How do we do this customer experience thing anyway? Join award-winning customer experience (CX) expert Jeannie Walters as she answers real questions from overwhelmed leaders! Let's turn ideas into ACTION! From company culture to employee experience (EX) to customer service, Jeannie wants to help you demystify the process for enriching the customer experience. With over 20 years investigating the best and worst in CX, this international keynote speaker has heard it all... and now she's here to give you the answers you need! You won't want to miss an episode! Do you have a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail!
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AI is moving fast into customer service, but customers are pushing back. With 59% saying AI agents feel frustrating, "set it and forget it" automation is not enough.
We break down the AI trust gap, why fast answers do not equal helpful outcomes, and how to hold AI agents to the same standards as human ones: empathy, clarity, and responsible decisions. You will learn why most customers want AI and humans working together, with a clear path to a real person when things get complex.
Walk away with practical steps: mystery shop your own AI agents, test messy real scenarios, and find the moments of truth where trust is won or lost. Subscribe and leave a review to help more CX leaders find this conversation.
Experience is everything. And that's why we have a new name coming up. If you want to know all about the podcast and make sure you don't miss when the first live Experience is Everything podcast drops, sign up at ExperienceInvestigators.com to make sure you're the first to know about Experience Is Everything, the podcast. We'll still take your questions, so don't forget you can leave me a message at askjeannie.vip.
AI adoption is here and it's fast, especially when it comes to customer service. Roughly 80% adoption with reported ROI near $3.50 for every dollar invested. That is based on research from 2026 from Avaya and Answer Connect. But the same data shows a trust gap. And that is widening. Let's talk about it. AI is here. It's helping us be more efficient. It's helping us get answers faster. It's helping the very people who serve customers in ways that they get better knowledge, better information, able to help the customer faster, better, and more efficiently. All good things. However, with this pace and with this level of adoption, we are experiencing a trust gap, and that is widening. 59% of customers say that AI agents are frustrating on service calls. And the significance of this is that that number is actually up from last year's 54%. So what does that tell us? That tells us that some of the AI agents are not living up to the standards that we would have for human agents in that
same position. We have to make sure that when we are evaluating, is this efficient? Is this serving us? That we are also looking at what our customers are telling us? What are they saying about their experience? Is this living up to the same standards of customer experience that we would have with somebody that we hire? If AI agents aren't delivering on that, it's time to reevaluate what is the process that they're using. What can we do to make sure that they have not only the right policies and processes and transactional history, but they have history around empathy and compassion and understanding, that we are giving them instructions to show up in the same way that we would a human. That's why it is extremely important that we provide customers a way to reach a human when they need it. There are things that AI is going to get wrong. There are ways that it will show up that make customers feel uncomfortable, unheard, or even not valued. When that happens, we have work to do. And this isn't an either-or question, or either or, either or, either or, whatever
you say. It's not about that question because 69% of customers are saying that they want AI and humans to work together. I think we all understand the advantage of speed and scale and efficiency that AI can bring. But we also understand that there are times we need a human in that experience. We need someone who understands the broader scope of the situation and not just the transactional parts of it. We need someone who can help us when things go awry or when we simply are wary or frustrated with an AI agent.
That's why, as you're building your processes, your customer journey maps, anything around the service touch points with your customers and AI, you need to think about the contextual intelligence of this. It's no longer just about what is the customer telling us, how are they feeling, and what can we do about it. It's about something much bigger than that. We have to take into account the context, combining the actual AI and the performance of it, along with data, human judgment in real time, what it looks like in actual practice, and why chasing speed alone or something like that as a metric is not the way we want to go. We want to make sure that we are looking at this from that customer lens. It is so easy. It is like a siren song to get attracted and led by the siren song of think of how much we could do with AI. Think of the scale we could achieve. And while that's very, very tempting, we have to constantly take that step back and make sure that we are looking at things from the lens of the customer.
That means it's time to mystery shop your own AI agents. Figure out what they are doing in complicated situations, maybe situations without a lot of customer history. How are they handling things that are outside of the realm of what we would call standard requests or normal procedures? What happens when somebody has a question upon a question? What happens when somebody says, I really want to talk to a person? We have to make that so incredibly easy for customers. Otherwise, that trust gap I mentioned is going to continue to grow. Right now, people don't know what to trust. And it's our job to help them not only know they can trust us, but we actually have to earn that trust every step of the journey. That means making sure that we are being proactive about how we are rolling out these AI
tools. Here is a gut check question for you. Where in our process do customers usually want to talk to someone? Where in their customer journey do you think they will need a human? Look at that part of the journey and ask yourself: are we over-relying on AI when somebody really needs that human guidance? If the answer is yes, you need to look at the entire customer journey and assess where are the places that it will matter most.
This is where understanding the moments of truth in your customer's journey will really pay off. If we are basically telling AI to take over in all these different ways and not really aware of where those moments of truth are, it's very easy to get it wrong. Those moments of truth, those times when a customer decides, is this working for me or not? Are they earning my trust or eroding it? Those moments matter more than anything. So let's invest in them by making sure people are there to help the people we serve.
AI is here, it's amazing, it's fast, it's scalable, it's all the things that we need it to be. But it will never, ever, ever be human. That's why we need to make sure that as the human leaders of customer experience, we are investing in the right tools, the right technology, the right way, at the same time as understanding when will humans be absolutely critical to the experience that we're delivering. If you are not sure, if you don't know how to answer that question, it's time to get back to the basics and ask yourself, what is the experience we've promised and how can we make sure we're delivering on it?
This is an exciting time. I hope that you will stick with us. I hope that you will continue to send in your questions to askjeannie.vip. And I hope that you will continue to lead with experience. Because at the end of the day, experience is everything. But remember, it's not everything all at once. It's everything built one moment, one experience at a time. Thanks for being here. We love your ratings and reviews. Please share this with someone you think needs to hear it. See you next time. If you're ready to turn insights into action, join CXI Membership, our community for customer experience investigators just like you. Get the tools, support, and inspiration to move from ideas to true impact. And don't miss my book, Experience is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations. Available wherever you order books. Until next time, keep asking questions, keep improving, and keep leading with experience.
