By Yaniv Masjedi, Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva
Businesses are making a big mistake in how they use AI tools for the customer experience. They’re successfully speeding up journeys, but not making them better. That's a central finding in a new, global survey that should capture the attention of business leaders everywhere.
The solution isn’t to reject the technology -- it’s to use the right tools in a strategic, constructive way.
As AI has offered big new advances, businesses have too often treated efficiency as a holy grail. They’ve poured billions of dollars into chatbots, automated call flows, predictive routing and more. Vendors’ promises to leadership have focused on metrics like time slashed, hold queues reduced, and cost-to-serve driven into the floor.
But that hyper-focus on efficiency has left out what’s even more important: excellence. In racing to eliminate friction at every touchpoint, brands have been engineering out the things that can make the customer experience memorable. They’ve made purchases and customer service requests smoother and more competent, but forgettable.
Half of Interactions Leave No Impression
“The evidence of this templated, efficiency-driven approach pulling experiences towards the average shows in our data,” Ipsos reports. Its 2026 CX Global Insights study finds that 70% of customers choose brands because they expect a good experience. When evaluating brands, “personal experience consistently outweighs marketing or brand image,” the market research firm reports. “The commercial case for CX is not in question.”
But customers rated a massive 48% of all their interactions as “nothing notable.” So in nearly half of their interactions, the customer does not feel disappointed, but also does not experience moments of delight that create memories and build long-term customer loyalty.
Ipsos uses a framework to “decode” relationships with customers into six factors. Three are categorized under “hygiene.” These are control, fair treatment, and certainty. The other three, which Ipsos calls “differentiating forces,” are status, enjoyment, and belonging.
Many AI deployments excel at hygiene while falling flat on differentiation. But there's good news. The best customer service and support desk platforms achieve both. Rather than treating these challenges as separate, they use all these factors to enhance the others.
The Power of Context at First Contact
The difference shows up at the very beginning of an interaction. The instant the person reaches out through a phone call, digital tool, or any other channel, the brand should recognize them based on the number they’re calling from or the account they’re signed into. If it doesn’t have that information, it should request the person’s basic details right away.
If the customer is known to the company, everything changes. In an AI-powered unified customer experience management system, the most important insights about the individual are immediately available at a single glance. Whether they’re interacting with an AI receptionist, chatbot, or human agent, the company should demonstrate that it knows them. The experience should then be tailored to their preferences.
This achieves efficiency, preventing customers from having to tell the company what it should already know. It delivers a sense of control, fair treatment, and certainty because the customer intuitively feels the interaction is respectful, predictable, and transparent. It also delivers a sense of status, belonging, and enjoyment. The customer feels valued and appreciated. The organization leaves a positive, lasting impression.
Delivering this level of personalization does not have to mean handing off an interaction to a human agent. More advanced cloud communications solutions take all this information into account and provide experiences that delight. Rather than following rigid scripts or simplistic conversation flows, they’re built to keep learning, growing, and improving.
They also include live sentiment analysis, tracking both spoken and unspoken cues to sense whether a customer is getting the results they deserve. These tools can also alert a human agent to provide a nudge in the right direction, and they can escalate an interaction to the point of a smooth handover, with full context provided.
When organizations transform their operations to achieve these kinds of results, they break away from what Ipsos calls the “competent average.” They don’t just edge upwards; they soar far above the pack.