AI Agents & Customer Service?

There is one particular business that's led me to write this. This business is in the airline industry. I won't call them out.

...but, honestly I hate their use of AI agents for customer service. I never get the answers that I need. They are incredibly unhelpful for the types of queries I have.

Sure, if you want to have an agent that does RAG against your docs to act as a first line of defense, I'm not opposed. I don't have anything against chat-based interfaces, in fact I tend to prefer them when I'm searching for information.

That being said, there should be a 0 friction path for me to interact with a human. 9/10 times when I'm reaching out to support, it's not because I can't find something on your doc site. It's because some BS happened while booking a flight, or I need to make changes and your agent isn't able to help with that (yet).

Until your AI agent is so f*cking good that I'm unable to notice that it's an agent, don't use it for customer service. It's going to make your customer experience 10 times worse because now I'm just pissed off that you decided my time isn't worth speaking directly to a person.

Yes... I wrote this while waiting for a human to respond to my customer service inquiry.