During my nearly 40 years in the world of customer support, I’ve witnessed wave after wave of new technologies promising to completely revolutionize the field.
In the beginning, these innovations delivered undeniable benefits. They allowed us to retire the days of sifting through endless filing cabinets to access customer records. They enabled us to deliver expertise at scale in an increasingly digital world.
But in recent years, the narrative around automation and artificial intelligence seems to have shifted. Rather than enhancing human capabilities, some believe these technologies will make customer service agents obsolete.
The thinking goes like this: if AI keeps improving, they’ll eventually be able to resolve customer issues from start to finish without human involvement. Support teams will dwindle as more and more of their responsibilities are automated away.
In my view, this thinking is fundamentally flawed. While AI unquestionably holds tremendous potential to transform customer service, it will never wholly replace the human touch.
Here are three reasons why:
- Customers crave human connection.
Surveys consistently show that when customers have an issue, they prefer to speak to a real human being. Yes, chatbots can be convenient for simple inquiries. But for more complex matters, a chatbot’s predetermined responses quickly become frustrating.
Nothing builds loyalty and trust like a real person who listens attentively, thinks creatively, and cares genuinely about resolving your problem. A chatbot may efficiently look up answers, but it takes empathy, discretion and strategic thinking to create satisfying resolutions.
- AI lacks human judgment.
In customer service, judgment is just as crucial as knowledge. Even when powered by the latest natural language processing, chatbots still lack the situational awareness, cultural understanding, and ethical reasoning that guide human agents.
No matter how much training data they have, chatbots simply cannot exercise the sound judgment required to navigate nuanced customer conversations. Only people have the discretion to take the right action beyond what an algorithm dictates.
- AI should empower agents, not replace them.
Rather than pushing support teams to the sidelines, AI should enable them to focus on where they add the most value – building relationships and solving complex problems.
At InterSystems, we use machine learning to quickly analyze logs so our experts can immediately start investigating issues. For support teams, AI eliminates the drudgery of combing through massive data. It doesn’t replace human work; it accelerates it.
That’s the true promise of AI – not rendering people obsolete, but complementing their specialized skills. When combined ethically, AI and human insight create a whole far greater than the sum of their parts.