AI will not replace customer support—yet
People don't like being told that they are talking with AI when they are dealing with a frustrating product.
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Both essays are dedicated to my mother who wrestled with Life to give me one of the best education people of our humble station could hope for. Almost 12 years ago this year, I was in a cybercafe near my hometown “surfing the internet” to find essay competitions I could enter to win some money and contribute to my mom’s treatment. I didn’t find any and she passed away from complications arising from ovarian cystic dermoid in early 2014. She would have been 57 last December.
If I ever contribute to the field of medicine, I know what I want that contribution to be.
If you’ve ever called a customer-care phone number, you know how annoying it is to get the automated wait message, because there are more people on the queue than customer support can handle. Customer service is one of the key executive functions of which a CEO is chief. In other words, the CEO is the first customer support staff. And like all executive functions, it’s hard enough to outsource it efficiently, to say nothing of outsourcing it effectively. What we call customer support today is a compartmentalised version of that executive function.
One area where we’ve seen AI agents hyped for is in customer service roles. In February 2024, Klarna, the leading European Buy-Now-Pay-Later company, announced that it was cutting customer service roles. Why? Because early results from implementing an OpenAI-powered chatbot suggested the AI customer support bot could handle the work of 700 real people.
Last week, the Nigerian food delivery app, Chowdeck, announced it was laying off 86 people from its contract workforce. This Techpoint news article, one of the earliest news of this I could find, does not mention artificial intelligence or chatbots or even automation. While a more recent blog post does claim the layoffs are due to automation. It too does not mention AI.
The lack of explicit mention of AI in the statements attributed to Chowdeck’s CEO, Femi Aluko, notwithstanding, Nigerian users of the app are convinced that their recent customer service woes with Natasha (the AI agent?) are caused by this abrupt switch from humans to AI.
And people don’t like it.
Can AI replace your CEO?
Customer support is not usually the glamorous department of any company. It is tedious, typically thankless and demanding. It’s also seen as the prime candidate for AI replacement. Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok and ChatGPT all list customer service roles as the number one vulnerable role.
That said, DeepSeek “thinks”:
Jobs requiring emotional intelligence, complex decision-making, or deep creativity are probably safer. For instance, a CEO or product manager who needs to make strategic decisions or understand nuanced customer needs might not be replaced anytime soon.
In other words, AI thinks the CEO role is safe. You probably agree.
But as I mentioned earlier in this essay, one of the key functions of being chief executive officer, is being chief customer support officer. This is apparent enough when companies start out, fight for their first customers and then begin to deal with teething issues as the business grows rapidly.
Without really thinking about it, CEOs will outsource customer support, a.k.a understanding nuanced customer needs, in favour of making strategic decisions. It’s a natural progression. The CEO is human after all, and if she spent all her time responding to customer queries on WhatsApp, she could not do anything else. So she will compartmentalise that executive function, simplify it to fine-grained rote tasks, and then find someone else—usually a lot of other people—to do it. It is normal.
But it doesn’t stop the CEO from being the chief customer support officer. Actually, the CEO should not want to completely exit her customer support role. She may not be hunching over the telephone listening to customers. But listening to customers and experiencing the product from the customer perspective will never not be part of her job. Even if it will become a thousand times more difficult and frankly speaking, impractical. Especially if the company started that way.
Or you might run the risk of generating scary customer feedback like this.
Maybe not as public, and maybe not as eloquent. But definitely not feedback that would put a smile on your face.
As you ight have been able to tell. The underlying point of the above LinkedIn post is frustration, not AI. That is to say, the emotional need of the user to talk out the frustrations he had with the product with a human was unmet. David wanted effective delivery of customer support. Not the efficient delivery of customer support. AI chatbots are currently efficient in the delivery of customer support.
To be clear, it does not mean that AI will not impact customer service jobs. It will. Nor does it mean that AI will not replace some customer service functions. It already is, and computers have since before the age of AI—remember the automated, “Press 1 to do x” messages? It simply means that human customer support agents will become closer to the product than ever before.
That’s what Sebastian Siemiatkowskim, Klarna’s chief executive officer (and chief customer service officer), seems to have discovered. Or at least that is what I think he was saying last February.
Offering “a human to speak to!!!” is not particularly a new implementation of automation. But Siemiatkowski, who allegedly told Sam Altman, “I want Klarna to be your favorite guinea pig,” seems to be suggesting that this “offering” will be a key distinctive feature. So AI will not replace customer support entirely.
But it will pick up your calls/chats faster and keep you talking through the basic resolution steps so that you won’t have to listen to annoying music. That is one less annoyance. And the less annoyed the customer is by the time she gets to speak with the customer support staff, the better for everyone.
If people know that it’s AI though, I suspect they still may not like it.
You can choose to fix your product to eliminate human customer support. But you should not solely rely on a technology wonder to deal with frustrated human beings. The matrix is not real.
Thanks, good read! I like the nugget about in the age of AI nothing will be as valuable as humans.