How AI Is Putting ‘Customer’ Back in Customer Service

Two technological advances have fundamentally transformed customer service forever.

The smartphone and AI.

Smartphones revolutionized how easy it was for customers to interact with companies, but the increased volume reduced customers to little more than case numbers. AI is reshaping how companies serve customers, but the fear here is that the humanity in customer service will be lost completely. That’s the wrong way to approach AI in CX, though. AI will make customer service more useful, valuable, and ultimately more human for both customers and service organizations in a system that’s still building on top of the smartphone’s foundation.

The Smartphone’s Legacy – Communication Anytime, Anywhere, on Any Channel

I know first-hand that customer service has come a long way. When I accidentally fell into a customer service leadership position, communication was via phone only. People called us and we called them back, or we did outbound calling to those customers.

But the world of smartphones transformed customer service.

The fact that customers can access their smartphones, at any time, in any place, means that every number they dial is free. No waiting by a landline. No sitting idle for hours hoping to receive a call back from an agent. Also, customers can research, use chat, chat at the same time they’re on the phone, and text people.

So now, in my 30 years of customer service leadership position, I’ve observed the progress paradox. As solutions improve and access to companies through multiple channels widens, customers’ expectations of how companies communicate with them rise.

So, we must ask ourselves — how do we integrate all this so that we can respond well to our customers?

Those of us in the world of ecommerce get so many different pieces of communication in each different method —by email, text, chat, or phone.

What that means is that the customer, in their world, has already reached out to us, so we should already know what their issue is. But many customer service organizations are built into categories and compartmentalized. Maybe one department received the email, another department is answering the live chat, and another is on the phone. If they’re not integrated or touching base with each other, then you have three different isolated touchpoints where communication can easily break down.

Customers like that they can communicate with us in their channel of choice. They don’t like it when we can’t connect the dots between them and the channels they use. Customers expect that we know what’s going on, no matter how they reach out to us. They want us to know before they know.

That expectation of happiness requires us, the company, to be very integrated and very knowledgeable on our customers’ stories.

“AI will make customer service more useful, valuable, and ultimately more human for both customers and service organizations in a system that’s still building on top of the smartphone’s foundation.”

John McCahan

Customer Service and Experience Executive

AI Customer Service Chatbots – Where They Go Wrong and Where They Go Right

When people think about AI in customer service, one of the first things they think about is customer service chatbots. To be honest, they don’t have the greatest reputation. And that’s on us as an industry. Somewhere along the way, we lost focus on the customer. Leaders and agents had the new goal of solving tickets and addressing high incoming volume. Customers, subsequently, became case numbers who we left to fend for themselves with our bad bots.

No wonder the perception of chatbots is impersonal and terrible.

It’s because of older technology from a few years ago, where all the chatbot did was create a large number of contacts and funnel them at a rate that the company could not handle. This also explains why it was so frustrating when the chatbot didn’t actually listen to them.

This chatbot responded the way it was told to respond. And it was told to respond as often as it could, and take as many inquiries as it could, in the same way every time.

When issues needed to be escalated, the chatbot often didn’t pass along the information to the agent in a digestible, easy-to-see way. Take a look at the conversation below and see how you feel for both the agent and the customer afterwards.

Teams also used to turn on the old chatbot to accept all incoming chat requests. This created a bottleneck for small teams of agents on the back end and made hold times way too long. The poor agents answering customer chats had to sift through conversations, first-come, first-serve, to start working through them.

That’s a recipe for unhappiness and fatigue.

But unlike the rigid chatbots of the past, today’s AI technology understands context, learns from interactions, and seamlessly passes information to human agents. This means customers don’t have to repeat themselves, and agents can focus on what matters most — solving complex problems and building revenue-driving loyalty.

AI and Humans Working Together for CX Success

Customer service has to include AI from here on out. I believe that AI will improve how companies communicate with customers.

In an ideal world, AI and humans interact together so that agents can become more effective.

Agents will also become more efficient, but more importantly, they’ll spend more time on the complex problems that customers are faced with. For example, imagine a situation with one customer who has three orders. If the customer contacts the company in multiple ways, that could be 11 tickets per order.

With AI and humans working together in a customer-centric way, the agent will know who the customer is.

Agents will know which order is impacted. They can jump in and solve the problem in a single, real, human conversation. It won’t get bogged down in 11 different ticket numbers that 11 different agents have to close.

It should get resolved in that one interaction.

My goal is to get away from the efficiency metrics of average handle time. Workforce management uses average handle time. I want to know the average handle time per channel, per brand, per customer type, per partner — but I don’t want agents to think about it.

I want agents to solve problems so that the customer never has to reach back out to us on the same problem. I don’t want agents to make customers feel like they’re cutting them off or passing the buck or saying, Hey, I’m going to have to do some things and follow up with you. I want there to be a seamless interaction in a single conversation. That’s important.

The agent should never have to worry about the data, the incoming volume of contacts or calls. AI gives us the data to let the backend staff worry about that.

Let the agent worry about the customer.

“I want to know the average handle time per channel, per brand, per customer type, per partner — but I don’t want agents to think about it. I want agents to solve problems so that the customer never has to reach back out to us on the same problem.”

John McCahan

Customer Service and Experience Executive

A More Rewarding Future for Agents and Customers

Customer service agents bring the power of solution in any company. People solve the real problems. AI helps with smaller ones — while making bigger problems easier to solve.

The future of customer service won’t involve answering a high volume of routine questions like it did with the advent of smartphones. Instead, it will depend on agents to handle very complex problems, empathize and build relationships with upset customers, and turn around difficult situations. That’s a very different type of job. But it’s also a more creative, more solution-oriented job for those who step up to it.

The future of customer service is customer-centricity. It’s knowing your customer, whether it’s their first purchase or they’ve been buying from you for years. If you know their situation, how often they buy, the situations they’ve been confronted with, their channel of choice, and how they want to be communicated with, then that creates powerful long-term loyalty.

What excites me most about where our industry is heading is that we’re finally able to deliver on the promise of truly personalized service at scale. The combination of AI’s efficiency with human empathy and problem-solving skills means we can give customers what they’ve always wanted — to be known, understood, and helped quickly by someone who has the context and capability to solve their problems.

Companies that embrace this evolution — focusing on customer relationships rather than ticket numbers — will be the ones that thrive in the next decade of customer service. After 30 years in this industry, I can say with confidence that we’re entering the most transformative and exciting era of customer service yet. What side of this evolution will your company be on?

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