Rushed AI, Bloated Journeys, Silent Channels—None of This Is Accidental
DCX Links | December 28, 2025
Welcome to the DCX weekly roundup of customer experience insights!
This week’s stories expose a hard reality: customers aren’t being failed by technology. They’re being failed by leadership.
Rushed AI deployments, bloated journeys, vague communication, silent social channels, and brand decisions that erase hard-earned meaning all have one thing in common. They weren’t accidents. They were choices—made without enough proximity to customer reality, emotional impact, or long-term trust.
The damage rarely shows up as a single breaking point. It shows up as friction customers absorb until they stop. Stop trusting. Stop engaging. Stop staying. And by the time dashboards light up, the decision that caused the problem is already months old.
These stories are a reminder that great CX doesn’t come from smarter tools or louder strategies. It comes from judgment, restraint, and leadership willing to ask harder questions before customers are forced to answer them for you.
Let’s get into it.
This week’s must-read links:
Human-Centred AI Starts With Who Has Power in the Room
Great Experiences Start When Leaders Design for Real Constraints
Why Unclear Communication Creates Panic. Even When Nothing Is Wrong
The Future of CX Isn’t Smarter AI—it’s Better Judgment
DCX Stat of the Week: Nearly half of social complaints disappear into silence
DCX Case Study of the Week: HBO Max’s Brand U-Turn
Human-Centred AI Is a Leadership Choice, Not a Feature
At the recent UnConference, Clare Muscutt, Founder and CEO of Women in CX, led a session to cut through the AI noise. The key message? The real risk in CX is not automation moving too fast. It’s leadership outsourcing judgment, empathy, and inclusion to tools that reflect whatever we feed them.
Why it matters:
AI is widening the gap between promise and practice, especially where governance and intent are weak.
Trust erodes faster than efficiency gains when customers feel trapped, misheard, or manipulated.
Bias is not accidental. It shows up when the same voices design, train, and deploy systems in isolation.
What’s happening:
CX teams are being told to “do AI now” without fixing data quality, journey ownership, or decision rights.
Real wins show up when AI removes effort without removing humanity, like guided self-service or agent support that preserves recovery time.
Failures cluster around hostile loops, false personalization, and automation that optimizes metrics while draining empathy.
The catch:
AI mirrors organizational values. Broken governance produces broken experiences.
Inclusion is a design requirement, not a cultural add-on. Diverse inputs change outputs.
Speed without guardrails bankrupts trust.
The CX To-Do:
Keep humans in the loop, test against known truths, and demand evidence before scale.
🔗 Go Deeper: LinkedIn
Great Experiences Start When Leaders Design for Real Constraints
This TED Talk isn’t about scarcity. It’s about customer empathy under constraint. Navi Radjou shows how entrepreneurs across India, Africa, China, and South America design experiences that work because they start with real limits. Time, money, energy, access. That mindset maps directly to the CX problems many teams are wrestling with right now.
Why it matters:
Customers don’t want more features. They want experiences that respect their constraints.
Complexity often shows up as friction in journeys, especially for underserved or stressed customers.
The fastest way to break trust is to design for ideal conditions instead of real ones.
What’s happening:
Frugal innovation focuses on solving the core problem with what’s already available. Mobile phones instead of banks. SMS instead of broadband. Simple tools instead of over-engineered systems.
These solutions succeed because they reduce effort, lower cognitive load, and meet customers where they are.
Many Western CX programs still optimize for “more for more.” More channels. More tech. More rules. Customers experience that as harder, not better.
Between the lines:
CX teams already operate in frugal conditions. Limited budget, limited headcount, rising expectations.
The winners redesign journeys around simplicity, reuse, and accessibility instead of chasing the next shiny platform.
Doing more with less isn’t about cost cutting. It’s about sharper problem definition.
The CX To-Do:
Audit one journey and strip it back to the essential customer outcome. Then design around the constraint, not around the org chart.
🔗 Amazon: Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth
Why Unclear Communication Creates Panic. Even When Nothing Is Wrong
This piece from CX Stories lands on a deceptively simple CX truth. Experiences don’t fail because systems break. They fail because communication does. When customers lack context, their brains fill the gap with fear, confusion, and worst-case assumptions.
Why it matters:
Customers react to what they think is happening, not what’s actually happening.
Ambiguous messages trigger stress responses. Panic, calls, complaints, escalation.
Poor communication quietly inflates cost. More contacts. More reassurance. More cleanup.
What’s happening:
The examples are mundane but powerful. A plane announcement. A train board. A booking screen. An email subject line.
In each case, the underlying service was fine. The failure lived entirely in how information was framed.
CX teams often obsess over process, pricing, and platforms while treating communication as an afterthought.
Between the lines:
Clarity is the cheapest CX lever you have.
Tone, sequencing, and context shape emotional response more than accuracy alone.
Internal language leaks into customer moments unless teams actively design for how messages land.
The CX To-Do:
Audit your top customer notifications and frontline scripts. Rewrite them from the customer’s emotional state, not the company’s operational logic.
🔗 Go Deeper:
The Future of CX Isn’t Smarter AI—it’s Better Judgment
Shep Hyken’s 2026 CX predictions land on a familiar truth, but with sharper edges. Customers are more informed, less patient, and quicker to judge experiences against the best they have ever had. AI is in the mix, but it does not replace the basics. It raises the bar for them.
Why it matters:
Customers benchmark you against standout experiences across industries, not direct competitors.
Speed has become a signal of respect. Wasted time feels personal.
Trust now sits at the core of CX. Miss a promise and the experience collapses fast.
What’s happening:
Proactive service is gaining ground. Fixing issues before customers notice them is becoming table stakes.
Employees are demanding the same quality of experience customers expect. Broken tools show up downstream.
AI self-service is more accepted, but customers still want humans when it counts.
The catch:
AI will not replace live agents anytime soon. It augments them.
Personalization is no longer impressive. It is assumed.
Customers know when they are talking to a machine. Transparency builds credibility. Pretending otherwise erodes it.
The CX To-Do:
Audit where time is wasted, map employee friction, and decide where AI supports judgment instead of faking it.
🔗 Read the Full List of Predictions: Shep Hyken
DCX Stat of the Week
DCX Stat: Nearly half of social complaints disappear into silence
DCX Stat: 43% of customer complaints posted on social media receive no response from the company, up from 32% in 2022—even though digital is now the primary way customers complain.
Takeaway: Most CX teams say they’re “omnichannel,” but their operational reality is still built around phones and tickets. If you don’t give social and digital complaints clear ownership, SLAs, and recovery playbooks, you’re effectively training your angriest customers to escalate publicly and defect quietly.
🔗 Source: National Customer Rage Survey 2025 – Customer Care Measurement & Consulting & W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University
🔗 MORE STATS: Daily Stats on Substack Notes
DCX Case Study of the Week
HBO Max’s Brand U-Turn
CX Challenge:
After merging HBO Max with Discovery content and shortening the name to Max in 2023, the streaming service faced confusion and a weakened connection with its core audience — viewers who associated HBO Max with premium, high-quality storytelling. The simplified Max brand diluted that legacy and created uncertainty about the platform’s identity.
Action Taken:
In mid-2025, WBD announced that it would revert the service name from Max back to HBO Max, restoring the iconic brand identity that audiences recognize. The company rolled out the change globally starting July 9, 2025, with automatic updates across apps and websites.
Result:
While exact metrics tied to the rebrand are not yet disclosed publicly, social conversation around the announcement spiked dramatically — trending online with a 3,500% increase in mentions — and fans reacted positively to the nostalgic return of the HBO name. Restoring a well-recognized identity is expected to reinforce subscriber confidence and strengthen brand loyalty in a competitive streaming market.
Lesson for CX Pros:
Strong brands act as mental shortcuts. When customers already have well-formed memory structures tied to a name, logo, or tone, they expend less cognitive effort deciding whether to trust, try, or stay loyal. Removing familiar cues forces customers to “re-learn” what a brand stands for — increasing friction at exactly the wrong moment. Before changing names or visual identity, CX leaders should evaluate whether they’re dismantling a shortcut customers rely on.
Quote:
“Returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect…” — David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO
Further Reading:
🔗 The rebrand that went full circle: HBO Max to new HBO Max (The Conversation)
Have a case study to share? Reply and let me know!
🔚 Final Thought
The common thread this week isn’t AI, channels, or brands—it’s accountability. Experience is shaped by the decisions leaders make when speed, scale, and simplicity collide with trust, clarity, and human impact. When judgment is missing, customers feel it first. When it’s present, friction disappears quietly.
The real question for CX leaders now isn’t what to deploy next.
It’s this:
Which customer experiences today are the direct result of decisions you’d still defend if you had to live them as a customer tomorrow?
Thank you!
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