The future of customer service: using AI to improve human connection

Three levels of customer service

From where I'm sitting, customer service seems to fall into three camps. They're not that hard to predict.

There's the very poor. You can only email or send off a form. You can't call them, or if you can, you're on hold for an hour or more. You get passed around people and nobody can help. Sometimes there's a language barrier as well, which makes the whole thing harder.

And that's even if they've got a phone number. Otherwise, it's all online forms. We won't speak to you. You need to create an account, make a secure password and do everything yourself through our crappy portal.

That is infuriating service.

The middle tier is where you can call and get through to someone okay, but everything they do takes ages. They need to pass you to a different department, or they're asking you to log into your portal and do some of it yourself anyway.

Then there's fantastic customer service. Octopus Energy is an example people had mentioned to me, and recently I moved house and used them myself.

I gave them a call. Someone picked up pretty much straight away. They were UK based and just got everything sorted on the phone. I didn't need to get passed around to anyone. Things I thought would be complicated were done in a few minutes. Yep, you're all set up. Super simple.

I'm sure not every single interaction with them goes like that, but mine felt like a breath of fresh air.

People just want the thing done

I'm writing this now because AI and automation are encouraging businesses to streamline and optimise processes more than ever. Building things like customer portals is becoming easier, so there's more opportunity to get customers to self-serve.

But I think a lot of people don't want to self-serve. Some do, and that's fine. Others want to call someone, have them pick up the phone and action the thing. Maybe it's an online chat or an email instead. Maybe it's a mixture of all three. They just want someone to get it done.

I know from my own experience that I get so hacked off when it's something simple, but they want me to make an account, create a secure password, enter a confirmation code and go through all this nonsense. For the task I'm trying to complete, it can feel completely overkill.

I think there's a risk that customer service gets worse and worse as businesses build more of this stuff. But there's also a real opportunity to use AI and automation slightly differently and really stand out.

For me, that's unbelievable customer service, with AI, automation and clever systems working in the background.

Better systems are becoming more accessible

People have been doing versions of this for quite a long time. It isn't a completely new idea. Having someone's account details ready when they call, and giving staff the tools to help them, was possible before AI.

What I think changes things quite a bit is the ability to develop those systems. The sort of setup I'm imagining used to feel limited to the mega corps and big companies. Now it's becoming more accessible to smaller businesses as well.

I've written about how AI is changing my own work as a software engineer. That change in how we build software matters here too. If people invest their efforts in the right way, we can build better tools for the person giving customer service.

Some of that involves AI within the system. Some of it is simply having better software in the first place.

Imagine calling a business like this

You call and spend a few seconds listening to a short intro message. If there's a queue, you're told roughly how long the wait is or what position you're in. You know what you're signing up for. But the business still needs to pick up pretty quickly.

Before someone answers, the system should have matched your phone number to your record, if it can, and started pulling up useful information about your account.

If I've got an account with you, you should know my name. There might be security questions to go through, which is fine, but the person answering should have my history in front of them. Maybe some personal context as well.

With AI integration, the system could also give that person a good idea of what I'm likely to be calling about. If I've recently purchased something, there's a good chance it's about that purchase.

Then, from that central system, the person on the phone should be able to handle as much as possible there and then. That's the key thing for me. Whatever the customer needs, you should be able to action it while you're speaking to them, without passing them around different departments.

There will be odd circumstances where something needs investigating or the customer needs a callback. Some things are bigger than a quick phone call. But those need to be logged and handled properly too. The process should still be smooth.

For a lot of the smaller requests, it should be possible to get everything sorted in that conversation.

Let the person focus on the conversation

Imagine the phone conversation being transcribed as both parties speak, so the person taking the call doesn't have to write all the notes. The AI could use that transcript to suggest which action to take within the system.

That means the customer service operator, whether it's the owner answering the phone or someone on the team, can focus on speaking to the customer. The interaction, the relationship building, the rapport. Those small things that make for extraordinary customer service.

The frustrating version is something like doing a car insurance quote over the phone. They've got a hundred questions, and you're sitting there repeating information back and forth. I know some of that is probably a necessity, but it is bloody tedious.

If the system makes it ten times easier to action things, I think it's going to be a much better experience for the customer. And it's going to be better for the person giving the service as well.

Picking up the phone and confidently satisfying a customer should be a pleasure. It shouldn't leave you frustrated by all the overhead involved in helping them.

That's where I think there's an opportunity for absolute standout customer service. There are roadblocks, of course. It's technology heavy, and the systems have to work together. But our ability to do that kind of work keeps improving.

Or will our AI do it all for us?

There's another possible future where the whole thing is handled by AI agents.

People have had Google in their pockets for a while, and now they've got AI assistants as well. Maybe it becomes commonplace to say, "Can you renew my car insurance at the best price?" and leave the assistant to deal with it.

I think some of the technology is already getting us towards that, to a degree. Maybe eventually your AI follows things up for you, speaks to the company's AI and handles everything without you having to get involved.

That's a possibility. But I think that being commonplace for everything is still a long way off. It's a guess at what the future might look like.

My feeling is that a large proportion of people will still want to speak to a human. For those customers, there's a lot we could do now to make that conversation easier and more useful. But who knows?