In 2018, I wrote a piece on returning from the annual family holiday, about how as consumers, the summer getaway – even abroad – no longer felt disconnected from work and home life. Our smartphones come with us (young and old), and we all end up swiping by the pool, making bookings, online purchases, and responding to emails.
This year I noticed something new – not only do we take the CX world with us in our pocket, but more than ever, it’s becoming clear how much of the work of simply ‘being the customer’ has quietly shifted onto us as individuals.
- At the easyJet bag drop at Luton Airport, I scanned my own suitcase, printed my own label, wrapped it around the handle myself and heaved the bag onto the belt. That was the job of a person sitting behind a desk just a few years ago. But when an airline’s brand promise is built around price, I get it, I know the bargain I’m making – albeit I missed the holiday ‘bonhomie’ often offered by the desk agent!
- I then went for a coffee at Black Sheep that uses a battery of large touchscreens for placing orders. The choice was so extensive that it took considerably longer than simply saying: “an extra hot skinny latte please”, and after all that navigation there was no option I could find for ‘extra hot’. So I left and bought my coffee elsewhere – from a person.
I’m sure Black Sheep knows precisely what it saved by not having a person at the counter, but has no idea that I walked out – or the cost to their business of me and many others doing the same. One of these two numbers will appear in the annual accounts, but I imagine the other won’t get reported at all.
- By contrast, while on holiday I came across a twenty four hour pizza vending machine. The exact same category of technology as the Black Sheep coffee screen, but at two in the morning there was never going to be a ‘person’ option so the value-add to me as customer was genuine. The machine wasn’t replacing a service, it created something new that never previously existed.
- On another occasion, in one particular restaurant on this holiday, when I went to pay the bill, I discovered the new card terminal they used had no slot in it. When I asked why not, the answer given was that most people keep their cards on their phone nowadays. I don’t, for reasons of security (and choice) that I would consider fairly reasonable. In this instance, there was nothing ‘broken’, the machine was working as designed, but I wasn’t the customer they had designed it for when they decided to bring it into their business. Luckily, Mrs C is happier with mobile card wallets than I am, and dishwashing was avoided!
All these experiences appear to me to reflect a sideways slide into a form of ‘Vending CX’ – all the speed and convenience customers seek, but at what cost? By the way, I must just say, in defence of every business I’ve described here, that none is a villain in the context of what they were hoping to achieve.
We Asked For It
As customers, haven’t we asked for this? Perhaps not directly, but in the many small ways we actually express our preference. We chose the app over the phone call, we pick the shorter queue, the less expensive product, we book and shop online at eleven on Sunday night because we can’t face waiting until Monday morning. Brands understandably have responded to this, and mostly with good intentions and real investment – the airline that lets me check-in from the sofa on an app has done me a genuine favour, and First Direct that lets me photograph a cheque on my phone has saved me a trip to the nearest branch. Nobody imposed Vending CX on an unwilling public, as brands and consumers, we’ve arrived here together, and a great deal of it is better than the experience it replaced.
But when I think about how most people actually approach a vending machine, it isn’t always with confidence is it! Will it accept my card? Does it take cash, and do I have any? Is the tray going to move far enough forward, or is the thing I’ve paid for going to hang there on the edge, suspended, mocking me!
If I think about approaching a person behind a counter with the same purchase in mind, we don’t rehearse what we will do if it goes wrong, because the answer is obvious – we simply ask them. That difference isn’t irrational customer behaviour, it’s customers acting instinctively and intuitively, a behaviour that boardrooms don’t often get to see.
When a machine does let us down, more often than not, the recovery falls to us as well. Some years ago, at an airport, waiting for our bags, my seven year old son bought something from a vending machine which then refused to drop. Being a boy who had been told countless times: ‘don’t touch’ he proceeded to reach up through the flap to retrieve his chocolate bar, and got his arm stuck. He was fine in the end but it’s a perfect metaphor for the unseen consequences of self-serve, the machine didn’t work, nobody was coming to sort it out, and a child was left performing the recovery himself.
That’s Vending CX in a single image – speed and convenience, delivered with a touch of anxiety, and no obvious plan for the moment it might not work.
So what do brands need to consider in an age when we are increasingly self-serving everything from baggage handling to 3am pizza orders? Here are a few reflections:
1. The pizza machine and the coffee screen speak to the same customer need – order on demand, but they arrived at two completely opposite places in terms of my customer experience. It wasn’t the technology that made the difference, nor the quality of the interface, it was whether the machine added something or took something away. Some machines give and some machines take, and as customers we can tell within seconds which way we’re headed. That’s probably the simplest and single most useful test I know for evaluating a self-serve investment.
2. When a business removes a service layer, the benefit is recognised, and will probably have a department’s name attached to it and often delivers results within the financial year. When the same decision costs revenue, that loss is unattributed, unnamed and may not show up in the figures until much later in the future, when the original cost saving initiative is long forgotten. These are two impacts of one decision. Any perfectly competent leadership team, looking only at the evidence it can see, will naturally over-invest in taking cost out.
3. If we consider what happens when the airport Wi-Fi fails or customers can’t get signal, and several hundred people can’t open the app holding their boarding pass, or when the machine takes the money but delivers nothing at two in the morning – the fault in itself is often trivial. What determines whether it becomes a disaster is whether anything sits behind it – an order screen in a fast food restaurant can fail all day without much consequence, because the counter is still staffed. As customers we understand this disparity perfectly well, which is why we approach self-serve warily. We’re not being difficult, we’re subconsciously estimating the gap between the height of the ceiling (the best possible experience automation can offer) and the floor we may fall back on (whatever’s left to catch us) – and how hard we might land if it doesn’t.
4. My card payment experience is not a fault to be fixed. It is a businesses customer journey assumption that I fell outside of and shows how every self serve system visualises an imagined customer on a happy path: a charged phone with data on it, a contactless card, a printer at home for the returns label, the eyesight and dexterity to manage the screen, the confidence to read quickly with a queue forming behind you. Each of those assumptions quietly designs somebody out, often the most vulnerable.
Exclusion of a customer is far more corrosive to a business than failure, because it cannot be resolved by trying again, and because it tells that customer they are the wrong sort of customer for the brand. It is also almost invisible in the data, since the people affected never make it into the transactions being recorded.
Keeping Score
But how does this all bubble to the surface, how do we know if brands are doing well in balancing what I term Vending CX with the needs of customers?
Browsing through the latest Institute of Customer Service UK Customer Satisfaction Index, it seems things are going the right way.
The July 2026 UK Customer Satisfaction Index came in at 78.3, up a point on the year and the third consecutive rise. Every sector shows improvement, with banks and building societies overtaking retail for the first time. ICS CEO Jo Causon commented that the fundamentals are now simply expected, and that service has become the differentiator.
While this is genuinely great news, it does sit a little at odds with the summer holiday customer experiences I’ve just described. Part of the explanation, I expect, is that the thing being measured by the Index keeps changing shape underneath the measurement. Petrol forecourt attendants disappeared entirely within living memory and no index anywhere reflects their absence – our expectations simply reset. Now when I’m in Ireland or abroad and at a petrol station where attendants are still present, what was once common customer experience now feels slightly awkward and unnecessary. But perhaps more importantly the customers who gave up halfway through a self-serve journey, or who were never accommodated in the first place, are the least likely of anyone to appear in the sample.
None of this of course makes the UK Customer Service index invalid, rather it’s a barometer rather than a mark sheet, which is probably what it was always built to be. The real analysis has to happen inside individual businesses, and it requires measurements many don’t currently take: what failure actually costs to put right, how many self serve journeys ended in surrender rather than success, and what the customers who had a bad time went on to spend with the brand afterwards – if at all.
Where this leaves us
There is no argument that automation offers customers great advantages. I was delighted by that pizza machine, contactless payment is a doddle, mobile check-in and app-based banking have all removed genuine CX friction and I wouldn’t want any of that old world back. The magic is real!
But over the past decade, largely without anyone noticing, brands have been investing heavily in how high the ceiling can go, not always realising they are ignoring where the brand has set its floor or indeed if it hasn’t dismantled it altogether… largely because the floor only proves its worth on the days everything goes wrong, and nobody keeps a record of the disasters that did not happen.
Getting the balance right between both is genuinely difficult. It requires an analytical capability to find where customer journeys are breaking and who is being designed out, the operational capacity to ensure an experienced operational human layer is in place without it becoming an unmanaged cost, and the honesty to say when an automation business case is counting only one set of results.
Very few enterprises have all three of these things sitting in-house, which is why choosing a partner who understands that automation and people are not competing budget lines but two halves of the same CX design is sound business decision-making.
The brands that will succeed in this will be the ones who have made the effort to tell the difference between a machine that gives their customers something new and a machine that simply moves work away from the counter – and which is able to measure the impact of both.
I got lucky in that restaurant, but somewhere behind me in the queue was a customer who had no Mrs C, and neither the restaurant nor anyone else will ever know they were there.
Next summer I’ll be off again and no doubt will trip over new modes of CX delivery. But lets not slide so far sideways that we diminish the value to customers and to brands of authentic customer service and care.
Where have you come across Vending CX, and was the machine in question one that gave, or one that took away?
