Your AI Chatbot Isn't Fixing Your Customer Problem (It's Just Hiding It)

You ready? I'm not here to make friends with your Chief Innovation Officer.

Last week I sat down with Ryan Rael—a guy who's basically seen every CRM dumpster fire you can imagine—and he dropped a truth bomb so obvious that I'm still recovering: Your executives are making million-dollar decisions based on vibes.

Not data. Not customer feedback. Vibes.

The $50K Band-Aid You're Calling "Innovation"

Here's a story that'll make you physically uncomfortable:

One of Ryan's clients was absolutely thrilled about their shiny new AI chatbot. Like, popping-champagne-at-the-board-meeting thrilled. Why? Because it handled 750 customer inquiries in a week without adding headcount.

"Look at these savings!" they said.

"Look at this efficiency!" they cheered.

Ryan looked at the data and said: "Why the hell are 80% of these people asking where their order is?"

Spoiler alert: They shouldn't have to ask in the first place.

You just spent five figures on an AI tool to efficiently handle a problem you created by being terrible at proactive communication. That's like buying a really expensive mop because you refuse to fix the leak in your ceiling.

Congratulations, you played yourself.

Your Customer Experience Has Multiple Personality Disorder

Here's what's actually happening in your scaling company right now:

Your marketing team promises customers the moon. Your sales team sells them a slightly different moon. Your product team delivers a moon-shaped rock. And your support team is like, "Sir, this is a Wendy's."

Ryan nailed it when he pointed out that as companies grow, leaders get further and further from actual customers. You used to talk to every single person who bought from you. Now? You're in a conference room debating customer experience strategies with people who haven't spoken to a customer since Q2 2023.

The result? Your customer is trying to build a relationship with someone who has multiple personality disorder. And you're wondering why your retention sucks.

The One Metric That Actually Matters (No, Really)

I asked Ryan what success looks like when you cut through all the BS. His answer was so simple it hurt:

Net customers acquired + Net customers retained.

That's it. That's the tweet.

Not your NPS score that you manipulate by only surveying happy customers. Not your "innovation index" or whatever made-up KPI your consultant sold you. Just: Are you getting good customers? Are you keeping them?

Every department—finance, engineering, marketing, that weird team in the corner nobody talks to—should wake up every morning and ask: "Is what I'm doing today helping us get or keep the right customers?"

If the answer is no, why are you doing it?

If the answer is "I don't know," you have bigger problems than I can solve in a blog post.

The Reality Check Nobody's Giving You

Your finance team is fighting with customers over PDF vs JPEG formats.

Your engineering team is building features nobody asked for because they're "cool."

Your support team is reactively putting out fires instead of proactively preventing them.

And your leadership team is making decisions based on what feels right instead of what your customers are literally telling you they need.

This is why your competitors are eating your lunch. Not because they have better technology. Because they're actually listening to their customers instead of guessing what they want.

What You Should Actually Do

Stop treating customer experience like it's someone else's job. It's not the responsibility of your Customer Success Manager, your Support Lead, or that intern you hired to "own CX."

Customer centricity is a wall-to-wall endeavor. Either everyone cares about the customer, or nobody really does.

Start here:

1. Talk to your actual customers. Like, today. Not through a survey. Actual conversations.

2. Stop celebrating efficiency wins that just mask deeper problems.

3. Pick the one metric that matters and make every team accountable to it.

4. Ask yourself: "Are we being proactive or reactive?" (Hint: You're being reactive.)

The good news? This is fixable. The bad news? It requires you to admit that maybe—just maybe—your gut feeling about what customers want has been wrong.

Want to hear the full conversation with Ryan? Watch the episode here. He drops way more truth bombs about breaking down silos, why your tech stack is probably making things worse, and how to actually validate decisions instead of guessing your way to mediocrity.

Trust me, it's the kind of conversation that'll make you rethink everything you thought you knew about scaling a customer-centric company.

P.S. If you're reading this and thinking, "But our company is different, our customers don't mind..."—they do. They're just too polite to tell you. Or they've already churned and you're calling it "natural attrition." Either way, you're lying to yourself, and your board's going to figure it out eventually. Might as well fix it now while you still have customers left to save.

Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H, human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.