Ask Us Anything: Customer service expert Amanda Stevens shares how you can track your customer experience

Author, speaker and consumer expert Amanda Stevens is highly regarded as a marketing consultant, having worked with brands such as Microsoft, Westpac, Foxtel, Lend Lease and Priceline.

We sent Amanda your top three questions on personalisation, measurement and AI and why they matter more than ever when it comes to enhancing customer experience.

Personalisation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s the baseline expectation in the experience economy.

When a product, service or experience feels customised and bespoke, we place a higher value on it.

The brands that truly lead use data not to stalk customers, but to serve them. They focus on timing, tone, and touch in ways that feel anticipatory.

That said, to avoid being intrusive, it’s important to start with clear consent and a genuine value exchange. If a customer shares their preferences, reward them with an immediate, relevant benefit. Personalisation should feel like your favourite barista remembering your order, not an algorithm reading your diary.

If you're only measuring customer satisfaction, you're playing a two-dimensional game in a four-dimensional world. To be truly customer-centric, it’s important to measure what matters to the customer, not just what matters to your internal dashboards.

Traditional metrics like First Response Time, Resolution Time, and Customer Effort Score still matter. But they only tell part of the story. You also need to track emotion trends, repeat contact rates, and consistency across channels.

Beyond satisfaction, look for loyalty signals. Are customers coming back? Are they referring others? Are they engaging long term? Most brands are striving for customer satisfaction when they should be shooting for customer advocacy.

Most importantly, don’t rely solely on numbers. Combine your quantitative metrics with qualitative insights. Voice of customer data, emotion analytics, and even agent feedback can give you the full picture. CX excellence lives at the intersection of data and empathy.

AI and chatbots can be game-changers in customer service when they are used with purpose and empathy. The question is not whether we should use AI. It’s how we design AI that elevates the experience rather than just automating it.

Used well, AI takes care of the repetitive so humans can focus on the remarkable. It can deliver fast, efficient, and personalised service around the clock.

That said, we’ve seen some spectacular fails recently where AI was deployed within a customer service department without a considered strategy or (more importantly) customer consultation. Simply replacing humans with AI bots is a sure-fire way to lose trust. Making your customers part of the strategy, clearly communicating the efficiency benefits of AI pathways, but also giving your customers clear options to deal with a human should they wish, is essential to avoid customer backlash.

The future isn’t human versus machine. It’s human with machine. That’s how we create seamless, soulful experiences that actually earn customer loyalty