The pressure to automate is outpacing organizational readiness.
As enterprises race to deploy AI-powered bots and virtual agents, automation can quietly erode customer trust when the right foundations aren't in place.
The difference between automation that scales and fails often comes down to how organizations prepare for a bot to handle its first interaction.
Speaking with CX Today, Scott Kendrick, SVP of Strategy and Alliances at CallMiner, argues that current industry hype and pressure to adopt are pushing organizations to automate faster than they may be ready to.
"There is a lot of hype which creates FOMO, everybody's looking to see how they can reduce costs, increase margin, and provide a better service to their customers," he explained.
"If the competition is automating and providing more efficient service, there's a potential risk of not being competitive in the market based on how fast things are moving."
The Gap Nobody Is Measuring
Today, the pressure to automate is all too real for organizations, but the conditions under which many deploy often undermine its long-term success.
Pressures from the market, customer expectations, and demands for greater efficiency have encouraged many businesses to launch chatbots and virtual assistants as a milestone instead of an organizational capability.
From here, essential foundations are overlooked, feedback loops are incomplete, and CX goes unmeasured, resulting in many viewing customer successes based on operational metrics over outcomes.
As a result, problems can remain hidden until they become too large and complex to resolve, with the speed of deployment creating the illusion of progress while masking customer dissatisfaction, inaccurate responses, or growing frustration.
"Bots aren't great at handling complex emotional interactions," Kendrick explained.
"If you don't have the right feedback mechanisms in place to track and ensure your automation is functioning, there's a potential risk of loss of trust in a brand, brand crises, and general misinformation to customers."
As automation quality cannot be evaluated solely by technical performance, customer trust depends on whether automated systems respond appropriately in empathetic situations.
Furthermore, this is compounded by organizations that rely on the same platforms running the automation to evaluate its success.
"A lot of times they're relying on automation systems, not necessarily analytics or intelligence systems from the ground up," he continued.
"They provide limited visibility into how the automation is performing, focused on containment and efficiencies. That can drive the wrong behavior of a bot."
When success is defined by containment rates or reduced agent handoffs, organizations risk optimizing for efficiency and overlooking customer outcomes.
By measuring the complete journey instead, this enables organizations to identify friction and patterns, and continuously improve automation based on customer outcomes over convenience.