December 09, 2025
Customer Experience Fails of 2025; Hacks, IT Failures, Management and Human Error
For all the CX success stories, there have been plenty of failures across the year. Not all were headline-worthy, but these fails act as a salutary warning to businesses, typically those over-reliant on their software and AI services.
We’ve already had our CX experts weigh on on some personal experience fails, but here’s a collection from the should-have-seen-it-coming brigade.
Supermarket ASDA Not Super at CX
We start with ASDA (UK supermarket chain, formerly part of Walmart, now owned by private equity investors).
In a recent earnings call, executive chairman Allan Leighton said. “The (IT) change severely disrupted our systems and materially impacted our progress. We saw a step-back to inconsistent availability, operational issues at depot and in-store and a poor customer experience online and through the app,”
The problem is rooted in ASDA’s struggles to extract itself from reliance on Walmart’s IT systems, stretching back over 25 years since the original acquisition.
One example of the issues customers face comes from Reddit, “This last month the experience using Asda online to do grocery shopping has become unbearable. Lost orders, orders taking days to check out, once completed orders disappearing completely. Add this to the non existent rewards you now get it’s a completely frustrating experience to attempt to use the app.”
While other retailers are pushing ahead with integrated experiences and loyalty initiatives (see our interview “EagleAI’s Cédric Chéreau Talks Helping Tesco Personalise and Boost Transactions”, a major player struggling to deliver in such a competitive marketplace will lose customers fast.
At least ASDA’s woes aren’t quite as public as the aftermath of Marks & Spencer’s cyberattack in the spring. But any retail technology and CX is only as good as the company’s IT security, disaster recovery and transition planning.
AI Takes the Load, and the Blame at Taco Bell
With AI a current favourite to be Time Magazine’s “Person” of the Year, there’s no denying the impact of the technology. However, it has had plenty of what we can charitably call “teething problems.”
At the broadest level, AI remains notorious for misrepresenting facts and news, or just making stuff up. Then there are examples of AI being plain racist when it comes to financial decision making, to the tune of a $2.5m lawsuit. Some of this is down to human and training errors, but for the poor end user, AI remains the scapegoat.
Even when AI isn’t going rogue, the security risks related to their back-ends or efforts to game the system all remain a growing threat. And then there’s the use of AI to orchestrate cyber espionage and other criminal acts, as recently discovered by Anthropic.
While AI might be a productivity hero for businesses, and support customers with a growing array of assistance, there are any number of public failures we could highlight.
But Taco Bell’s AI order system failure takes the caramel churro-style cookie, with rollout being slowed after repeated failures.
Foreshadowing this, McDonalds and IBM canned a similar effort in 2024 after a couple of years proving AI isn’t good at everything.
American Airlines, as un-American as You Can Get at Customer Service
Whenever we get a press release from an airline, it typically features a great new premium departure lounge, the latest upgrade to in-flight service, and similar finery.
Yet, many still fail to get the basics right despite the massive expenditure. Primarily as they try to cut staffing costs while investing in AI.
American remains the top airline for poor CX, with the flyer continuing to trim staff and close counters at airports, pushing passengers to notoriously poor phone and app options.
Despite the latest crumbs of free in-flight Wi-Fi, passengers with rebooking or similar problems are often left in the lurch. And when there is a major airport or ATC issue, the gremlins multiply quickly.
American’s latest earnings report notes “The team delivered a resilient operation in the third quarter, despite a difficult operating environment due to significant weather events and the FAA technology outage in September and associated ATC challenges. Thanks to investments in technology and its operating systems, American quickly recovered from irregular operations in the quarter and successfully mitigated the impact to customers.”
But, it fails to recognise the trauma and stories that passengers suffered, preferring to highlight a partnership with Bollinger Champagne. And American employees are mitigating/venting at high speed on social channels about the poor conditions they face at work due to management drives to ever-lower-cost efficiency.
There are plenty of similar examples out there, and many more to come as AI takes a stronger hold of CX in the years to come, do let us know if you spot a niche or niggling CX fail in 2026.
