AI and Customer Support: Cost Savings, Yes. Useful, No
July 24, 2025
This blog post is the work of an authentic dinobaby. Sorry. No smart software can help this reptilian thinker.
AI tools help workers to be more efficient and effective, right? Not so much. Not in this call center, anyway. TechSpot reveals, “Call Center Workers Say Their AI Assistants Create More Problems than They Solve.” How can AI create problems? Sure, it hallucinates and it is unpredictable. But why should companies let that stop them? They paid a lot for these gimmicks, after all.
Writer Rob Thubron cites a study showing customer service reps at a Chinese power company are less than pleased with their AI assistants. For one thing, the tool often misunderstands customers’ accents and speech patterns, introducing errors into call transcripts. Homophones are a challenge. It also struggles to accurately convert number sequences to text—resulting in inaccurate phone numbers and other numeric data.
The AI designers somehow thought their product would be better at identifying human emotions than people. We learn:
“Emotion recognition technology, something we’ve seen several reports about – most of them not good – is also criticized by those interviewed. It often misclassified normal speech as being a negative emotion, had too few categories for the range of emotions people expressed, and often associated a high volume level as someone being angry or upset, even if it was just a person who naturally talks loudly. As a result, most CSRs [Customer Service Reps] ignored the emotional tags that the system assigned to callers, saying they were able to understand a caller’s tone and emotions themselves.”
What a surprise. Thubron summarizes:
“Ultimately, while the AI assistant did reduce the amount of basic typing required by CSRs, the content it produced was often filled with errors and redundancies. This required workers to go through the call summaries, correcting mistakes and deleting sections. Moreover, the AI often failed to record key information from customers.”
Isn’t customer service rep one of the jobs most vulnerable to AI takeover? Perhaps not, anymore. A June survey from Gartner found half the organizations that planned to replace human customer service reps with AI are doing an about-face. A couple weeks later, the research firm anticipated that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. Are the remaining 60% firms that have sunk too much money into such ventures to turn back?
Cynthia Murrell, July 24, 2025
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