Historically in customer experience, the term retail robot has been used to describe frontline employees who just went through their day and more importantly, through customer interactions robotically, reading enthusiastically from a script, interacting the minimum possible to complete the transaction, and never thinking outside the box or looking for creative solutions. 

Retail Robot is a pejorative term that those of us who taught customer experience use to describe the types of employees you did not want on your team and to describe the behaviors you want to eliminate through better hiring, better culture, and better training. 

Now our human robots have been replaced with actual robots, and the result is even more frustrating.

I was actually inspired to write this article. I came up with the idea for this article back in December because my level of frustration with dead-end chatbots and inescapable voice recognition (IVR) systems was already so high. 

Now in September of 2025, it has only gotten worse. Sure, AI technology is better, but the disturbing trend has only continued. Leaders are seeing the dollar signs that AI brings and in many cases are using it too fast, too far, and at the detriment of the customer experience and their long-term relationship with their customers.

This is not a new game. It happened decades ago when companies offshored to the cheapest countries they could find, where often there were not sufficient English language skills or technological infrastructure, and the damage, to customer experience scores and loyalty, was so stark that many companies moved their contact centers (an expensive proposition) either completely back to the United States or to more expensive but “higher-skilled” markets. 

History is repeating itself, but this time, with AI. Leaders are making the same mistake now, sacrificing long-term relationships for short-term profits. 

I can only urge customer experience leaders to think about that pattern and how it cost companies in the past. Sure, artificial intelligence continues to improve and, for that reason, the situation may not be completely analogous. But if you are prioritizing near-term profitability over loyalty and lifetime value, those chickens will eventually come home to roost..

So here are three tips to make sure your organization does not fall into this trap. 

Race to the Top. First of all, don’t engage in a race to the bottom. It is tempting to match your competitors. It is tempting to see them increasing their bottom line and using technology to cut costs, but you can either lead or follow, if you want to be the customer experience leader in your industry or the cost-cutting leader in your industry. 

Start with the Experience. I feel like I’ve been saying this for over a decade now. It doesn’t matter what the technology can do, it matters how the technology can enhance your experience. If you’ve designed a customer experience and a customer journey that you believe is optimal, you should not be asking, how can we save money with X technology. You should be asking how X technology can better execute and enhance our CX strategy. The money saving will come naturally. 

Stay customer centric. The idea of customer centricity is simple. The customer is at the center of what you do. Does it mean you will never make a decision that a customer doesn’t like or that a group of customers doesn’t like? Of course not. But it does mean that you consider the impact on the customer of every decision.

The transition to AI is moving fast, and if you have not had serious discussions about every facet of the technology you’re using and how it’s going to impact the customer as well as your employees, then you’re not leading, you’re following. 

In this age of AI, leaders need a gut check. They need to decide who they are. If you are a short-term leader and your goal is only to maximize quarterly earnings, push up your bonuses and springboard yourself to the next position, then this article is not for you. 

But if you care about your organization and its brand, if you care about the long-term impact of the experiences your customers are having, and if you care, quite frankly, about the human beings who give you their money for your product or service, then be careful about how you add more “retail robots” to your customer experience. Because customers didn’t like them then, and they still don’t like them now.