AI Customer Service Is Hurting Your Business

I know, I know – AI is being shoved absolutely everywhere these days. It feels unavoidable. But you know what? It isn’t. It really isn’t.

So many companies are using AI chatbots as their first lines of customer service. And I am here to say out loud how much this sucks and how they are regularly pissing off their existing customers. Now some executive somewhere is probably gleefully looking at a spreadsheet showing how much the company is “saving” from firing actual humans who were performing customer service in favor of having AI do it.

 But what that spreadsheet does not show them is the incandescent rage they are needlessly inducing in their customer base. Because, trust me, it absolutely is.

There is an old adage in business that it is always wiser to retain existing customers than to have to constantly seek out and convince new ones. It is something like a minimum of 5x less expensive to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. 5X! Why then, would you want to make one of those existing customers think very seriously about pursuing an alternative to you?

I would hope the answer to this question would be – well we wouldn’t. And yet, AI chatbots are out there doing this work for you. Pushing your customers to the brink of breaking up with you. And honestly, that’s your best case scenario – that they are only mad and staying with you out of some sort of inertia. Do you really want a customer base that primed for an alternative to you? Really?

I’d urge you to think about your own experiences with an AI customer service agent before you go ahead and deploy it for your business. Because they pretty much suck for your customers.

I had an experience so bad yesterday that I am seriously considering a competitor, which I also hate. Think about that! Do you want that happening to your business?

If you do deploy an AI chatbot as the first line in your customer service strategy, please, please, please, make it easy for a customer to skip to an actual human representative. I promise your retention numbers will thank me.