At the start of 2026, I believed the biggest lever for improving customer experience was speed. If we could answer customers faster, resolve issues quicker, and reduce backlog, customer satisfaction would naturally follow.
It seemed logical. Customers contact us because they need help. The faster we helped them, the better the experience would be. So much of our focus was on service levels, handling times, productivity, and ensuring we had the capacity to keep up with demand.
I wasn’t wrong that speed matters. But I underestimated something more important. I underestimated how much of our contact volume exists because we create work for customers in the first place.
What Changed My Mind
The turning point came when we started breaking down customer contacts at a much more granular level than ever before. Instead of looking at contact volumes through broad categories, we analyzed the specific reasons customers were reaching out, journey by journey, process by process.
What we found surprised me. A significant proportion of our contact volume wasn’t generated by customers needing advice or support. It was generated by friction. Customers contacted us because something was unclear, because they couldn’t self-serve, because a process had failed, because they were waiting for an outcome, or because we hadn’t proactively informed them about what was happening.
The breakthrough wasn’t a single customer conversation or one piece of feedback. It was the cumulative weight of the data. As we mapped contacts back to individual customer journeys, it became impossible to ignore the simple truth that we could never hire, train, automate or optimize our way out of demand that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
That fundamentally changed how I think about customer experience.
What I Am Doing Differently Now
Because of that shift, our focus in Q4 is changing. Instead of measuring success primarily by how quickly we answer customers, we are increasingly measuring success by how effectively we eliminate the reasons customers need to contact us.
We have created a much more detailed view of contact drivers and assigned ownership across the business. Product teams, operational teams, commercial teams and customer-facing teams now work from the same evidence. The question is no longer “How do we handle this demand more efficiently?” The question is “Why does this demand exist at all?”
That is driving different decisions. More investment in self-service. More focus on proactive communication. More accountability for fixing broken journeys. More use of automation and artificial intelligence to remove friction before a customer experiences it.
Most importantly, it has strengthened my conviction that the future of customer experience is increasingly digital. Customers today expect immediacy. They want answers in seconds, not hours. They want to solve problems themselves, on their own terms, without needing to pick up the phone, send an email or wait for an agent.
The belief I started the year with was that customer service is primarily about responding well when a customer needs help. The belief I hold today is that our job is to build better customer journeys by removing friction and providing immediate answers always.
