Throughout this year’s National Customer Service Week, it was fantastic to see so many organisations and individuals champion great service, recognise their colleagues and highlight the difference they make to customers every day.
AI increasingly featured in this year’s discussions. However, the business conversation about AI in customer service is too often framed as a contest: human versus machine, which, for me, is nonsense. Customers want things to run smoothly and any issues that do arise to be resolved quickly and fairly, in the way that suits them at that moment.
As service leaders, our duty is to keep championing the right behaviour and approach to meeting customers’ needs in a way that builds loyalty and supports growth of our business in the longer term. We should avoid being seduced by quick fixes or solutions that promise a silver bullet – as my mum still likes to remind me: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is!
And the idea that AI should do this and a human should do that is too simplistic. The reality now is more nuanced. The same customer may be happy to self-serve when tracking a parcel but want a person to help when something goes seriously wrong with an urgent delivery. It’s a question of situational context as much as customer preference.
I worry that too many organisations are trying to put lipstick on a machine – deploying a human-mimicking avatar providing simulated empathy. This can feel like deception, eroding the trust that good service depends on. To what extent can a machine understand what it means to be human? Pretending it can do customers and our colleagues a disservice. It is better to be open about what the technology is and design it to do what it does well.
Offering customers genuine choice
Ultimately, it comes back to choice, and a good organisation will provide that. Genuine choice depends on honesty. “Hello, I’m a virtual assistant; I can help you quickly deal with most queries” is a good way of being open about what you are dealing with and that you understand its limitations.
The greatest opportunity probably lies upstream of the frontline. Using AI to fix broken processes, join up information and predict issues before they happen is where customers will really feel the difference (without even knowing the part AI has played).
AI should support human-led customer service
Regulators are already responding to the new questions that AI deployment is raising. Since August 2026, EU transparency rules have required interactive AI systems to make clear that they are not human.
And in the UK, the AI Minister has confirmed plans to ensure organisations properly report when an AI system goes rogue.
An article in The Guardian this week highlighted examples of trying to go too far too fast with AI, with the likes of Meta reversing some of its moves to replace middle managers with AI.
Consider intent in your approach to AI
Start with intent, not technology. Before deploying AI, organisations should be clear about why they are using it. What problem does it solve for the customer, not just what cost does it take out? Design it around the customer experience, and measure success by whether things are genuinely easier for the people using it and the savings will follow.
Service-led design is the answer. Understanding the outcome, you want to create and the end-to-end experience across the organisation, ensuring clean data and constantly testing hypotheses, is critical. Involving the right people at the right time is essential to any service-led business: support them with clear guidance and training from the outset, which, unfortunately, more than half of workers feel they haven’t received when new AI solutions have been introduced.
AI is changing the nature of customer service, but good service still requires empathy, fairness, accountability, and good judgement. Get this right, and trust and financial return will follow.
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