If you have needed to contact a large organisation recently (utilities, insurance etc.), then you will probably have experienced communicating with a computer program rather than a human being. These customer service representatives make use of artificial intelligence (AI) to respond to your queries, often providing standardised answers.
New research has found that the majority of these companies have either rolled back or shut down an AI agent. The main reasons cited being concerns about customer data exposure, brand reputation risks and lack of auditability.
However, despite this high failure rate, most of the organisations surveyed have AI agents in regular use for customer service roles. The driving factors for this are to improve customer satisfaction, boost revenue through increased conversions and to as lesser extent, reduction of operational costs.
It may seem obvious that replacing human customer service staff with computer-generated AI agents would save money. Although this assumption does not take into account the cost of developing these virtual staff members, which includes both agent programming and governance systems. In fact, companies reported spending more time and resources on building and maintaining safety systems than AI technology itself.
In my experience, AI agents are useful for dealing with basic enquiries but tend to struggle with more complex issues. For example, if I was to ask about how to return a faulty product, then the agent would most likely be able to provide detailed instructions. On the other hand, if I had a problem that could not easily be summed up in a few words, I would spend a few minutes answering a series of questions based on keywords in my query. Unfortunately, this exercise generally would not yield any helpful information and instead feel like a waste of time. At this point, the agent may offer the option to speak to a real person, or just go round in a loop.
Of course with further development and testing, AI agents will improve and may even exceed the capabilities of a human to assist customers with all manner of problems. The one aspect of customer service that I believe they will never be able to provide is empathy, which can be really important when handling complaints. After all, things are not always black and white, so I think there will still be a place for people in years to come, and I hope companies can see this too.