CRM is dead — and AI can’t come to the rescue fast enough

I’ve changed my mind about artificial intelligence. It used to worry me. Now I can’t get enough of it soon enough.

Why the change?

Once upon a time, CRM was more than a software category. It was a philosophy of doing business, exemplified by the late, great grocer Sid Applebaum, who reportedly explained (I paraphrase), “Every time I watch a shopper leave one of my stores, I see them carrying $50,000 worth of groceries. Of course I let them return the tomatoes.”

As a management consultant and Recognized Industry Pundit (RIP), I figure anything I experience twice in one day must be a trend. And so I hereby declare CRM to be officially dead.

Why CRM is dead: Catch-22 version

I tried to set up a login with a well-known FinServ company. Something went wrong. My new account was scrambled. No worries, I thought. I’ll just delete the new account and start over.

I searched the site, and as it turns out, I’d have had to log in to delete the account and start over. Only I couldn’t sign in because the account was scrambled.

Joseph Heller would have been proud.

Frustrated, I figured I should talk to a live human being. A live human being would, I imagined, be able to delete my scrambled account for me; maybe even set one up that worked.

That led me to the company’s customer service phone number, which, miraculously, the website did provide. I dialed it and was treated to a voice menu that uttered three alternatives, none of which was “Close an account.”

So I tried responding “Representative!” instead. The pre-recorded voice then said — now I’m paraphrasing, but am not making this up — “We only speak to customers in special circumstances. This isn’t one of them. Would you like to …” Then it repeated the three options.

In case you’re wondering, no, there was no online chat, either.

Why CRM is dead: Waiting for Godot version

I needed to book a flight. So I did, online, with no glitches. “Ahhhh,” I thought to myself. “Sure, I should expect FinServ companies to treat me poorly. But the travel industry lives and dies on customer satisfaction.”

But then I reconsidered a choice I’d made: Right now, none of my plans is certain, so I should have bought tickets of the refundable kind. I tried to make the change online, but that wasn’t one of the change alternatives available via online booking.

No worries, I thought to myself. I’ll just call the customer service number and have a live human being make the change for me.

There was just one hurdle to overcome: There was no customer service phone number mentioned anywhere on the website. So I Googled for it, and Google came through. I called the number and, yes, you guessed it: It provided three alternatives, none of which was the alternative I needed; none of which connected me to a live human being either.

Now, this was not an insurmountable problem. I could easily cancel my tickets and start over to rebook.

But still, why would two separate companies in two different industries both make reaching a live human being impossible?

The answer is obvious: Companies have to pay live human beings, and worse, live human beings don’t scale.

How and why customer dissatisfaction scales

For quite some time, “best practice” has been to make connecting with actual live human beings as inconvenient as possible, encouraging otherwise recalcitrant customers to find online solutions to their problems. This isn’t even necessarily a bad idea. In many cases, once customers figure out how to use a DIY system they end up preferring it — a convenience win for the customer and a financial win for the vendor.

But there’s a wide gorge separating “inconvenient” from “impossible” (yes, I know, gorges are narrow by definition, but I didn’t like “canyon” or “channel” for the metaphor; also, my gorge was rising).

Where was I? Oh, yeah: It appears that in the lofty towers in which business decision-makers reside, making the customer experience dehumanizing isn’t good enough anymore. A fully de-humaned business appears to be the only satisfactory end-point.

Which is why I want artificial intelligence now — Fully Buzzword Compliant Artificial Intelligence (FBCAI?), in all its generative, machine-learning glory.

The cost of turning the technology in its machine learning mode loose on a company’s business systems so it “knows” how to do stuff would be more economical than training customer service representatives in large numbers. The cost of scaling up to handle the call volume would be low as well — mostly the cost of spinning up another instance in the cloud.

FBCAI-enabled customer service would still be de-humaned, and de-humanized as well. But that’s better than the obvious end point — the one we can see with a decent pair of binoculars.

That’s the point where companies only let AIs buy from them. I suspect that for some business leaders the prospect of making human customers irrelevant is more cool than unsettling.

Recent experience suggests it’s more than cool.

It’s inevitable.