The problem is that a lot of friction is intentional. Companies want there to be friction to return an item or cancel a subscription. Insurance companies want there to be friction to evaluate policies or appeal denied claims. Companies create legal friction to make competition harder. The friction is the point so AI isn't a solution. If you were to add AI they'd just find a way to create new friction.

So are call trees where you have to answer yes / no to a decision tree (and can't press 0 / 1, you have to verbalize "yes" or "no"). Those continue to exist, so I expect AI customer 'service' to be very frustrating to work with for quite some time.

I mean look, if the customer service department is just trying to frustrate you into not contacting them then AI is just a new tool in the belt for that. Sad, but improvement for them is explicitly worse for you.

But if you're actually trying to provide good customer service because people are paying you for it any paying per case then you wouldn't dare put a phone menu or AI chat bot in-between them and the human. The person handles all the interaction with the client and then uses AI where it's useful to speed up the actual work.

Yep.

The thing is, you aren't contacting customer services because everything is going well, you are contacting them because you have a problem.

The last thing you need is to be gaslit by an AI.

The worst ones are the ones where you don't realise right away you aren't talking to a person, you get that initial hope that you've actually gotten through to someone who can help you (and really quickly too) only to have it dawn on you that you are talking to a ChatGPT wrapper who can't help you at all.