There has been a lot of talk about the importance of the customer experience to businesses for quite some time now, and as a result, an entire subset of business technology has emerged around the topic, with leaders like Salesforce and Adobe at the helm. In spite of this, 2022 was a year of bad customer service as a result of the economy or a shortage of personnel (or both?). This, in turn, led to unsatisfactory experiences.

Your customer service department is the first line of defence for your business, and they will be evaluated based on how successfully they handle problems rather than how good your product or service is. If you let them down when it matters most, you risk losing their loyalty forever and getting a poor name for yourself. The internet allows for the quick dissemination of information. Nothing good can come from discussion like that about your product.

You can’t separate how your customers feel about you from how you treat them in terms of customer service. We are always being asked for our opinion on the company’s performance, yet this insatiable curiosity never seems to go somewhere useful.

Think about all the people who shelled out money for Southwest Airlines tickets this week. As was shown in a video, airline staff called the police on their own guests. Consider that the airline made a mistake and apologised for it, but that a representative of the same airline actually called the police on people for waiting at the gate. That is the most extreme example of how to treat your clients badly and ruin your reputation as a business.

Data has been touted as the key to improving customer service for far too long, but is it ever really made accessible to the frontline employees who actually interact with customers? It’s evident that there wasn’t enough assistance, training, and direction in 2022, and that’s why they can’t use data. It seemed that corporations were cutting down on customer service, which had a negative impact on both consumer satisfaction and the company’s image.