When efficiency outweighs empathy, customer experience suffers, writes Nic Laschinger, technology director of Euphoria Telecom.
2026 may be remembered as the year the customer experience experiment went too far. Not because technology failed us, but because we failed the technology – and our customers in the process.
For the past two years, boardrooms have focused on one directive, to get AI into the stack as quickly as possible. The promise was irresistible. Lower overheads, 24/7 availability, and the ability to automate away the friction of human interaction.
But as we move deeper into this year, the cracks are showing. Businesses are becoming so focused on what they can do with AI that they have forgotten what they should do for their customers.
We risk mistaking automation for real progress. Efficiency has value, but not if it comes at the customer’s expense. When you optimise for containment rates instead of resolution and outcomes, you create distance, not value.
The metrics death spiral
The problem starts with what Forrester (2026) calls the orbit of dysfunction. Companies have become measurement factories, focusing on dashboards, KPIs, and AI containment rates – essentially, how many customers a bot can keep away from a human – rather than actual customer outcomes.
When you manage a business purely by the numbers on a screen, you lose sight of the person on the other end of the line. If your AI handles 90% of queries but leaves that remaining 10% – the complex, emotional, and high-stakes cases – trapped in a loop of generic responses, you haven’t improved efficiency.
You’ve simply automated customer frustration. That’s why Forrester’s 2026 predictions suggest that a third of companies will actively harm their customer experience this year through premature or poorly implemented self-service AI.
The empathy gap in the rush to automate
The pressure to automate is huge. Gartner (2026) reports that 91% of service leaders are under executive instruction to implement AI. At the same time, more than 80% expect to reduce frontline headcount within the next 18 months.
This creates a structural risk. AI should support people, not replace them. When you cut human capacity to meet efficiency targets, you remove the safety net for when automation fails to interpret nuances, urgency and emotions.
It also highlights an important distinction. Empathy is not the same as compassion. Empathy recognises that a customer is frustrated. Compassion recognises it and feels compelled to act.
Customers do not just want to be heard. They want the problem fixed. An automated reply might recognise frustration, but if it cannot take ownership and resolve the issue, there’s really no point to it. Rather let AI handle the heavy data work so humans can focus on context, judgement and solving the customer’s problem.
Voice as a VIP channel
As self-service tools mature, voice is changing too. Customers no longer call to check a balance or track a parcel. They call when something has gone wrong. If customers cannot reach a capable human at that point, the message is clear that efficiency has taken priority over resolution.
That’s effectively telling your customer that their most complex problems aren’t worth the company’s time.
The Capita (2026) CX Trends report makes it clear that trust is the new currency. As AI continues to clone voices and generate infinite content, customers are becoming more sceptical. They are punishing brands that use AI as a wall to hide behind and rewarding those that use it to make their human agents more accessible and better informed.
A pragmatic reset
If we continue down the current path of cost-cutting disguised as innovation, we will find that by the end of 2026, we will have very efficient systems and few customers left to use them. What we need is a pragmatic reset.
The goal of digital transformation in the contact centre shouldn’t be to see how many people we can remove from the process, but how many meaningful conversations we can enable.