I am sharing an experience I had with Samsung customer service the other day. I’m not picking on them – I bet my experience is common amongst many other customers with a wide swathe of consumer companies. I share it just to show what bad looks like and how the promise of AI for customer service could easily take things from 1 star to 5.

After choosing the support option I was pointed to by email, below is the conversation that ensued between myself and several live agents on a chat via their website.

This is not about the issue I had, as much as their Apps and Online Services don’t work the way you’d expect them to or they claim they should. This is about online customer service and my experience with it. It shows how disjointed it was and frustrating. And how in the age of AI, it surely can only get better.

Sure there are teething problems with using AI for customer service but compared to my experience with humans and disjointed, manual systems, I’m positive things can get better.

An AI Agent, with some basic automation in the background, should easily be able to improve on some of the experiences I had, without needing to involve or incur the cost of a human. For instance:

• Connect all of my conversations across different touchpoints
• Keep me within a unified conversation between humans if needed
• Shorten the time of my conversation from an hour to probably 10 minutes
• Connect different product and service insights

Here is the transcription of the chat I had if you have the time and inclination. I’m also going to use this post to see if I can get some joy from Samsung another way or at least alert them to this abysmal state of affairs.

The promise of AI for Customer Service

While there are many companies offering AI solutions for customer service, the one I work at, Microsoft (disclosure), is also. So I have the most familiarity with their offerings – aside from the video, there is this microsite: Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service—AI Contact Center | Microsoft 365 Copilot.

I only share these by way of example and to show you the art of the possible. Many customers are adopting or thinking of adopting these approaches and technologies already. So it’s a reality and there are some great examples out there of customer service experiences being improved through AI.