How CFOs Can Shed the 'Dr. No' Role and Win More Loyal Customers

In the field of customer service, companies often face a dilemma: should they provide personalized human service or adopt efficient automated systems? Should they keep human voice or enable voice response? Many companies, when seeking a balance between "care" and "efficiency," often find their internal discussions at an impasse—the CFO is portrayed as "Dr. No," a role that only calculates costs but fails to see potential benefits.

This situation could have been avoided. As we explored in our recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, mature solutions already exist:Successful companies can resolve the tension between "intimacy" and "efficiency" by effectively investing in digital capabilities。

The problem is that routine discussions among senior executives are still based on outdated trade-offs. Today, however, a new reality has emerged, making a win-win outcome entirely possible. This tension often manifests as a dispute between revenue and cost, sometimes even escalating into personal conflict: the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) pushes for growth, while the CFO keeps a close eye on profit margins.

Chasing renewal rates

Both the CFO and the CRO want to improve customer renewal rates, net revenue retention, and customer loyalty, as well as increase customer lifetime value. However, the CFO typically evaluates investments from the perspective of EBITDA margin, favoring projects with quick returns; the CRO, on the other hand, often focuses on top-line metrics such as sales, marketing, and customer experience, which have a longer time horizon and are sometimes more ambiguous. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) often finds themselves caught in the middle, trying to serve both "bosses" simultaneously, and may end up pleasing neither.

Leading companies have found that the tension between cost efficiency and customer intimacy can be resolved by leveraging the increasingly powerful and flexible capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning in self-service and customer support. Our experience working with multiple clients, as well as our recent survey of customer success leaders across various industries, confirms this: digitally enabled customer success strategies can deliver a "best of both worlds" outcome—enhancing personalization, satisfaction, and service quality while also reducing costs and increasing scalability.

Soothing customer emotions

Our research and experience show that companies focusing solely on efficient customer interactions increase their risk of delivering a poor customer experience.

In the past, self-service was limited to clunky automated call handling, designed to reduce labor costs at call centers. Take chatbots, for example: most bots can handle conversations of moderate complexity, such as welcome calls and product discovery interactions, but the "if/then" logic underpinning their conversational abilities limits their scope of action, and these limitations often frustrate customers.

For example, if a customer raises a question that was not anticipated when designing the chatbot's logic, the bot cannot answer, leaving the customer stuck; worse, automated systems are often deliberately designed to make it difficult for customers to escape the bot and reach a human agent.

Making chatbots more human

This "vicious cycle" of dissatisfaction and churn is not inevitable, thanks to advances in AI and machine learning. In recent years, the role of AI/ML in self-service and customer support has evolved significantly, driving a shift toward truly customer-centric self-service models—tools that listen better, respond faster, and understand consumer language and intent.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can support the analysis of customer data, provide insights into customer behavior and preferences, and translate those insights into excellent customer experiences. Although generative AI was not originally designed for customer service, its human-like responses and chat interface will revolutionize customer service operations. The software's capabilities are still maturing, but progress is happening so rapidly that it is time for CFOs, CIOs, and revenue and customer experience leaders to start using these tools to gain a competitive edge.

When implemented properly, ChatGPT and other chatbots with AI/ML/NLP capabilities can make digital interactions more human, helping companies balance their focus on efficiency while delivering a top-tier customer experience. This will make end customers more "sticky" and increase company revenue.