r/customerexperience

They are the ones whose information is so clean, consistent, and AI-readable that customers arrive already trusting them.

Your new competition is not the brand next to you.

It is the AI summary that gets pulled before the customer ever finds you.

TL;DR: 20-year+ CX leader says CSAT captures a moment, not a journey. Argues for analyzing full conversational data instead. Does this match what you're seeing? How are you doing it?

Sharing a clip from a video series we produce called Heard in CX. (I'm on the r/UJET team, full transparency but I'm here with a conversation I think this community will have opinions on)

Our guest Michael Windler, Director of Customer Operations at NerdWallet, was asked to finish the sentence: "the metric that looks great on a dashboard but means nothing is..."

He said CSAT.

He explained it's one question at one moment in time, from the customers who actually completed the survey. You're missing the full journey, and ofcourse, you're missing the customers who didn't bother responding at all.

His solution was to instead analyze all conversational data, not just survey responses. Build metrics from what customers are actually saying, across every interaction.

So here's the questions, curious what this community thinks: is CSAT still doing useful work in your org or has it become a vanity metric? And if you've moved away from it, what replaced it? How are you vetting the multitude of tools out there?

Episode is here if you want the full context:

https://reddit.com/link/1sr5pab/video/40wow2wpbfwg1/player

if you're curious, here's how we're approaching the issue over at ujet.cx

We're hitting that stage where things are growing, but our processes aren't quite keeping up.

We've been using Google Sheets for leads and handoffs, which worked only on, but now we're starting to see issues with inconsistent data and lost context between teams. It's small things, but they definitely impact the customer experience.

A few days ago I discovered HubSpot for Sheets, which looks like a way to push structured data from Sheets into a CRM without completely changing how everyone works.

Timing-wise, it actually lines up pretty well for us since we're already at the point where we need to scale things more properly. But not sure if it actually fixes the handoff problem or just makes things look cleaner on the backend.

Anyone tried this in a growing team? Did it actually help, or did you end up moving fully into a CRM anyway?

A CX Network survey of 342 practitioners found that the number one customer behavior changing CX work is customer awareness of how AI uses their data (36%), followed by demand for convenience (30%), and customers using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for their own service and sales interactions (29%). PR Newswire

The big shift: CX leaders are being told they can no longer assume the customer journey starts at their website or social media. A large percentage of people are now doing their primary research inside AI answer engines, forcing brands to completely redesign the customer journey. CX Dive

Customers are arriving already informed by AI, and brands that have not adapted their CX strategy to this new reality are losing the moment before it even begins.

I Recently purchased a 2 man tent from Nightcat.com. They then sent a 1 man tent so i obviously asked for a return or refund.

They asked if i want another tent sending which i responded no as it wouldn’t arrive in time. They then said we could send another with some extras for the inconvenience but I don’t need them and just wanted my money back.

They then agreed to send a refund when “We will refund after you use knife to cut it off and send us a video to confirm it.”

I responded to confirm they meant rip up and essentially destroy a perfectly functional tent. It was correct.

They said this - “Since it was shipped from China so if shipping back to China will be a big cost of shipping fee.

Therefore you only need to cut it off to make sure you don't have a tent for free, and we can refund you the money.”

Update - I won. They are issuing the refund. But with a grain of salt. “OK the refund has been issued.

I might take some time to arrive.

Wish you can have a happy time using the 1 person ultralight tent.” 😂

Spent the last few weeks evaluating VoC platforms because my team spends half of every quarter manually tagging customer feedback for leadership and it has to stop.

Worth-knowing takes on what's out there:

Medallia: Powerful if you have a dedicated VoC team running it. Overbuilt for most CX orgs under a few thousand seats and the price reflects it.

Unwrap: Aggregates input from multiple sources and groups it by meaning/theme, so recurring issues across tickets, reviews, and calls appear as a single trend. It works best when there’s enough feedback volume for the patterns to clearly emerge.

Qualtrics XM: Great if you're running structured survey programs. Weaker on unsolicited feedback and the contract is a real commitment.

InMoment: Strong on experience management fundamentals, feels mature. UI and workflow felt a generation behind the AI native players when we tested them side by side.

Chattermill: Decent on support ticket analysis specifically. Lighter on app stores, social and call transcripts vs the broader platforms.

UnitQ: Been around a while and has big logos. The UnitQ Score is a black box though, never got a clean answer on what's in it.

Sprinklr: Strong on the public slice (social, reviews, forums). Not really built for internal CX use cases beyond that.

What works best ultimately comes down to the shape of your program. Medallia or Qualtrics if you already have a formal VoC team and survey first motion. Unwrap if your signal is scattered across every channel customers talk and you want one place to see patterns. Chattermill if most of your feedback is in tickets specifically.

not a formal list or anything, just stuff I actually run through now because I've seen what happens when you don't

test it as your worst customer not your best one vague question, typo in it, missing half the context. if it handles that you're probably fine. most people only test the clean version and then wonder why it breaks on real customers

ask it something that's not in the docs not to be mean to the AI, just to see what it does when it doesn't know. does it say it doesn't know or does it just... make something up confidently. very different outcomes

go through every case you've had to escalate manually before if a human has had to step in for it, the AI will hit it eventually. better to find out in testing than from a pissed off customer

make the "talk to a human" option obvious not in a footer somewhere. actually there. especially for anything touching money or cancellations

read the first 20 answers out loud sounds dumb but you catch things this way that you miss reading. if anything sounds slightly off it needs fixing before customers hear it

most of the issues I end up seeing in tickets could've been caught in like 30 mins of this before launch. anyway hope it helps someone

Anybody using a voice AI tool? If so, how's it going in terms of living up to the promise and customer acceptance?

I’ve seen a lot of tools like Fireflies or Fathom that join as a "bot" listener, but they seem 100% dedicated to Zoom/Google Meetings.

I’m looking for something more seamless that works in the background and will connect our calls ( VOiP) . the goal is to catch when customers are unhappy or when competitors are mentioned before they actually churn.

what tools you know work for regular phone calls, and not just meetings?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently building a small outsourcing service focused on customer support and back-office assistance (emails, after-sales service, multilingual support, admin tasks).

At this stage, my main challenge is client acquisition.

I would really like to hear from people who started a service business like this:

- How did you find your first clients?

- Which channels worked best for you (LinkedIn, cold email, referrals, platforms, partnerships...)?

- Did you do outreach yourself or work with someone specialized in lead generation?

- What would you do differently if you started again today?

I also have an operational question about CRM:

Do clients usually provide their own CRM and workflow tools, or do you offer your own system?

Is it useful to prepare a CRM in advance and adapt it when a client arrives?

Or for written customer support, is email management often enough at the beginning?

My service would focus only on written communication (no calls), so I’m trying to understand what clients usually expect when starting with a small outsourcing provider.

I’m especially interested in real experiences and practical advice.

Thanks in advance 🙏

half of customers say losing access to a real human is their number one concern with AI in customer service. and honestly fair enough..when most AI support tools are scoring below average on usefulness, convenience and time saved.

for most companies, this looks like they deployed the tech before it was ready and now customers are paying for it. how are your teams actually balancing this in 2026?

New study just dropped.

1 in 4 customers walked out of a store this year without being greeted.

No hello. No eye contact. No goodbye.

And satisfaction scores for those visits dropped to 31 percent.

Not because the product was bad. Not because the wait was long.

Just because nobody made them feel like they mattered.

The smallest moments are still the most powerful ones in customer experience.

What is the smallest thing a brand did that made you feel genuinely valued?

Something I keep noticing when talking to support and CX teams:

The default approach is to handle messages as they arrive. Ticket comes in, someone responds, it gets closed.

That works fine until you zoom out and realize you've closed the same ticket twelve times this month without ever connecting them.

The issue isn't the individual responses, those are usually good. It's that handling messages one by one makes it almost impossible to see what's actually happening across all of them. Each complaint looks isolated. The pattern only exists in the aggregate.

And the aggregate gets harder to see for two reasons nobody talks about enough.

First, channels. The same issue arrives via email, contact form, live chat, and social - each one landing in a different inbox, handled by a different person. No single view, no single owner.

Second, wording. "Can't log in", "authentication is broken", "keeps kicking me out", three ways of saying the same thing that will never appear in the same search, the same filter, or the same tag unless someone manually connects them.

So what tends to happen: someone builds a manual layer on top. A tagging system, a shared doc, a Notion page, a spreadsheet. Something that translates scattered individual messages into a pattern someone can actually act on.

It works to a certain degree, but it's held together by human consistency, which is the first thing that breaks under increased volume.

The shift that seems to matter most is treating incoming messages as signals first, tickets second. Not "how do I close this?" but "have I seen this before, and how many times?"

Curious how others here approach it - is there a system you use that actually catches patterns in real time, or does it mostly surface when someone senior happens to notice?

No hold music. No repeating the issue to a third agent. No "let me transfer you."

Just someone who already knows. Already cares. Already has the answer ready.

That is not luck. That is what happens when a team actually has the right insight at the right moment.

Some brands are already doing this and you can feel it instantly when you land with one of them.

What is the one thing that would make you never leave a brand?

So, while shopping I ran across a couple of issues on a site. I added said issues to my cart and then contacted customer service to see if I could get said items for the price. $18(0)+$18(0)+$32(0)+274.49 (27.55 someone fucked up). Had I not contacted customer support and report but then told 100 and they told 30 and they told 5… reasonable right? How many people would have bought $68-$343 for free? If I didn’t tell customer service and let the em know, when I found out, who much would they have lost?

150k x $68 = 10,200,000….. and they’re trying to screw me over 400-$30?????

I was not even that frustrated when I reached out.

Just a small issue. Expected the usual. Hold music. Transfer. Repeat yourself three times to three different people.

Instead someone picked up. Already knew my history. Asked one question. Fixed it in four minutes.

I sat there genuinely confused for a second.

Then I went and told three people about it the same day.

That is the power of actually feeling seen as a customer. Not wowed. Not discounted. Just seen.

Has a support experience ever genuinely changed how you feel about a brand?

Not the product. Not even the price.

For me it is the moment I realise they actually remembered me.

No re explaining. No starting from scratch. Just someone who already knows the story and picks up right where we left off.

That feeling is so rare now that when it happens it genuinely shocks me.

What is yours?