A few weeks ago I was waiting on a delivery from one of the UK’s largest electrical retailers. The item never arrived.
A couple of hours after the missed delivery window, I got a text asking me to complete a customer satisfaction survey and rate the delivery experience.
I gave it zero. Fair enough, I thought. I hadn’t received the delivery, so there wasn’t much of an experience to rate.
Then, a few minutes later, a second text arrived:
“Have you been updated on your next delivery time?”
That raised a fairly obvious question.
If the retailer had already registered that my delivery hadn’t happened, why was I being asked to rate it?
The Technology Wasn’t the Main Issue
From the customer’s side, both messages did what they were supposed to do. The survey arrived, I could complete it, and the follow-up message came through shortly afterwards.
The problem was how those messages worked together.
One part of the customer journey was asking me to review a completed delivery. Another was asking whether I had been updated about a replacement delivery.
Those two messages made sense individually. Together, they created a completely different experience.
I was being asked to rate something that hadn’t happened, followed almost immediately by a message acknowledging that the delivery was still unresolved.
Why This Matters as AI and Automation Grow
This is a fairly simple example, but it highlights a wider problem for businesses adding more automation into their customer communications.
Automation can repeat whatever process sits underneath it. If the triggers, customer status and next action are poorly connected, automating more of the journey can spread those problems across more interactions.
A person looking at the full customer history might spot the contradiction before sending the next message. An automated workflow can only respond to the information and rules it has been given.
That makes the design of the customer journey increasingly important.
Start With the Journey
Before adding another automated message, survey or AI-driven interaction, it is worth asking a few basic questions.
What triggers this communication?
What should have happened before the customer receives it?
What information do we already have about their situation?
What has the customer already been told?
What should happen if the expected journey changes?
Answering those questions first gives automation a much better foundation to work from.
When the journey is clear, automation can help make communication faster and more consistent. When the journey has gaps, automation can make those gaps much more visible.
In my case, the problem wasn’t receiving an automated text.
It was receiving two automated texts that appeared to have completely different ideas about where I was in the customer journey.
