News Analysis
The Gist
- Initiative targets poor CX. The “Time Is Money” initiative is aimed at solving pain points like difficult subscription cancellations and ineffective customer service chatbots.
- Industry groups respond. Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce claim the initiative will raise costs for consumers.
- The challenge of implementation. The success of the initiative will depend on strict enforcement and the willingness of corporations to comply with new rules.
The government isn’t exactly known for its people-pleasing qualities. But that might change.
In August, President Biden and Vice President Harris announced the new “Time Is Money” initiative in an effort to crack down on all the ways corporations add unnecessary hurdles to peoples’ lives.
What kind of bad faith practices will this initiative target, and will it actually improve customer experiences across the board?
Inside the ‘Time Is Money’ Initiative
Americans face a lot of customer experience pain points when dealing with companies — long hold times, hidden unsubscribe buttons, automated systems that don’t understand requests.
And no matter how much people complain, these organizations don’t change. But, according to the White House briefing, “Americans are tired of being played for suckers.” And the administration plans to take on corporate practices that give people the run around and waste time and money.
The Time Is Money initiative will target several key areas:
- Subscription and Membership Cancellations: A new rule proposed would require companies to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one.
- Automatic Airline Refunds: A new rule will require airlines to automatically pay back airfare — in the original payment method — when your flight is canceled or significantly altered.
- Submitting Health Claims: The initiative plans to find new ways to make filing health claims and accessing helpful information easier.
- Automated Customer Service Doom Loops: The initiative plans to implement a new rule that will require companies to allow customers to speak to a human by pressing a single button.
- Review Manipulation: New rules could stop marketers from using elicit review and endorsement practices, such as using fake reviews, paying for positive reviews and suppressing honest negative reviews.
- Customer Service Chatbots: New guidance will crack down on ineffective and time-wasting chatbots used by banks and other financial institutions in lieu of customer service agents.
- Parent-School Communication: The initiative will include new guidance to schools on how they can make two-way communication processes less time-consuming for parents.
According to the briefing, the White House is looking for additional ideas to help Americans save time and money. Those interested in sharing their thoughts can do so here.
Related Article: What Defines World-Class Customer Service Now and How to Get There
Why Is CX in Decline?
The White House has highlighted issues that we’ve all been familiar with for years. But how did we get to this point of bad CX becoming the norm?
According to Dave Seybold, CEO of CX consultancy TTEC Digital, brands 20 years ago thought they were delivering exceptional customer experiences. But egos took a hit in 2005 when a Bain & Company report revealed that while 80% of CEOs held this belief, only 8% of customers agreed.
“This was a wakeup call for many organizations that considered themselves to be customer centric,” he said. “More importantly, this humbling realization kicked off nearly two decades of significant technology investment aimed at elevating CX delivery.”
Today, however, organizations still aren’t seeing the customer experience benefits they expected. Seybold pointed to the 2024 Forrester Customer Experience Index, which indicated that CX in the US sits at an all-time low. Compared to just a year ago, 40% of brands in the Index received lower quality scores from customers in areas like effectiveness, ease and emotion.
“So, what is happening here?” Seybold asked. “It turns out most of these poor-performing investments share one thing in common: they focus on technology adoption, not customer experience transformation."
Where CX Is Falling Short
According to Seybold, “Initiatives that are laser-focused on technology adoption — and light on the operational, data and change management strategies to back it up — fall short of true customer experience transformation because they lack the design and orchestration needed to bridge the experience gap and reach business goals on the other side.”
In most cases, he added, lagging business outcomes are directly linked to key aspects of CX design and orchestration that have slipped through the cracks:
- Siloed and Unstructured Data: When organizations integrate technology and tools (especially AI tools) without having the foundational data practices to feed valuable insights into these tools.
- Disorganized Adoption and Change Management: When operations are not equipped to utilize new tools and technologies within the broader customer experience.
- Tech-First, Customer-Second Strategy and Design: When technology investment focuses on solving internal challenges first, without considering the customer impact.
As AI investment grows, said Seybold, these foundational CX problems disrupt many companies’ ability to capitalize on AI’s potential.
He pointed to a Zero100 report which found that 88% of surveyed companies are currently in the process of implementing AI/ML into their operations — yet only 25% of them are directly seeing revenue growth from these investments.
“To achieve powerful AI-enabled customer experiences, these three problems must be solved alongside technology investments to successfully bridge the gap between tools and outcomes," he said.
Related Article: The AI Advantage: Is Your CX Falling Behind?
The White House Initiative in Action: Will It Work?
Many of the key points in the Time Is Money initiative focus on these technology infusions that cause more headaches than happiness for consumers. But what will it look like when this initiative is put to practice?
First, said Lisa D. Dance, UX research consultant and author of “Today Is the Perfect Day to Improve Customer Experiences!” the regulatory actions will typically go through a comment period and industry trade groups will try to influence what the final regulations are.
“The US Chamber of Commerce released a statement saying the ‘Time is Money’ initiative will ‘inevitably raise costs for customers,’” said Dance, a CMSWire Contributor. “But the reality is that customers are already paying untenable amounts of time, money and stress (aka ‘Unpaid Customer Labor’) just trying to get what they paid for or get an issue resolved.”
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Customers seeing their money credited back as fast as it was debited, getting automatic refunds when flights are canceled and getting wasted time back from hours with chatbots and phone systems — all of it will improve customers’ quality of life, Dance explained. Plus, these regulations could benefit employees caught in the middle between frustrated customers and company policies and procedures that produce subpar customer experiences.
However, she added, some companies may violate not the wording of the new regulations but the spirit of them, “because that ‘move fast and break things’ mentality is still strong.” As such, she said, enforcement of regulations is important.
The White House plans to take action in the coming months to implement these new regulations. However, only time will tell if this proposed initiative will save Americans time, money and sanity.
