Human Moments That Matter in an AI‑Driven Customer Experience

AI is everywhere. But what does it mean for your business? Gartner is the world authority on AI with more than 200,000 client conversations and more than 6,000 written insights on AI in 2025 alone. Leaders across the C-suite just like you are partnering with Gartner to turn AI ambition into impact. Go to Gartner.com/AI to learn more. Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Alexis Waringa. We recently had the chance to visit Phoenix, Arizona for Gartner's CIO leadership forum, one of our premier conferences for CIOs and IT leaders, and the first of several taking place around the world this year. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing some of the standout insights and sessions that reflect the challenges and opportunities leaders are navigating right now in the age of AI. Today, we're starting with Gartner distinguished BP analysts Don Schibnery. Don joined us last year to discuss machine customers and autonomous business, and in a similar vein, he'll explore how to scale customer experience without losing the human connection that actually builds loyalty. Drawing on real world examples from travel and financial services to retail and public sector leadership, Don challenges CIOs to rethink how technology is designed, deployed, and governed, so enhances customer relationships rather than replacing them. Now, here's Don Schibnery. Good afternoon. I'm Don Schibnery. I'm a distinguished BP analyst with Gartner, and I work in our CIO and AI leaders research group, but I also work on customer experience. My background is actually marketing, and in my time at Gartner, I've actually kind of looked at this intersection of technology and customers. So today's presentation is more of a love letter to organizations about what they can do when it comes to CXN technology. So what you may not know is that over 93% of executives that were serving this is from a Wall Street Journal article. Tell us that they admit that their customer experience is broken. They actually know it's important. They know it's a critical part of driving revenue and growth at the company, but they just don't seem to be able to get their heads wrapped around it. That's been my experience doing research on CXGartner. Everybody likes the idea, but they just can't get their heads wrapped around it. So this is really important because without a good customer experience, I think it's very hard to achieve sustainable growth. And we can all answer that question ourselves as customers. We know that people that treat us well, that actually see us as human beings, tend to get more of our business than those organizations that don't. Let me tell you a quick story. I travel a lot like many of you do and I stayed at the Marriott Hotel in Vancouver, Canada. I was here for a briefing this was last year. And I'm a big fan of Marriott. I use the app. I use the technology. I checked into the hotel when I was in the Uber from the airport. I got a digital key. I didn't even talk to anybody at the front desk. I went to my room. I ordered room service on the app the whole nine yards. And that's what I felt like. And Marriott gave me that opportunity. But the next day, I decided to have breakfast in the restaurant itself. And basically, when I sat down, the server came up to me and said, "Hi, my name is Dwayne. What's your name?" And I don't buy any of you, but I was kind of startled there. You know, as a business traveler, you're just used to kind of being in your zone. But Dwayne actually took the opportunity to introduce himself and ask for what my name was. And I answered that question. And we had a nice little chat. Now, AI did not do that. A human being did. I felt like I was seen by Dwayne. And it actually made it for an overall great experience. I actually sent the hotel manager a note to recognize Dwayne for what he did. Because it doesn't happen very often. And I think that what I worry about a lot is that organizations are using AI and other types of technology to get between them and their human customers that we run the risk of over-automating relationships. So what I'd like to do is kind of bring us back a little bit to the other side of the equation when we talk about humanity. So what is a moment of humanity? This is my quick definition. It's anytime you are seen as a person in any type of experience. And we can all, we all know what those are. We know we know when we're seen and we know when we're not seen. And to me, that is something that we need to kind of rethink when we're looking at this technology and how it applies to our business and how we interact with customers. So when do moments of humanity happen? You might also think of them as moments that matter. First of all, when something goes wrong, how many of you have had an experience where you had to call customer service for something and you were met with bots or automated systems? You don't really feel like you were seen, do you? You don't really feel like they cared about your problem very much. Maybe you ultimately got it solved, but that's the prime moment for a moment of humanity. Or if you're feeling vulnerable or confused or overwhelmed in a situation, that's another one. That happens a lot when we travel and our flights are cancelled and we don't know what to do next. Or you want to seek reassurance and accountability. I was talking with a client today at a one-on-one meeting. She works for a bank and she said that there are times when people just need to be reassured that everything's going to be okay. Like maybe there was a fraud attempt on your bank account or something bad happened in with one of your investments. Sometimes you need another human being to tell you everything's going to be okay. I'm with you on this experience. Not a probably friendly sounding bot that will just tell you what you need to do next. And lastly, it's not always about you. Expressing gratitude to somebody else would be considered a moment of humanity in my book. So let me ask you this question and I'm not going to ask you to answer it out loud, but how are you feeling as a customer these days? Do you feel like more and more automation is making its way into your relationships with both your suppliers and even your personal life? Do you feel like you're being seen? You are the best judge of that. And one of the reasons that I talk about this, and you might be asking, "What does this have to do with my role as a CIO?" I'd like to believe that we don't stop being people when we come to work and that each of us has a need to be seen and to be treated as a human being. And as I've been working with CIOs over the years, I try to tell them that you have more control and more influence over CX than you think because, obviously, technology is a huge part of how we interact with our customers today. So this is where, you know, think of this as a little reminder that you have a role to play in your organization's customer experience. So with that, I'd like to cover three topics. The first one is balancing empathy with efficiency, which is basically kind of the key tug of war that takes place in organizations today. Your ability to see a moment of humanity and then be able to act on it. So all of our clients use technology, including AI, to drive efficiency in their organizations. In our CEO research, which I also work on, efficiency and cost management are really the number two priority behind growth. The customer priority is like number five or number six. So that tells you something right there. But a lot of CEOs want to use AI to reduce headcount. You probably have heard the stories of some organizations saying, "Hey, we wiped out 80% of our customer service agents and replaced it with AI." What you don't know is they end up hiring back many of those people. So the pressure is on to reduce cost to become more efficient. And right now, right or wrong, people are saying, "AI can do it." But that is not going to be true in every case. AI could not introduce itself to me in that restaurant and ask me what my name was and how I'm doing. So here's a few examples of companies that went the opposite direction. What I would call moments of mechanization. Netflix, if you're a Netflix subscriber, you might remember about two or three years ago, they were having some problems because they changed their password sharing rules and their customer service was almost completely automated. So people feel that they weren't being listened to, that their complaints weren't being addressed, and everything, they just were, they were not happy. So they dropped a lot of the subscriptions. Netflix was able to turn that around and actually are on a role again, but they had their own issues. Salesforce, the same thing, also in 2023, many of the mid-sized enterprise customers felt like they were just a number that the customer service or the advice was all automated. And basically, they started to go off and joined other companies like HubSpot because they were tired of being seen as not that important. Then lastly, Deutsche Bonn in Germany, they have a lot of older writers and they made these technology decisions that sometimes excluded them, whether it's Kiosk or mobile applications. So many of those writers took other forms of transportation. Again, all of those companies were able to recover, but my question is, why get to the crisis moment in the first place? How did that happen? How did automation take over for empathy? In truth, empathy is comprised of three main ideas. First one is emotional empathy, which is probably we're all pretty familiar with. That's the ability to listen to others and to share their feelings and to connect with them. Cognitive empathy is actually understanding a customer's intent by inferring where they are in the relationship. This is about really putting yourselves in the customer's shoes. Not to say, I'm sorry this is happening to you, but boy, I understand that this might be really frightening for you when we need to do something about it. The third part of empathy is compassionate empathy, which is about taking action. So the first one is to connect. The second one is to understand and the third one is to act. If you are going to be empathetic as an organization, you literally have to do all three. Now, some of these things can be done by machines, but by far the vast amount can be done by human beings. An example of one of my favorites, saying you might be familiar with this, during the pandemic, a woman had her dog pass away unexpectedly. So she wanted to return to Chewy, which is an online pet food retailer, some unopened bags of dog food. What she got back was instead is just donated to your local shelter. We're very sorry about your loss. Don't worry about the dog food. You don't have to worry about the money. And then the next day or the day after she had a bouquet of flowers, expressing sympathy for the loss of her dog. That to me is empathy in full action. And by the way, it was actually built into the DNA of the company. It was expected to be able to do that. Because Chewy knows the emotional connections that people have with their pets. And that filtered through into these very difficult situations. A personal story from myself-- anybody fly through Chicago or here recently? OK. All the runway construction? It's a mess. So of course, I had a very comfortable two-hour connection time between flights. I was flying from the East Coast back to California. That connection time went from two hours to 20 minutes. OK. It's possible. It's doable. But I was literally at one end of the terminal. And I had to get to the other end. It was about a mile. And the absence, it'll take you 30 minutes to walk. And I said, I will be stranded if I do that. So I'm in relatively good shape. I was running through the airport to do to make my flight. And in the middle of that, I get this text message, which I wasn't able to read because I was so focused on running and not collapsing. Take a deep breath. We're holding your next flight for a few extra minutes. You'll arrive at gate B25. We would appreciate it if you could make your way directly to the gate. How many of you have ever gotten a message like that before? You can say what you want about United Airlines. Somebody figured out that this type of situation of missing your connection is one that creates a lot of anxiety. This may have even been an automated message, which is fine. But a human being figured out we need to do something to reassure this person if they're about to miss her flight. And this to me is a great example of that. So in terms of balancing efficiency with empathy, yes, we all have to use technology to become more efficient. And there are some customer processes that can be made more efficient. Bots can be very good at answering certain questions and doing certain things, but not everything. So one possible thing for you to think about is to partner with some of your customer facing teams to audit some of these processes and figure out, is there an opportunity where automation can actually help the situation and still retain your empathy like with United Airlines? But also I would tell you to recognize and reward your own team for when they say, hey, you know what? If we did this thing, we could alleviate this anxiety and create a better experience for people. Looking to stay ahead of the competition, attend a Gartner conference. Our conference has provided attendees with invaluable insights and ideas. And the content is always relevant and tailored to key issues being faced by leaders in every core business area. Be it finance, HR, sales, IT, supply chain, or marketing. Join us at a Gartner conference to learn about emerging trends and gain new perspectives that you won't be able to find anywhere else. - So the second thing I wanted to talk about is being able to see moments of humanity. So how many of you are familiar with customer journey mapping? This is one of the primary ways that we use to understand the journey that a customer goes through for a particular job to be done. The primary way to do that is from voice of the customer and voice of the customer initiative. And this is where we collect feedback from different ways of customers. One is direct feedback is when they talk to us directly about something. The second is indirect when they talk to us but they're not quite sure we're listening. An example of that may be a social media post or sending a complaint in or in the B2B space, having a discussion with the field service engineer, whatever that looks like. They're talking to you but they're not quite sure that you're listening. The third area, which I find personally the most interesting is inferred feedback, which is what can I learn about you by watching you observing your behavior. A true commitment to voice of the customer involves all three forms. With that insight, it actually could help you spot those moments of humanity. And most organizations that they usually have it, it's just split in silos. So one of the things that CIOs can do is help, there's platforms out there like from Qualtrics, Medallia, Oracle, Salesforce, that can collect all of this customer information and organize it. So that's one thing you can be involved in. But let me share with you a quick example that I learned about from the state of California. I made a presentation in Sacramento last year and I met the CIO, Leanna Cremens Bailey. And basically, this is a scene from her touring the LA Fire, the Burn area. Now, basically just getting out of the office and being with your customers, in this case, being with the citizens of LA was really important. What Leanna did is she was part of an entourage of state officials from Sacramento touring the Burn area. She was able to talk to a number of the victims of the fire. And through those discussions, she realized that these citizens had no idea where to start to access the many services that California offers in situations like this. So what she did is she directed her team, the California Department of Technology, and within 24 hours, they created what they call the LA Wild Fire Portal for citizens to be able to access the services that they needed to get their lives back on track. And they iterated constantly in the subsequent days to account for languages in different situations and different services that came to the forefront. And to me, I love this example because she could have done this potentially in Sacramento from the comfort of her office, but she decided to get out and meet with customers and be able to demonstrate empathy but more importantly, take action to help them. So great example. Now, what can you do as a CIO? I mentioned the voice of the customer being an advocate for that and also introducing technology solutions that make it easy for your customer-facing teams to collect and process and share that information. We actually have a magic quadrant for voice of the customer platforms if you're interested. There's also something called the voice of the employee. What we've learned in our customer experience research that employees, frontline employees specifically, have a lot of insight into customers and what they want and what they need, but often they are ignored or not listened to. So if we give them an opportunity to share what they know, collect it, marry it with the voice of the customer information, you have a really solid base of insight from which to build and do work. You could also sponsor human-centered design training for some of the customer-facing functions. Maybe they don't know customer journey mapping or they don't understand it. You could help teach them with our help. Then lastly, I would just say, get out of the office and be with your customers. How many of you have been out with the customer say in the last three months? In past jobs that I've had corporate jobs, we were required to get out and spend time with customers even when I was a marketer. So I can't emphasize enough the importance of that. And it also sends the message to your employees and to your peers that you are devoting your time to be with your customers in person. So the last thing I'll share with you is how do you act on moments of humanity? And the biggest finding we found-- this is from some research last year-- the number one driver to improving the results of a CX program was when leadership took barriers out of the way of the front line. They made it easy for front line to be able to serve customers. That had the biggest impact on the CX experience. And what's interesting, it sounds kind of simple, but removing barriers was more important than the other areas about, hey, we're committed to CX or somebody's accountable for what's happening at the usual corporate stuff. It was actually removing barriers that made things easier and led to better results for customer experience. Now, one of my colleagues also flew United. This is not a commercial for United Airlines, by the way, although they are pretty good. I wanted to read you something that she wrote me. She said, on my birthday, I flew United Airlines. I was surprised when the flight attendant brought me an open snack box with all the contents carefully arranged like a small gift basket. With a birthday note tucked in that was signed by the other flight attendants, the captain and the first officer. So you might imagine that Deb-- your name. was in an elite flyer like a Premier One K. She wasn't. She was an economy passenger in a middle seat and she still got this treatment. I kind of marvel at that because this is an example of a crew that was given the permission to actually act on a moment of humanity. They went to all this effort and somebody at United made it easy for them. They took a barrier away to recognize a guest on the flight. Again, a really, really great example. Anybody had anything like that happen to them? Is something comes out of the blue and you're surprised? Yeah. It's very, very few in-fair between. That's when we find them, we try to talk about them. What do employees need to act on these moments of humanity, celebrating in birthday, holding a flight, sending a message saying, "We're sorry about the loss of your dog." Well, basically, this is not just the CIO, but this is the entire organization. How about this permission to be human? Many organizations say, "We're customers first. The customer is always in the center of our decisions." Then when you call customer service, you're faced with a 10-branch IVR with no hope of talking to a live person. Part of this is actually calling, making sure that if you say, "This is really important thing you act on it." The second is access to customer context. This is all about customer data. When your frontline employees are actually working with customers, do they have everything that they need? Do they have the full picture so they can serve them appropriately? For most of our clients, their customer data is scattered in many different silos. It's not integrated, and that makes it harder for people to actually do what they need to do. The third is guided workflow recommendations. This would be something like next best actions or recommended next steps. This is something you can help with because you are already using and thinking about automated workflows and ways to make recommendations to employees. Lastly, is real-time analytics and performance feedback. Again, many of us are being asked to continuously improve our performance. The only way we can do that is through data on a very timely basis. What can you do as a CIO to act on moments of humanity? The first is, maybe even adopt the term. When you're looking at IT requirements or you're working with a new team on a customer-facing project, ask, "Where are we focused on making this customer feel seen?" or, "How do we demonstrate empathy in the way that we are approaching this particular solution?" Definitely invest in a voice of the customer platform. I can't emphasize enough how important this is. I know you have many priorities, but without the right level of customer insight, how do you even know what solution is going to work? Usually what happens is the person that's screen is allowed is what gets where the resources go. The third is build easy access options and automated workflows to connect the customer to a human employee. Maybe automated systems are not the default anymore. Maybe they're the exception. Again, these are all potential situations that you can be involved in. You can have visibility too and you can actually take action on. With that, we all know that AI is a very powerful tool, but it's your people that create moments of humanity. Will your organization be remembered for its efficiency or do you want it remembered for its humanity? I believe that in an AI-mediated world, customers don't just reject technology. They reject dehumanization. Thanks for listening to this latest episode of ThinkCast, that was Gartner Distinguished VP analyst Don Shivenrife. To learn more about this topic, follow the links in the notes. ThinkCast will be back wherever you listen to podcasts a week from today. In the meantime, please rate, review, subscribe, and share with a colleague, so neither of you will miss it. ThinkCast is a production of Gartner. This podcast may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's permission. It consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization which should not be construed as statements of fact. Content provided by other speakers is expressly the views of the speaker and/or their organization. While the information contained in this podcast has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information. Although Gartner research may address legal and financial issues, Gartner does not provide legal or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such.