Everyone has an automated customer service horror story, but for many consumers, the horror is less about man versus machine than about getting a satisfying outcome from a service call.
A recent survey of 3,000 consumers by Gradient Labs , which develops AI agents for financial services customer operations, found that 49% would prefer an AI agent to fix their problem immediately rather than wait until the next day to speak to a human.
Among respondents who had used an AI agent for a customer service issue in the past year, 87% reported that their issue was fully or partially resolved.
But the survey also revealed that four out of five respondents have deliberately tried to circumvent an AI agent to reach a human customer service representative.
Contacting a human gives you someone to talk to, but it doesn't guarantee an outcome, Gradient co-founder and CTO Neal Lathia explained.
"Most chatbots people deal with can answer a question, as they typically aren't able to reopen a dispute or apply a policy," Lathia said in a statement. "This is what drives people to ask for a human."
"The demand changes once you give the AI the ability to actually finish the job," he continued.
"Interestingly enough," he added, "an AI agent who truly understands the domain will know when it is out of its depth and, consequently, the moment when a person should step in."
AI agents aren't given enough agency to solve real problems, and analysts reinforce that by telling companies to "take it slow" with "baby steps" and start with a simple FAQ AI agent so they can test it and see how it works, said Jen Grant, CMO of Quiq , a maker of an AI-powered customer experience platform in Bozeman, Mont.
"But we have not seen that to be successful at Quiq," she told TechNewsWorld.
"Human agents are given access to order management, customer records, or other critical systems within the business, so they can look up, solve, and update records for the customer," she explained.
"But if the AI agents, whether on voice, text, or chat, don't have the same access to systems that the human agents have," she continued, "they can't solve many of the real problems customers have, and so it has to be escalated to a human."
"That's where the real problem starts," she said. "Businesses have, in their effort to be cautious and 'start small,' put AI agents into the customer support flow that can't do too much and then turn into yet another hurdle for their customers to get an answer."
"Whether you want to reschedule a technician visit, change the dates of that room you booked, or just want information about the return policy for the thing you ordered, if you still have to get transferred from an AI agent to a human agent, that makes the experience even longer, more frustrating and worse than it was before AI was introduced," she noted.
"Consumers start to see the AI agent as a frustrating roadblock, and that's why laws start to get put into place," she added.
California has passed one such law. The Right to Human Customer Service Act, AB 1609, takes effect Jan. 1, 2027. Subject to exemptions, it covers businesses with more than $500 million in national gross annual revenue and requires a simple way to request human assistance during regular business hours.
Covered businesses must make a good-faith effort to connect customers with a human agent within 15 minutes of a request or provide a specific appointment within one business day for an agent to call or connect with them.…