Why AI Makes Customer Service Worse, And What Companies Can Do To Fix It

I am on hold with music that is no doubt the same music played on loop in the fifth circle of hell. It will be 50 minutes before the system will hang up on me because I am not a leaf in its automated customer-service decision tree. I am angry and frustrated.

There is no way to talk to an actual human. My credit card company referred me to a monitoring service when its data systems were breached (again). The monitoring service sends me a sexual-predator alert about my file.

I can’t get into my account because my password won’t work, and I have to be on the site to change my password. I call the customer-service number and try to get myself routed to a human by saying the word “agent” 25 times. By the time I get to an actual human, she sympathizes and says that the magic word is “fraud”—you always get to a human immediately because in the case of fraud, the credit card company is the victim.

The fraud humans can route you to other humans who can help me change my password. It turns out that no one thinks I’m a sexual predator, I just live in the vicinity of one. In the increasingly automated world of customer service, custom service—actual humans who can solve problems and answer questions—is on the wane.

What we increasingly get are automated customer-service systems that are frustrating to deal with and don’t solve our problems. Most people call customer service only when something is not working, but it seems that these systems are designed to address “common” problems—problems that you don’t necessarily have. When there are no people to be found to explain things to, you may end up in an endless loop, having a bot tell you the same annoying irrelevant thing over and over.

How is that customer service? In my own fantasy world, customer service is custom service—service that targets my needs and my problems, suggests good solutions, and assists me in implementing them, all via a human who can take into consideration the tangible and intangible contexts relevant to a remediation that fits my needs. Sounds dreamy, doesn’t it?Such solutions actually exist in the real world.