We have never been more visible to the companies we buy from.
They know what we bought, when we bought it, how we paid, what we looked at before we bought it, whether we opened their last email and increasingly, what we are likely to want next.
CRM systems capture the relationship; accounting platforms capture the transaction; websites and apps capture the behaviour. AI sits across all of it analysing patterns and supposedly generating deeper understanding of the customer.
So why has being a customer become so difficult? Try resolving an incorrect utility bill. Getting a refund for a subscription you did not intend to renew. Changing a bank account. Reporting a faulty hire bike. Challenging a smart meter reading. Or simply trying to speak to somebody who has enough authority to understand the problem and fix it.
What follows is increasingly familiar. An IVR system asks you to choose from options that do not describe your problem. A chatbot confidently answers a question you did not ask. A website directs you to an app. The app directs you to a help page. The help page brings you back to the chatbot.
Eventually, the customer starts doing the company's work for it. We scan and bag our own shopping. We administer our own accounts. We diagnose our own service problems. We navigate billing systems. We search knowledge bases. We repeatedly provide information the company already holds. And we do much of this while paying substantial amounts of money to the businesses that have removed the people who once performed those tasks.
None of these decisions looks unreasonable in isolation. Self-service reduces transaction costs. Automation handles repetitive queries. Apps make services available around the clock. AI can process huge volumes of customer information.
The problem is what happens when those layers accumulate. Each new efficiency creates another interface, another password, another notification, another menu, another process and another piece of work for the customer. Technology that was supposed to make life simpler starts creating its own complexity.
You can see the same thing in products. Washing machines need apps. Cars beep, flash and issue warnings constantly. Appliances want accounts, software updates and connections to the cloud. Products that once performed a simple task increasingly require customers to manage an ecosystem.
We may have reached an odd point in the productivity story. Companies have become extraordinarily good at using technology to reduce the effort required to serve customers. They have been much less successful at reducing the effort required to be a customer.
And now AI is being added to the same machinery. So why has more customer information produced less customer understanding?