We had something to celebrate at the Ziptone editorial office. The Ziptone customer contact dictionary was approaching 1.500 entries. All terms relevant to the customer contact profession. From AHT to the Swedish model, but also acronyms such as PII and BYOM. The editors compile the dictionary themselves, but called upon the readers for customer contact term number 1500.

 

Ziptone reader Claudia came up with the concept of 'connection,' and with that, she earned a cake, because we had promised one for the 1500th dictionary word. Immediately afterwards, a customer journey was initiated by the editorial team. From orientation to the ordering process: everything ran like clockwork. Who is going to deliver that cake? When? And above all: which cake? Gefelicitaart.nl has a high score on Trustpilot (4,3 out of five) (in addition to an annoying and therefore effective radio commercial). Brand awareness and positive experiences apparently went hand in hand here once again.

The cake (naturally featuring the Ziptone logo) was ordered on Friday and was scheduled for delivery on Saturday. To be fair, we were glad that the bakers were able to arrange all of this so smoothly.

But the route to Claudia involves some sharp turns, and the cake saw every edge of the box during its own journey. Perhaps the delivery driver was in a rush, traffic was bad, there was a road diversion, or something personal was getting in the way. Parcel delivery drivers are the (often underpaid) heroes of the logistics chain, and 'management is always to blame'—that is my starting point.

The cake arrived at its final destination slightly misshapen. It was unmistakably still a cake, but the party was also a bit ruined. Claudia (you know, the one with the word 'connection', but also a customer contact specialist) got on the line with a photo as proof, but assured us three times that the cake otherwise tasted really excellent.

We decided to give it a try sending an email: there must be smart and understanding people at Gefelicitaart.nl. After all, how else do you get thousands of fragile cream cakes to all your customers undamaged?

We received a response on Monday that removed all friction. Friendly, apologies, and a choice of two solutions. It certainly helped that we were able to send a photo: that left little room for discussion. While some companies make optimal use of that space by citing force majeure, fine print, or SLAs, Gefelicitaart.nl was generous: a new cake or a refund. That is how simple good service is.

Who is Sophie?

But then the doubt crept in. Was Sophie, with her perfect emails and fitting solution, actually human? Her carefully formulated sentences—apologies, naturally that wasn't intentional, shall we send a new cake, or would you like a credit note—could easily have rolled out of any random LLM. Was it really Sophie's job to write those kinds of sentences herself? Or was that done by an LLM, and could Sophie simply check the text before pressing 'send'? Or was that check superfluous because an algorithm, rather than a human, had determined based on 25 variables that a credit note was the best solution here?

Sophie had no last name and could not be found on LinkedIn either. And what customer service representative enjoys assessing dozens of misshapen cakes every day? Or was that task assigned long ago to another AI agent, specializing in comparing the delta between 'ordered cake' and 'delivered cake'? There are bakeries that use image recognition and machine learning for quality assessment.

I can hear the reader thinking: but answering complex cake questions—think of a super-special cake that needs to be urgently sent by 'exceptional convoy' to an uninhabited island in the South Pacific, but gets stuck at a small local airfield four hundred kilometers away—surely a human is needed. And yes, even if Sophie really were a flesh-and-blood customer service representative: job well done. Because even routine work can be customer-oriented and is very often still human work.

Of course, people will continue to work in customer contact. But whether customer contact is always human work is actually no longer something that can be said with certainty. Let alone that people always make the difference. And so, with customer experience, we are gradually rolling into the uncanny valley. Never heard of it? Just look it up in the Ziptone dictionary.

(Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

Case, Customer Experience, Featured, Opinions