The Wall Street Journal’s latest report, titled “Customers Are Madder Than Ever”, makes one thing unmistakably clear: despite decades of investment in customer experience, American consumers are reaching their limit.
77% reported a product or service problem in the past year, the highest level ever recorded, while the effort required to resolve those issues continues to climb.
Even more alarming, 64% of customers who experienced a problem feel rage about it.
The Journal’s data exposes a growing imbalance that every leader should be alarmed by: operational efficiency improves each year, but the actual customer experience continues to decline. This is happening as AI is about to drive efficiency to new heights, raising the risk that the gap between what companies optimize and what customers actually feel becomes a serious crisis.
We Made Buying Effortless and Made the Post-Purchase Experience Exhausting.
Over the past decade, companies have invested billions to make shopping faster and easier: one-click checkout, same-day delivery, frictionless returns, and endless self-service options. The front end of commerce has never been smoother.
But, as the Wall Street Journal shows through example after example, that ease evaporates the moment something goes wrong. Customers who can order almost anything instantly often find themselves trapped in automated loops, blocked by chatbots that can’t resolve issues, or bounced between teams that lack the context or authority to help.
The experience is seamless until it really matters. That’s when the journey breaks. We enhanced convenience but neglected care—and customers feel the imbalance viscerally.
The Efficiency–Experience Gap Didn’t Happen by Accident
This gap exists because companies are inherently better at designing for efficiency than for experience. Efficiency is easier: it’s measurable, functional, and delivers a clear return on effort and investment. Leadership can see immediate gains in reduced costs, improved throughput, and faster cycle times.
Experience design is much more challenging. It requires understanding emotion, context, memory, and human behavior—factors that don’t easily fit into spreadsheets. Few organizations have the expertise or cross-functional alignment needed to design for these moments, so experience work often becomes fragmented or deprioritized.
Companies tend to optimize what is easiest to quantify, while the aspects of the journey that shape how customers feel are often underdeveloped. This capability gap, not a lack of intention, is why efficiency consistently improves while the experience continues to decline.
Customers Judge Companies by the Hardest Moments, Not the Easiest Ones
People don’t remember entire experiences; they remember moments, especially the ones with the strongest emotional impact. This is why airlines can operate most of the time flawlessly yet be defined by how they handle a cancellation, a lost bag, or a moment of distress. And it’s why a single act of proactive care can create loyalty that lasts for years.
Customer memories are formed at the extremes. And the extremes are where most companies remain unprepared.
AI Will Accelerate This Gap—Unless Companies Redesign the Experience Now
AI offers the greatest opportunity to redefine customer experience in decades. However, it also presents the greatest risk. The reality is: AI will make companies faster than ever. But without intentional human-centered design, it will also make them less connected, less human, and less capable of solving real problems.
If the past decade taught us anything, it’s this: efficiency improvements made without corresponding increases in experience only widen the gap.
AI could serve as the catalyst. It will cut operational friction,automate entire service layers, streamline workflows, predict issues earlier, improve routing, and speed things up. But none of these outcomes guarantee that customers feel heard, understood, supported, or respected.
If AI is primarily used for efficiency, the experience gap that the Wall Street Journal highlights will widen faster than companies can adapt. This is a red alert.
The Path Forward: Rebalancing Efficiency with Experience
Companies don’t need more CX programs—they need a fundamental realignment. Research across Forrester, Gartner, McKinsey, and the XM Institute is consistent: customer experience improves only when the entire system is redesigned, not just isolated touchpoints. Today, most systems are optimized for speed, scale, and cost—not for humanity.
A new chapter of CX must be built around six imperatives:
Anchor experience strategy in value creation
Most CX programs fail because they focus on metrics rather than meaning. A true experience strategy defines the human value the organization exists to deliver and how that value will be consistently expressed across every interaction. Without a value anchor, companies optimize for fragments rather than the whole.
Redesign the entire system around the customer, not the transaction.
Real CX is shaped in moments of delay, failure, uncertainty, and recovery. These are the moments that define trust. They must be intentionally designed at the system level, not treated as exceptions.
Use AI to strengthen human judgment, not to deflect it.
This is the core of Human + AI CX. AI informs. Humans decide. AI anticipates. Humans empathize. AI scales intelligence. Humans scale trust. When these roles are designed together, both perform better.
Design for real-world complexity, not linear journeys.
Most organizations still rely on linear journey maps, but real customer experience is much more complex, shaped by multiple pathways, touchpoints, handoffs, and contexts that vary for each person. This complexity is especially clear in service industries like healthcare, where customers navigate many care paths, channels, and decision points that don’t follow a single predictable
Customer experience is a dynamic network of pathways, not a straight line. Healthcare, financial services, logistics, travel, and subscription businesses operate across channels and partners. Experience design must reflect that complexity at the system level.
Restore fairness and transparency through policy design.
Many frustrations originate in policies built solely for cost and risk containment. When policies feel adversarial, trust collapses. Experience systems must protect both the business and the customer with clarity, consistency, and fairness.
Measure the moments that matter most.
Legacy metrics summarize outcomes but hide root causes. Organizations must measure friction, effort, failure recovery, escalation, and emotional resolution. You cannot fix what you cannot see.
From Branded CX to HumanAI Experiences: The Ziba Continuum
Ziba has been designing branded customer experiences since 1999, long before “CX” became a boardroom acronym. From the start, our work has focused on one core belief: experience is the brand in action. Not marketing. Not messaging. Not technology alone. The lived interaction between people and the organization.
For more than two decades, we have helped global brands design experience systems that align brand promise, operations, service, policy, and behavior into a single coherent reality.
Since 2023, Ziba has expanded this foundation into Human + AI Customer Experience, integrating artificial intelligence into the definition and delivery of branded CX across client organizations. Not as tools layered onto broken systems. But as intelligent capabilities are embedded into redesigned experience ecosystems.
We call this HumanAI Experiences.
HumanAI Experiences uses AI to:
Anticipate customer needs earlier
Surface insight at the right moment for employees
Personalize at scale without losing humanity
Predict breakdowns before customers feel them
Strengthen frontline decision-making instead of replacing it
This is not AI for efficiency alone. This is AI for experience integrity and performance.
A Leadership Imperative
The Wall Street Journal is right. Customers are angrier than ever. But their anger isn't random; it reflects years of systems designed to cut costs and speed up processes while neglecting emotion, memory, and trust. Now, AI threatens to entrench that imbalance permanently unless leaders act intentionally. The question isn't if AI will transform customer experience—it will. The real question is whether it will strengthen the connection or accelerate the disconnection.
Efficiency will set the pace of modern business. Experience will foster trust. And trust, not technology, will determine who succeeds in the next decade.
The future of customer experience belongs to organizations that intentionally design Human + AI systems that balance brand, empathy, and operational reality. At Ziba, this is how we build experience systems that work. This isn't about faster service; it's about better service. More human. More trusted.
Companies that act now will not only lower customer anger but also reshape loyalty for the next generation. If that’s the future you’re aiming for, we should talk.
