After countless CX conversations at Customer Contact Week Orlando, one tension kept surfacing. CX leaders know this is another big turning point for service, with AI at the center, yet many worry they are about to repeat the mistakes of earlier eras.
That was the starting point for Sangeetha Rai, COO at Barasch & McGarry, who led a session titled “3 Service Mistakes We Repeat Every Time the Industry Evolves.”
Her central claim was blunt and memorable:
“When you step back and look at this, it really is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem.”
Rai’s message landed because it was grounded in five decades of service evolution, and in the reality of leading CX, technology, and operations teams in very different environments.
From branch networks and call centers, to global outsourcing and now AI, she sees the same leadership patterns play out while customers keep asking for the same basics.
Customers Have Not Changed as Much as Leaders Think
Rai framed the CCW Orlando conversation by looking across the last fifty years of service models. In every decade, leaders embraced new levers of efficiency such as centralization, offshoring, self service, and automation. On the surface, each new wave promised transformation.
Underneath, customers kept repeating a short list of needs, they want:
- Companies to respect their time
- Their history to be understood
- Issues resolved without being passed around
- Access to a person when the stakes are high
Rai summed it up in one line that resonated across the room, claiming that “we did not remove work. We just kept moving it, from people to systems, to customers, and now to algorithms.”
For CX leaders, that observation flips the usual AI narrative on its head. If customer expectations have been consistent for decades, then the real problem is not that expectations keep exploding. It is that our operating models have never fully caught up.
From that starting point, Rai walked through three service mistakes that show up in every era of change, including the current rush into AI.
Mistake 1: Chasing Outcomes Without Building a Foundation
Rai’s first recurring mistake is a lack of structural readiness. She sees many organizations diving into new service models without the basic foundations that let change stick.
She pointed to six elements that shape whether disruption stabilizes or destabilizes service:
- Process
- Knowledge
- Data
- Operating model
- Culture and psychological safety
- Change capability
You do not need all six at a world class level. You do need to avoid serious weakness in any of them, especially when embarking on a major shift such as AI or a new contact center strategy.
In our interview, Rai reflected on leading CX and technology in very different businesses and sectors.
“Regardless of the size of the company and the industry, I have led technology and customer experience teams. The problems have been the same.”
One story she shared involved a rapid move to offshore support. The business case focused on cost and coverage. The reality exposed missing foundations:
- Core processes were not properly documented
- Knowledge was fragmented across spreadsheets and individual agents
- The operating model between onshore and offshore teams was unclear
External partners promised a smooth transition. Internally, leaders underestimated the readiness gap. The result was a predictable rise in escalations, slower resolutions, and growing frustration on both sides of the Atlantic.
The lesson was not that offshoring is inherently flawed. The lesson was that every disruption magnifies what is already there. Strong foundations show their strength. Weak ones crack under pressure.
Rai also drew a sharp line between change management and change capability. Change management is the go live plan, the communications, and the training deck. Change capability is the organization’s “muscle” to absorb frequent change, experiment safely, and recover when things do not go to plan.
Without that muscle, every new wave, whether it is AI or a new routing strategy, feels exhausting for teams and customers alike.
Mistake 2: Modernizing Tools Without Modernizing Thinking
The second mistake Rai highlighted is behavioral readiness. Many CX leaders update their tech stack while leadership habits and decision models stay rooted in old assumptions.
In the session and in our follow up conversation, Rai contrasted “old thinking” and “modern thinking” in practical terms.
Old thinking often looks like this:
- Decisions driven by politics and local preferences
- Short term wins prioritized over long term coherence
- Adoption treated as a one time training event
- Individual teams buying “local” tools to solve their own problems
This pattern leads to fragmented journeys. Different tools do similar jobs. Different processes handle similar issues. Customers are left to navigate a maze that makes sense on an org chart, not in real life, as Rai explained:
“A lot of times, we modernize the tools before we modernize the thinking.”
She described how this dynamic played out in a large organization with more than a hundred contact centers. Over time, each center had layered on digital tools to meet local needs. On paper, the company had invested heavily in modernization. For customers, the experience was inconsistent and confusing.