The rush to digital services is crushing online customer experience. We need to act NOW.

Since the pandemic started, I’ve heard an increasing number of stories of bad online customer experience. The timing is not a coincidence. Many businesses are at a critical inflection point when it comes to online customer care. In fact, as marketers are focused on “customer experience” as a priority, I’ll argue that customer care might be the most important issue facing the marketing profession right now.

It gets down to this: Nothing could prepare the world for the digital onslaught created by the pandemic. We have been setting eCommerce revenue records every single month since March 2020. But our levels of customer care could not keep up, for reasons I’ll explore in this post today.

We’re not going back …

A McKinsey survey found that companies are three times likelier than they were before the crisis to conduct at least 80 percent of their customer interactions digitally.

We’re three years ahead of schedule, and companies have had to scramble for people and remote services to handle the volume. Hence … the negative customer experience…