Over the past decade, the meaning of “customer experience” (CX) in large organisations has changed dramatically. What once was the domain of customer service teams solving real problems for real people has evolved into a cost-optimisation machine — a tug-of-war between genuine service design and corporate savings targets. At the heart of it? A growing obsession with deflection, automation, and control.

From Offshore Call Centres to ‘Customer Experience’

It started with outsourcing. Call centres were moved offshore to reduce costs, but over time, the term “customer service” fell out of fashion. Teams rebranded as “customer experience” departments, touting their constant contact with customers as a new form of insight. Suddenly, these teams believed they were in the business of experience design, without necessarily working with product or UX teams.

In some organisations, this created a strange identity crisis: a CX team that viewed itself as the gatekeeper of customer insights, yet focused primarily on how to avoid talking to customers altogether.

The Age of Deflection

With the rise of digital self-service, cost-cutting efforts doubled down. CX teams became fixated on metrics like call deflection, self-service adoption, and containment rate. The less a customer contacted you, the better your CX numbers looked — at least on paper.

Executives embraced this logic. The result? More bots. More hidden contact forms. And increasingly, more friction for customers who simply wanted help or to leave a service. This wasn’t about making customers happy — it was about making it harder (or costlier) for them to reach a human.

The Birth of the “Voice of Customer” Role

Somewhere in the middle of this transition, a new role emerged: the Voice of Customer (VoC) lead. On paper, this role was about gathering feedback and surfacing it to the business. In practice, it became yet another path for CX teams to assert influence.

VoC teams often bypassed product and UX entirely, feeding customer anecdotes directly to the executive team, sometimes skewed, sometimes incomplete. This created confusion at the top, with execs receiving conflicting insights depending on which team they spoke to.

And because customer service teams weren’t always deeply familiar with product roadmaps or technical limitations, they interpreted customer issues through their own lens, which often didn't align with what the product team actually knew or was planning to address.

Back Onshore… Then Replaced by AI?

About five years ago, the great outsourcing experiment started to unravel. Frustrated by thick accents, poor line quality, and scripted interactions, customers demanded better. Companies brought their call centres back onshore to places like Australia and the US, citing improved empathy and communication.

But now, those same teams are under threat again — not from offshore agents, but from AI ones. Local-accent voice bots and digital agents are being rolled out across industries. Their promise? Faster answers, 24/7 service, and (most importantly for executives) even lower costs.

Yet the strategy hasn’t changed — these bots are often another layer of deflection, not the solution. And unless AI is used thoughtfully, it risks repeating the same cycle of creating distance between companies and the customers they serve.

The Real Opportunity with AI

Despite the current misuse, AI presents a genuine opportunity to transform CX for the better — if companies choose to use it that way.

AI can surface patterns, identify friction points, and help organisations truly understand what customers are trying to do (and why they’re struggling). Used correctly, this insight can flow back into product and service design — empowering teams to fix root problems, not just patch symptoms.

But it requires a shift in mindset: from measuring success by how few customers you speak to, to measuring it by how much value you actually deliver.

Final Thoughts

CX has become a battleground. On one side, service designers and UX professionals are trying to make things smoother, simpler, and more humane. On the other hand, executives focused on deflection, retention-at-all-costs, and shaving down support costs year over year.

In the middle? The customer, too often left frustrated by a system designed to avoid them.

If organisations want to win at CX in the long term, they’ll need to stop treating it as a cost centre and start treating it as a competitive advantage. That means embracing the real voice of the customer, aligning internal teams, and using technology to improve, not just automate, the experience.

Because the best customer experience isn’t the one that’s cheapest to deliver — it’s the one that makes customers want to stay.

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