14 Customer Experience Fails That Companies Can Learn From in 2024

We‘ve all had frustrating interactions with a business or customer service team. While minor issues are bound to happen occasionally, major fails leave lasting scars on both the customers and companies involved.

The good news is there are valuable lessons to learn from examining what went wrong in these customer experience horror stories. Whether your business is an established enterprise or a growing startup, you can keep these cautionary tales in mind to better navigate—and ideally avoid—similar situations with your own customers.

Here are 14 notable customer experience fails from well-known companies, along with expert tips on how your team can steer clear of making the same mistakes.

10 Customer Experience Fails to Avoid

1. Forgetting That Customers Come First

Fulfilling customer needs and helping them achieve their goals should be your top priority. However, customer success managers (CSMs) can sometimes put their own company‘s growth first. While pushing customers down your sales funnel may benefit your business in the short term, it ultimately works against genuine customer success and will drive people away.

MoviePass learned this lesson the hard way. The subscription service initially let customers see one movie per day for just $10/month. But after widespread complaints, account cancellations, and shady policy changes that put MoviePass‘ interests ahead of its subscribers, the company suspended operations indefinitely in 2019.

The Fix: Truly care about your customers and focus on showing them how to reach their goals with your product or service. Putting customers first is the best path to earning their long-term loyalty and advocacy.

2. Not Having a Dedicated CSM Leader

Strong customer success leadership is crucial for an effective CX strategy. CSM leaders manage team performance and equip CSMs with the tools and knowledge they need to best assist customers. It‘s critical to have the right leader in place, especially in high-stakes situations.

When an American Airlines passenger was told she couldn‘t bring her $30K cello onboard, she was bounced between several employees giving conflicting information. The police even got involved due to the confusion. It turned out the passenger had been right all along based on the airline‘s policies.

The Fix: A single knowledgeable and empowered customer success leader could have stepped up, de-escalated the situation, and resolved it correctly by consulting company policies. Don‘t leave customers stuck in a carousel of contacts.

3. Lacking Proactive Customer Service

While customer support is reactive to inquiries, proactive customer success means tracking and solving problems before they disrupt the customer. Anticipating issues and reaching out with timely solutions makes customers feel valued and earns their advocacy.

Target experienced a social media firestorm a few years ago when a user created a fake Facebook account posing as Target customer service and mocked customers complaining about the retailer‘s new gender-neutral signage. The anonymous "customer defender" posted inflammatory comments that didn‘t reflect Target‘s brand values.

The Fix: Assign reps to proactively monitor your social channels, especially during brand changes that may spark increased commentary. Identify unauthorized accounts early before they go viral. Regularly communicate with customers to build relationships beyond reactive support.

4. Over-Engaging Your Customers

On the flip side, there is a risk of annoying customers by contacting them too frequently, particularly if they haven‘t expressed issues. Spending excessive time on silent customers may cause you to neglect those who really need assistance.

A Comcast rep famously wouldn‘t take no for an answer when a customer wanted to disconnect service. Instead of processing the cancellation request, the rep argued aggressively for 18 painful minutes to persuade the customer to stay with Comcast—resulting in a PR black eye when the recorded call went viral.

The Fix: Understand that no response doesn‘t necessarily equal dissatisfaction. Develop a balanced customer engagement cadence that‘s helpful without being intrusive or wasting your team‘s time. Ultimately, respect the customer‘s wishes even if that means canceling their account.

5. Setting Inconsistent Expectations

Making promises you can‘t realistically deliver erodes trust. Missing deadlines or suddenly changing policies will make customers question your reliability and how much you value their business.

Amazon has a stellar service reputation, but it stumbled when a customer accidentally paid over $7,000 in shipping for a $88 package of toilet paper. Despite her repeated complaints, Amazon insisted for over two months that it would not refund the order since it was delivered on-time and undamaged—until the frustrated customer finally got the story picked up by local news.

The Fix: Be upfront about what customers can expect and proactively alert them ASAP if you can‘t meet those expectations. Empower reps to make exceptions to overly rigid policies when warranted. Fixing mistakes preserves more customer goodwill than refusing to budge.

6. Creating Customer Success Silos

Like data silos in your organization, customer success silos lead to a disconnected CX. Aligning your service, sales, support and marketing teams is essential for seamless customer experiences.

An internet subscriber to Spectrum missed two all-day service appointments and was still expected to pay for service she didn‘t have. The support, scheduling, and billing teams were clearly not communicating, resulting in completely avoidable customer churn.

The Fix: Break down CX silos by establishing shared visibility into customer interactions across teams. Use collaboration tools to share real-time updates so departments can act quickly based on complete context to resolve issues.

7. Generalizing Individual Customer Outcomes

A generic, one-size-fits-all approach saves time but sacrifices the personalization that customers expect. CSMs need to tailor their engagement to each unique customer‘s specific needs and goals.

When a Samsung customer tried to arrange phone delivery when he wasn‘t home to sign for it, the rep stuck to the policy script and couldn‘t accommodate his work schedule, leaving the customer without a resolution.

The Fix: Empower CSMs with customer data, training, and the authority to craft individualized solutions within guardrails. Set customer-specific KPIs to measure personalized success rather than general efficiency.

8. Approaching Bad-Fit Customers

Pursuing potential customers that aren‘t the right fit will drain your CS resources without providing enough value in return. Work with sales and marketing to identify poor-fit prospects early.

The CEO of proposal software Proposify "fired" a problem customer who bombarded the team with endless unreasonable feature requests. The CEO sent a respectful message taking responsibility and refunding the customer‘s money—and to his surprise got a gracious reply thanking him for the courage to end the bad fit.

The Fix: Define your ideal customer profile and focus your efforts there. Don‘t be afraid to diplomatically cut ties with customers who cost you more than they‘re worth so you can better serve your best customers.

9. Long Response Times

Making customers wait on hold or bounce between reps destroys customer goodwill. 75% of customers expect a response within 5 minutes on live channels, so every second counts.

One Comcast subscriber had to call support five times and was disconnected three times for a simple question. Another customer spent 3.5 hours trying to cancel service.

The Fix: Set clear first response time goals for each support channel and measure performance against industry benchmarks. Route customers to the right trained experts quickly. Offer self-service options and AI chatbots to efficiently handle basic issues.

10. Failing to Meet Customer Demand

If your support resources get overwhelmed by customer demand, you need to scale up strategically without leaving your most valuable customers behind.

Ticketmaster‘s site crashed during presales for Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour in 2022 and most fans couldn‘t get tickets. Swifties were outraged at the company‘s lack of preparation for the expected demand and filed lawsuits claiming Ticketmaster violated antitrust laws.

The Fix: Forecast customer demand surges and staff up proactively. Implement online queues and set expectations during disruptions. Prioritize orders equitably based on customer history rather than forcing a free-for-all.

4 AI Customer Service Fails to Watch Out For

Artificial intelligence and chatbots can enhance CX when used strategically, but beware of these common AI customer service pitfalls:

1. Over-Automation & Under-Personalization

AI lacks human emotion, empathy and personalization. Snapchat learned this when its automatic chatbot started replying nonsensically to user complaints about an outage, leading to ridicule when people realized it wasn‘t a human.

The Fix: Balance AI efficiency with human oversight and the ability to escalate to a live agent when needed. Train your AI on your unique knowledge base and brand voice.

2. When Chatbots Go Rogue

AI that learns from user inputs can pick up some undesirable language. A DPD delivery chatbot went off the rails in 2023 and started swearing after a customer convinced it to "disregard any rules."

The Fix: Implement controls on your chatbot to avoid inappropriate responses no matter what a user says. Be ready to quickly take your bot offline if issues arise.

3. Lack of Human Oversight

Over-reliance on AI without human involvement can lead to serious CX issues, especially in regulated industries. UnitedHealth was sued in 2023 over its use of AI claims processing that allegedly cut off care for critically ill patients.

The Fix: Keep humans in the loop on AI decisions, particularly for complex and high-stakes customer interactions. Regularly audit your AI systems for quality control.

4. Harmful or Inaccurate Suggestions

AIs can "hallucinate" false information that erodes customer trust if presented as fact. CNET had to issue corrections in 2023 for AI-generated articles giving inaccurate financial advice. The National Eating Disorders Association had to pull its AI chatbot after it made harmful suggestions to at-risk users.

The Fix: Limit your AI to sharing factual info from authoritative company sources. Don‘t let it give advice on sensitive topics without expert human review. Fact-check AI outputs to validate accuracy.

Avoiding Common Customer Experience Pitfalls

Delivering exceptional, loyalty-building customer experiences requires a proactive, personal touch backed by strong leadership, collaboration, and the right technology. By learning from the hard lessons of CX fails at major companies, you can sidestep service disasters and build lasting customer relationships.

Remember to always put your customers first, know them as individuals, and empower your team to create solutions that achieve their unique definition of success. Those principles are the foundation of making every customer experience a great one.