Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
14 September 2026
The Essentials
Companies have massively automated customer relationships to cut costs, speed up responses and handle more requests. Forms, FAQs, self-service areas, chatbots and automated assistants have made many customer journeys smoother. But this simplification has a downside: some customers now struggle to speak to a person when their situation falls outside the expected scenario. The problem is therefore not automation itself, but the point at which a company optimises the journey so aggressively that it becomes more efficient for the business than for the customer. Quality cannot be measured only by the number of steps removed, but by the ability to solve the problem properly.
For years, customer relationships have been treated as a cost centre that needed to become more efficient. Reducing calls, limiting repetitive requests, directing customers towards forms and helping them find answers on their own all seemed like common sense. In many cases, they were.
Nobody wants to spend twenty minutes on the phone just to change an address, download an invoice or check the status of an order. When the journey is simple, self-service is often a genuine improvement. The customer saves time and the company avoids using an adviser for a task that requires no human intervention.
The problem appears when this logic becomes universal. By optimising the most common situations, some companies have built journeys that work extremely well as long as customers remain inside the expected scenario, but become frustratingly difficult as soon as a problem turns unusual. A billing error, an atypical contractual situation, a disputed delivery or a request that fits none of the available categories can turn an experience designed to be simple into a succession of menus, forms and automated answers.
The relationship has not disappeared. It has simply been replaced by a system designed above all to prevent it from starting.
Simplification Works Perfectly Until the Customer Leaves the Script
Automating customer service responds to an obvious economic reality. A company handling tens of thousands of requests cannot assign an adviser to every interaction. Repetitive questions represent a significant share of the volume, and automating them allows teams to focus on more complex situations.
Digital tools have also improved the experience in undeniable ways. Real-time order tracking, changing a booking in an app, consulting a well-designed FAQ or instantly retrieving a document are usually preferable to a manual exchange. In these situations, the best customer relationship is often one that requires no contact at all.
This efficiency, however, depends on one assumption: the need must be predictable. A form works very well when it contains exactly the option the customer is looking for. A chatbot is useful when it understands the request correctly. A customer portal is convenient as long as the required action has been built into its architecture. The experience deteriorates abruptly when a customer encounters a problem that nobody has turned into a button.
That is where the difference between simplifying a relationship and simplifying a process becomes visible. A process can be perfectly optimised while producing a poor experience for cases that fall outside its logic. The more a company automates, the more it needs to ask what happens when automation is no longer enough.
The Real Irritant Is Not the Chatbot, but the Inability to Escape It
Chatbots illustrate this tension particularly well. Used properly, they can handle simple requests quickly, direct customers to the right resource or collect the information needed before transferring the conversation to an adviser. They save time for both sides.
They become problematic when they stop being an entry point and become a barrier. The customer reformulates the same question several times, receives the same generic responses and gradually realises that there is no option for leaving the automated scenario. At that point, the frustration is no longer caused by automation itself, but by the feeling that the company has actively designed the experience to make human contact impossible.
The same phenomenon exists with forms. A company can offer an extremely comprehensive help centre while still feeling inaccessible if there is no email address, phone number or mechanism for describing a specific situation. Reducing the number of contacts then becomes an objective in its own right, including when contact would actually be the best way to solve the problem.
This logic can generate visible short-term savings. Fewer calls mean fewer advisers, less handling time and a lower average cost per request. What is much harder to measure is the cost of a badly resolved issue: abandonment, repeated complaints, negative reviews, loss of trust or a customer leaving for a competitor.
A cost removed from the customer service centre can therefore reappear elsewhere in a much less attributable form.
By Eliminating Contact, Companies May Also Be Eliminating Information
Customer relationships are not only about solving problems. They are also one of the places where a company learns what is not working in its product, offer or organisation.
An adviser hears the words customers actually use, spots recurring misunderstandings, identifies situations that were never anticipated and sometimes discovers that a commercial policy that made perfect sense on paper becomes absurd in reality. When these exchanges disappear, part of that information disappears with them.
The data generated by automated journeys partly compensates for this loss. A company can measure clicks, abandonment, FAQ searches or the reasons selected in a form. It gains an extremely rich quantitative view, but that view still depends on categories the company itself has defined.
The customer who finds no category matching the problem may become almost invisible in the data. Someone who gives up after three failed attempts with a chatbot appears as an interrupted session, not necessarily as a person who could have explained an important flaw in the journey in a few minutes.
That is why the quality of customer relationships cannot be reduced to journey efficiency or the average cost of an interaction. A relationship also produces understanding, and that understanding may be worth more than the time saved by preventing certain conversations.
Human Contact Does Not Need to Be Everywhere to Become Valuable
The answer is obviously not to put a human adviser behind every action. That would be expensive, often unnecessary and probably less convenient for customers themselves. The real challenge is to reserve human contact for the moments when its value becomes greater than that of automation.
A standardised request can be almost entirely automated. An ambiguous, emotional, financially significant or relationship-threatening situation requires more flexibility. Customers do not necessarily expect a human from the first second; they mainly expect to know that a human remains accessible when the system reaches its limits.
That possibility changes how the whole journey is perceived. A chatbot can be very well accepted if transferring to an adviser works when the conversation becomes complex. A form can be efficient if a free-text field or alternative channel exists for exceptional cases. Self-service can be appreciated as long as it is not turned into an absolute obligation.
Human contact then becomes less frequent but more important. It appears at the moment when the company is genuinely at risk of losing something: trust, loyalty, understanding or customer value. Its cost may be higher than an automated interaction, but its function is no longer merely to process a request. It is to preserve a relationship that the standard system can no longer manage properly.
A Good Customer Relationship Is Not One That Avoids All Contact
The pursuit of simplicity has sometimes led companies to use the wrong indicators. Reducing call volumes, increasing self-service rates or lowering average handling time can represent genuine progress, but only if the customer’s problem is actually being resolved.
A company can report an excellent automation rate while simply transferring part of the difficulty to its customers. It saves internal time because consumers spend more time finding the right option, reformulating their request or restarting a journey that did not work.
The relevant metric is therefore not only the cost of the relationship, but the total effort required to achieve resolution. A genuinely efficient company does not simply reduce the number of contacts; it reduces unnecessary contacts while making necessary ones easier.
That distinction may sound subtle, but it changes the logic of design. The objective is no longer to stop customers from calling, but to make sure they have no reason to call for simple situations and can do so easily when the problem genuinely requires intervention.
Companies were right to automate a large part of their customer relationships. Returning to a model in which every request requires an adviser would be economically irrational and often less comfortable. But they can go too far when they assume that a successful relationship is one in which nobody ever needs to speak to anyone.
Simplicity is not the absence of contact. It is the ability to provide the right level of interaction at the right moment, without forcing customers to understand the company’s internal organisation simply to get an answer.
By trying to make customer relationships less expensive, some companies may have forgotten that they are not only a cost. They are also the place where a brand proves that it can respond when a situation becomes too complex to fit inside a form.
We support companies that want to rethink their marketing and communication to build customer journeys that are better aligned with real customer expectations.
Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
14 September 2026
