For years after my mother passed away, I kept one of the last voice mails she left me.
The content of the message was no longer relevant, but I often replayed it just to hear the sound of her voice, the warm love behind it and the slight laugh she made towards the end.
So when Zendesk responds to the preference for connecting with other people in customer experience (CX) design with a brusque “Want to talk to a human? Call your mom,” it isn’t just a piece of marketing collateral that fails to land. It damages the company’s relationship with me and countless others.
I first saw the post on LinkedIn, but not directly from the Zendesk company page. The post had been reshared by someone else with the words, “WHO APPROVED THIS?”
Suffice it to say I was not the only person to see the post whose mother had died. Others pointed out that, consciously or otherwise, Zendesk had chosen to publish it directly amid the lead-up to Mother’s Day.
The post appears to have been taken down, but I did not find any response or follow-up from Zendesk, nor did I reach out directly for comment. There wasn’t any need. The company obviously realized it screwed up and acted accordingly. They’ll either apologize or they won’t.
My point here is not to rub the company’s nose in its mistake. It’s to make clear what the mistake was.
When people aren’t applauding AI loudly enough
The only other copy in the post said, “Self-improving AI agents are here.”
The audience’s reaction is presumably supposed to be “Hooray!”
And yet.
Even if you have full confidence in self-improving AI agents and can identify multiple areas in which they could improve your organization’s CX, the first line in the post is already criticizing you.
By telling people to call their mothers, the implication is that whining about a lack of human connection is tiresome and annoying.
Get over yourself, Zendesk’s post implied. It’s time to embrace automation or be left behind.
The opposite of empathy
There isn’t a customer on Earth who likes to have their concerns dismissed.
In fact, there are probably countless organizations that use Zendesk to help employees tell customers precisely the opposite – that their point of view matters and deserves a tangible, empathetic response.
I get that whoever created this Zendesk post might have thought they were being provocative. This is the kind of sarcastic humor that works well for certain subjects. The fear of AI replacing people is not one of them.
For sure, our relationship with key family members is important, yet we all crave a wider set of relationships. That’s why many people still like to hear their peers on the other end of the line when they reach out for service and support.
No one wants to be the kind of person only a mother could love.