Lewis has changed, they’ll say. He’s now using memes from fifteen years ago in his blogs. And to that, I say, “I haven’t changed, but customer service has.”
Artificial Intelligence is now being implemented at lightning speed in every possible location around the world. Need to improve sales, AI. Need to improve marketing, AI. Need to improve customer service, AI. And done in the right way, Artificial Intelligence is brilliant, fantastic, life-changing, but I think I have identified a few issues with unrestricted use of AI that’s not been thought through from all the angles.
So below, I’ll give a few different angles, and identify just one of the potential issues with inserting AI without looking at the alternatives (and yes, there are alternatives).
Angle 1: Strategic – The thing they don’t tell you about Metropolis, or Gotham, or your company.
In a world where Superman exists, why would anyone use anything, or anyone, else to solve a problem? I mean, we don’t all still own horses to get around; we have cars. Superman could empty our bins if he really wanted to, and actually, thinking about it, why doesn’t he? He’s got the time, and the power. He’s a god. He also is so much cheaper than a workforce.
You may have already thought of some issues with Superman as the answer to the whole society thing, but I am going to focus on just one. If Superman is the answer to all of Metropolis’ problems then what’s the point of investing in anything else? Shut down the bin-making plant, Superman can just grab the rubbish in his arms, right? Let’s just throw the trash into the street – he’ll find it.
When we just focus on AI – surprise, Superman in this story is AI – we end up losing everything that made us good in the first place. And why? Because we are using AI as a solution, and not a tool.
Your customers just want a good service, they want a product that works, and if the product doesn’t, they want it to work again. Good customer service comes from making it feel personal, warm, helpful. Angle 2 reveals why AI as an “everything machine” when it comes to customer service is an issue.
Angle 2: We care not for the robots, and they don’t care either.
There are currently no issues with abusing an AI. If you shout at a customer service agent, they put the phone down. Also, AI doesn’t really care, and what’s worse, we know that.
What this combination delivers is a set of customers who know that the AI agent on your website is just a dumb set of instructions and so doesn’t need to be believed, empathised with, or treated like a human. Or they realise that halfway through and get annoyed. This ‘thing’ is your company now to this customer, and they start to see this untrusted, not-really-a-human machine as your company.
I can give you a very specific example of this. Whenever I have a problem with a service, let’s pick a credit card, I now get an AI chatbot. The AI chatbot has never, not ever, sorted out my problem – to the point where I now just type “talk to human” in it, and then if they say that’s not possible, I ring the phone number.
That’s lost trust in the system, and lost trust in your company. But that trust manifests itself in other ways too.
Angle 3: Putting a barrier between you and your customers is lying.
Do you know what customers really hate? Being lied to. And most people think that’s just a big whopper of a lie, but humans are really, really sensitive to certain things and lying is one of them – and we never forget. A “gut feeling” or a “spidey-sense” is just that sensitivity being so small that the big lump of jelly in your head hasn’t caught up yet.
I can give you a great example from last Friday. I got a direct message on LinkedIn. It was clearly written by Artificial Intelligence. The person was selling some amazing solution to my specific problem. The AI they’d used to identify me had made sure of that. Then that same machine had sent me a direct message. It was very specific, well-researched, and set off my gut feeling response. The response wasn’t from the person in the profile picture; it was really from Claude, or ChatGPT.
It made me trust that person less. Why? Because they were lying to me – just a little bit. They might struggle with writing, but to me they couldn’t be bothered to reach out to me personally. They clearly didn’t think I was worth their time, and so why should they be worth mine? And also, it reduces their skill set, at least to me. Their lack of care and attention in reaching out to me, their terrible sales approach built on a little lie – it makes me think they might lie to me in other areas too, just a little bit. Convincing someone to work with you is hard enough without lying to them a little bit at the start.
But why does the person who sent this counterproductive message not know that their message would “find me” and make me see them in a lesser light?
Angle 4: AI, like a bad smell, is boring after a while
There are many towns around the world that live next to thermal springs. Thermal springs stink. They smell of sulphur and when you arrive at your town in New Zealand or Yellowstone or Iceland it smells… of sulphur. But after an hour or two your nose adjusts and then it smells like anything else. You just get used to it. I have found weed works the same way too – the only person who doesn’t know they smell of weed is the person smoking it.
AI is the same. I am someone who works with AI as a tool-only system and so I can “smell” AI from a mile away – and people who don’t use AI at all, and those who know it too well, can also smell AI, and that smell never goes away. And so it clings to everything you do from that point on, and people feel the personal service you may promise them will, in the end, just be AI – and they can get a Claude subscription for around £20 a month.
Seeing all the angles
None of the angles above inspire trust.
What inspires trust is the way Octopus Energy uses AI. A vast machine that allows you, as a customer, to be routed to the same team. Octopus still has real humans using that machine, adapting and talking to you, because they realise that, like the title, customers only want one thing, and it’s disgusting, and it’s not AI – it’s human-centred customer service.
AI integration begins and ends with the customer. Yes, it can improve efficiency, or reduce costs, but customers don’t care about that. They want the disgusting thing – a good service.
Lewis is a business and charity consultant who focuses on people-centred systems. Those people can be your staff, your users, or your customers. And if it’s the right thing to do, he can totally implement AI – but needs a good reason first. You can book a meeting with him here.
