Nataliia Onyshkevych is CEO at EverHelp, a customer support outsourcing company. Experienced in all support roles.
Imagine returning a defective headset at a shop where AI processes your return in seconds. Would you notice or care? With AI now handling many routine customer service interactions, these questions matter. Like at Amazon, where robots work in fulfillment centers, customer support is transforming rapidly.
Is this truly the end for human agents? My quick answer is no. Here’s why.
How Support Has Evolved Over The Years
Customer service dates back to ancient Rome and Greece, when merchants recognized the importance of customer retention. During the Industrial Revolution, face-to-face interactions increased with production volume.
With the telephone’s invention in 1876, business inevitably shifted toward voice support. The 1990s Internet era led to email support and live website chats. As social media emerged in the mid-2000s, companies expanded their service to these platforms.
Recently, customer service has transformed through AI and natural language processing. Support now operates 24/7 across multiple channels, with AI chatbots widely integrated into websites and applications.
These changes didn’t eliminate human roles back then and certainly won’t now.“But what about those who have already lost their jobs because of AI adoption?” you’d ask. I’ve found the answer to this question in Harvard Business School Professor Karim R. Lakhani’s quote: “AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.”
What AI Brings To The Table
• AI is faster than a human. It’s a simple truth: A machine will analyze an issue faster than a human agent. These days, approximately 90% of customers expect an instant response when submitting a support query.
AI helps our agents process routine inquiries quickly, freeing time for more complex issues that need human intervention. Our prompt responses also show our clients that we genuinely value their time in this fast-paced environment.
• AI’s data processing abilities surpass human capacity. It can analyze enormous amounts of data in real time and fetch essential customer information (e.g., previous inquiry history) to prepare the agent and minimize wait time.
AI uses forecasting and scenario modeling to find and highlight potential issues for human intervention as well. This turns our approach from reactive to proactive, allowing us to handle issues before they escalate and inflict damage.
• AI is available around the clock. AI can be there for your customers 24/7, no matter where they reach out from. Even with a support team in different time zones, integrating AI provides a robust backup that will eliminate potential coverage gaps and ensure consistency at all times.
• AI is a cost-effective solution. Implementing AI can slash labor expenses through task automation. You also won’t need to budget for overtime or additional temporary hires for peak times. And importantly, this approach doesn’t compromise CX efficiency. However, businesses obsessed with reducing expenses at any cost will face serious repercussions if they completely replace human teams with AI.
• AI can help with personalization. AI can track past user behavior and outline their preferences. Using the data, support agents can provide a tailored service that addresses customers’ specific needs. The system can identify patterns in customer interactions, recommend products based on browsing history and suggest solutions before customers even articulate their problems. And 64% of agents who use AI report that it enhances their ability to create personalized customer messages.
• AI has no constraints with languages. AI translation tools bridge the language gap between the agent and the customer. With real-time translation, one person can freely talk/text in their mother tongue while the other instantly receives the translated text or hears the voice in their language.
• AI can provide quality control. An AI assistant can perform the quality control manager’s tasks: Assess support agents’ performance based on randomly selected inquiries, find and highlight errors and assign a score at the end.
The Irreplaceable Human Element
• Humans are more emotionally intelligent. No matter how skillfully AI can tackle regular requests, complex emotional situations always require human empathy and common sense to de-escalate. A machine can’t fully comprehend the whole spectrum of human feelings: happiness, frustration, sadness, etc.
• Human agents think out of the box. AI excels at pattern recognition within known scenarios, while human agents make intuitive leaps across domains when the challenge falls outside the playbook. They navigate contradictory information by weighing probabilities rather than requiring clear-cut data.
• Humans are better at relationship building. While both AI and humans may remember the context of past interactions, the latter can also recognize cultural nuances and unstated expectations that vary across different regions. This human contextual intelligence significantly contributes to strengthening brand-customer relationships.
How To Find A Balance Between Humans And AI
There is a practical way to make AI and human agents work in synergy and avoid a bot or human uprising.
AI bots are helpful for basic questions, so it’s smart to let AI handle the first level of customer support and route tougher issues to appropriate human agents. This can slash down response times and aid agents because they won’t get bogged down by simple, repetitive requests. Instead, they can process more interesting, intellectually stimulating ones. For example, our pilot AI assistant can quickly handle refunds, subscription cancellations, order status requests and other standard issues, minimizing customer frustration.
You can also use AI to enhance your personalization through data analysis. For instance, we leverage data to anticipate and address users’ needs as well as get tailored troubleshooting recommendations. With that, our support became proactive, significantly boosting customer satisfaction. Beyond that, AI retrieves client information and communication history for our agents in seconds, highlights errors in previous encounters and can even predict user churn.
In short, clear task division is the key. Some areas are best handled by humans with AI support and vice versa. And the cherry on top is that no matter how sophisticated, AI still needs to be trained by…a human! So, one thing’s for sure—AI certainly won’t replace people in customer support anytime soon.
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