that just takes over the world.

Oh, see, I was going the other way. Every time you call in, they’ll just say, I’ll be back. They never come back. They’ll just never keep calling in. Oh, I’ll be back.

You’ve been terminated.

Yes.

Thank you for completing your 1000 hours of unpaid labor. You have been terminated. Goodbye.

Take a moment to consider the journey we’ve taken together so far. It’s been a difficult road and we are not yet finished. Creating a podcast like this one takes time, patience and understanding. Part of that understanding means we need to hear from you, our listeners. Take a moment and go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and tell us what you think of this episode and what we can do to improve your listening experience. That’s Cxleaderpodcast.com feedback. And now we continue our journey. Take care to not wander. This is not a place to find. You’ve lost your way.

All right. So, you know, we touched on this as well a little bit. But what about the innovation loss, the information loss, the knowledge loss, You know, so much we talked about website design, but so much has been innovated. Is that is that the way you say it? So much has been created and improved by thinking in terms of improving a customer experience. So what technology, what knowledge would we lose without customer experience driving it?

I think it’s like Halloween, right? Every every comment, every piece of customer data you’re getting is a little treat. It’s a little oh, look at this. This new nugget, this new little chocolate of knowledge.

The the the breadcrumbs that we leave to try to follow back later before we get completely lost in the woods of all of our amazing ideas. Those are all of those little things that this was difficult or I wish we could do this or this was easier as all leading us toward the next big idea. And without those, we’re just going to get completely lost.

And if somebody comes up with an idea that was later proven to be not worth their time, but then, you know, a few years down the future and five years from now somebody thinks it sounds like a good idea again. Well, they’ll just try it again. And it’ll just be an endless cycle of trying to rebuild something that was broken.

It’s the Groundhog Day of customer experience and innovation. Oh, yeah. We wake up and do the same thing over and over. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Terrifying. Unfathomable.

Brett, what about. What about you? What? What innovation do you think? Would be lost.

I think all innovation to some extent stems from. Maybe not customer experience, but the ability to give feedback about things and iterate on processes over time to improve those processes or products. So when you say like what is a world without customer experience, I really feel like it’s stagnant and it doesn’t go anywhere. And we just do the same thing all the time and nothing gets better.

Yeah.

What is what is innovation if not someone saying, hey, there’s a need. Hey, someone has said this is a frustrating process, this is a frustrating product. I wish my life could be easier if only I had X, right? Well, now you have that. Now you have your problem. Now you can innovate. But if we can’t even hear that.

Loop of wild guess and then wait and see if it sells.

Yeah.

Yeah. What happens to our profits if we this?

Yeah.

It just becomes push and pull. It’s just constantly pushing out products that it’s like, Well, I think this sounds good, I think this sounds good and you’re never getting feedback, so you’re just, well, I think my opinion is the best, you know.

The loudest voice in the room.

The loudest voice in the room.

Like sounds like the spooky like early stages of marketing where they were just like, Hey, guys, what if we sold this?

I made a product. Let’s come up with a niche of what is it that didn’t exist before.

The modern Madmen…

Yes.

..of CX.

And then, of course, scam artists, because then you never get feedback on it, and then nobody ever posts feedback on it. That’s a third party. So you’ve got, you know, these people going around to towns like they used to, just selling Miracle hairgrowth…

He’s a what? He’s a what? He’s a music man.

No Yelp. I mean, just think about like all of the reviews that you look for before you’re going to get a new product or service or, or like to to really like bring some gravity, like a new health care provider. Like it’s not just fun and flirty, like cosmetics, like it’s your health care, it’s the cars you drive. It’s how we get from point A to point B, not just like in a efficient way, but in an economical and ecological way, like it affects our health.

It affects safety.

Way. Yes, it affects safety. It affects really everything.

Yeah.

You’re like… Lives are… Lives are at stake, guys.

You just the serial killer who pretended to be an ADT guy. And how do I know if I don’t? If I can’t go, I have my dishwasher is currently broken. And if I couldn’t go and read everyone’s Google reviews, how do I know the difference between a really great mom and mom and pop shop, appliance center and an actual serial killer?

Well, and where would he be? Because none of us can think of their name. We would never be able to look it up.

Because we’ll be back at the Geo cities watching the little digging. Man.

It’s just word of mouth.

We’re doing our, like, Alta Vista search. You know, it’s like these are the old school. I mean, you know.

Yes. Just just picture it. You’re driving down the the you leave your house, maybe the doorknob breaks because the quality is not that great. And then you get in your car and your car just breaks. And then maybe like it it breaks in such a way that you need an ambulance, but then the ambulance can’t get to you because your cell phone has just broken. So then you try to walk to the nearest hospital, which is three miles, and then you just walk and walk and you get there and then there’s nobody to check you in, in the E.R. And then what are you left to do?

You die.

You die.

It just got dark in here.

The apocalypse. It is the CX apocalypse.

It is an apocalypse.

It is an apocalypse. Yeah. What about. I know this is something that you’re big on. What about ADA?

If. Yeah, because if you don’t have someone telling you, I literally cannot read your website. Not just because of the terrible design or your door. I can’t open that. So I can’t get into your building, so I can’t actually interact with you. I’m just. I mean, what do you do at that point? You just. You just sit around and wave semaphore flags, assuming that you can do that, hoping that someone will get to you.

Mm hmm. Yeah. And, you know, not everybody speaks the same language, so it’ll be the whole Tower of Babel all over again.

Oh, yeah. No, no website.

Translation, no website translation.

And no way to look up whether someone has services in your language.

Nope. Press one for English. Press two for Spanish. Yeah.

No pressing?

No. Yeah, that’s right.

No buttons. No buttons.

That’s right.

Now, in the Western world, with no buttons or.

The buttons are spikes, you know how the buttons are nice and grooved sometimes. Well, this is dating a little bit, but, like, you know, the screen would wouldn’t be as slick or as hard, so you just press it and the screen just cracks. Now you’ve left with a bloody finger.

It is the apocalypse.

You know, I will say when the innovation that stopped my phone screen from constantly breaking and when it was breaking, leaving little shards of glass in my actual face was based entirely on customer feedback. Wow. So imagine the state of my face.

A Bond villain I know.

Hellraiser, a terrifying.

Glass face.

That was a tiny splinter of glass in her face.

What a villain.

Or is she glass face?

Why is she so angry all the time? She has glass in her face.

I mean, true that innovation in my new smartphone was based on customer feedback that, hey, you’re hurting me with this very breakable phone.

All right. Well, now I want to throw out one more thing. And we haven’t talked about it yet. What about you guys?

Oh, God.

What do you mean?

Well. What about your job?

Obsolete, we’d be obsolete.

Wouldn’t be here.

I hadn’t thought about that.

There’d be no podcast and no podcast. No, I know. And I’d be out of a job.

Oh, no.

I’m not a professional, but I’d be out of a job. This is how much you know, it’s more than one layer here. It’s, you know, this is an onion. It affects everything. Yeah.

No job.

No job. And, you know, our core listeners are professionals. And you’d be out of a job, too.

You’d be out of a job to.

Just be out of a job to just out on street corners begging for data to put into a dashboard. Any data we’ll do.

Or you’d be picking glass out of a friend’s face.

But if the Shard was big enough, you could write that data on through the Shard.

Yeah, it would be.

That’s dark.

It’s so dark walking through like the. The mall’s just like, Will you fill out a survey for me? Please, please, please, please, just.

Tell me what you think.

And you have, like, half a pencil.

Yeah.

It’s like a scrap of paper, like a McDonald’s bag. You know.

It’s a napkin.

And so at that point, everything would be branded. So.

And all of this stray CX professionals have to, like, walk around with a bell on because everyone knows that we’re going to be asking annoying questions. You hear us going, Oh, no. What do you really.

Think the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, here they come, they come begging questions.

They have clipboards. Run.

What’s your name? Would you mind telling me why you said that? How likely are you to recommend this?

On a scale of 1 to 5.

Can you scale of 0 to 10? Yeah.

What’s your email address?

If I have follow up questions, how can I reach you?

Do you have two more minutes for just a few more questions?

Well, that’s not right now. No one does that, so.

Yeah. All right. So we’re at 25 minutes. So I think we’re we’ve got this. This is awesome.

We’ve got 5 minutes of content.

And it’s just the other 20 minutes is just me trying to say unfathomable.

Unfathomable.

Chris actually just has like, feedback to give us to make the podcast better.

Yeah, Yeah.

Now let’s imagine a world.

Where you do good.

In a world where you guys are funny.

Where, where you actually talk into the mic?

We left. We left a whole nother time frame just for you to redo the entire podcast.

That’s right.

With feedback.

That was a good warm up.

That’s good practice.

Now let’s do the real thing.

Well, guys, this has been a great discussion and and it’s very scary. I think we should wrap this up because I can’t take any more of this. It’s too much.

Yeah,

…just too much.

Yeah.

So I think…

Unfathomable.

Yes. Yes, exactly.

You insured that we can’t edit it out.

That’s right. It has to stay in the show now. So I want to go around the room and I want to give you all an opportunity to tell me one thing that you’re grateful for. After having gone down this thought experiment, if you will, you know, explored what it might have been like in a world without CX. So, Brett, what is the thing that you are most grateful for?

I’m grateful for innovation, but I would say specifically in a medical sense, like lives are being saved through feedback for medical, you know, innovation.

That’s good. Good. TJ?

I think for me it’s the employee experience, right? Like, how do, how, how do companies know what their employees like? Right? How do we how do we know that we should continue giving them WalkerFests? That we should continue providing them all these great opportunities to interact with each other? I think without without CX, you wouldn’t have EX, you wouldn’t have that that ability to to make happy employees that can then make your customers happy. Right?

Right, right. And I should say Walker Fest is is Walker’s own time when all the employees can come together and we do business but we also have fun. And…

And give back to the community.

The and we give back to the community and it gives us a time to fellowship and and it’s a great time. So just to give that a little context there. Liz?

I would say that I am grateful that in the scariest moments, whether it’s a medical encounter or a 13 hour tech support phone call, that I have hope that there is someone on the other end listening to my experience, knowing what I’m going through and coming up with ways to make it less scary next time.

Nice. Job?

Well, I’m just grateful for my job and the opportunity to get to listen to all of you.

And the podcast.

And the podcast.

There you go. There you go. Thank you.

Job’s favorite Podcast.

I’m grateful that we all know how to say unfathomable.

Wow. First, it’s really cool that we have amazing and creative people here at Walker that could come up with something like this. They painted a vivid picture of why customer experience is so important.

Absolutely. And while they had some fun with this episode, they really do know the importance of CX and its impact on the world. But I should also mention no one was harmed in the recording of this podcast.

Of course, yes. Thank you, Pat. We definitely want to clarify that.

Of course, any time.

And I really want to thank our expert panelists, Job Willman, Liz WallShield, TJ O’Neil, and Brett DeWitt for taking the time to have a little fun with this episode. And if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast, then you might want to consider seeing a therapist. I know I am. But if you want to talk about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast or rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we’re doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We’re an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it’s a great time to be a CX leader. Happy Halloween, everyone. Stay safe and we’ll see you again next time.