My family ran shops and food businesses, so I grew up behind the counter more than in front of it. Weekends and school holidays were spent helping out, and most dinner conversations were about customers. Who came in, who didn't come back, what someone complained about. Without really noticing, I learned what makes a customer feel looked after, and how much that decides whether a small business does well.
I also learned that good service and bad service usually aren't about effort. The best service I've seen is simply consistent. You know what you'll get, and the business knows what it's giving you. That sounds easy. In my experience it's one of the hardest things for any business to pull off.
Part of the reason is that people have good days and bad days. Someone who was brilliant with customers on Monday might be tired, stressed or distracted by Thursday, and no manager can switch that off. I don't blame staff for this. It's normal. But it shows up in the numbers: Gallup's latest global survey found only 20% of employees feel engaged at work, and 40% said they'd felt a lot of stress the day before.[1] Customers end up on the receiving end of that.
The other reason is that everyone has their own idea of what good service means. One person thinks it's being chatty and warm, another thinks it's being quick and getting out of the way. Neither is wrong. The problem is that a brand is supposed to feel the same no matter who serves you, and you can't really ask a whole team of different people to deliver one identical experience all day, every day. It's no wonder businesses often think they're doing better than they are. Bain once found that 80% of companies believed they gave superior service, while only 8% of their customers agreed.[2]
For the customer, all of this just feels like luck. You might get great service today and something completely different next week, from the same place. And people notice. McKinsey's research showed that how customers feel about the whole experience over time predicts their satisfaction much better than any single good interaction.[3] PwC found that about a third of customers would leave a brand they actually like after just one bad experience.[4]
One moment from my career has stuck with me. I was in the client engagement team at a private bank in Asia, helping run an outdoor event for clients. Hundreds of guests flew in from around Southeast Asia, and I was on the registration desk. Later in the day I bumped into one of the clients I had checked in and said hello to her by name. She stopped and asked how I remembered. I'd only seen her once, at registration, and I didn't have a photo or anything to go by. I just remembered.
She was so pleased by such a small thing. Afterwards I kept thinking: how often does that actually happen to any of us as customers? Not very often, I'd guess.
When voice AI really took off in 2025, that moment came back to me. For the first time, it felt possible to give every customer that same attentive, consistent experience the moment they pick up the phone, whoever they are and whenever they call. That's why I started PolymetricsLab.