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How to Navigate Customer Service

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I once drew a cartoon with someone trying to call customer service and hearing:

“Your call is very important to us. Please hold while we evaporate all the goodwill created by our expensive advertising.”

I’ve been thinking lately about the state of customer service, particularly with customer service touted as one of the first areas to be fully automated by AI. Just last week, Marc Benioff at Salesforce boasted about cutting 4,000 customer service reps (out of 9,000) because of AI.

AI boosters promise a golden age of customer service, with AI agents able to handle customer service inquiries even better than human agents.

And yet, some of the perennial headaches from bad customer service are by design. Chris Colin had a fascinating article in The Atlantic this summer that explored a customer service tactic called “sludge” (first termed by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler).

Chris defined sludge as “tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.” The result is that many customers just give up rather than fight through it.

Inspired by his own Kafkaesque customer service journey with Ford, Chris learned that sludge may not be fully intentional, but it’s still by design. Sludge is often the end result of companies optimizing for metrics around cost and missing the overall impact on the brand.

AI alone won’t fix sludge. AI may make sludge harder to escape.

And yet that creates an opportunity for brands to zig when others zag. A streamlined customer service experience can be by design too. And AI doesn’t have to be a binary choice. It’s how we adopt the tools that matters more than the tools themselves.

I’m struck by the evolution in thinking from a company called Klarna. An early adopter of AI for customer service, they ultimately pulled back for a more nuanced approach.

As Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski put it:

"We just had an epiphany: in a world of AI nothing will be as valuable as humans … we are going to kick off work to allow Klarna to become the best at offering a human to speak to.”

Collaboration with BlueOcean AI

One of the biggest paradoxes of AI is how such powerful tools can result in so much homogeneity. Strategies, messaging, and creative that sound suspiciously alike. I’ve heard this described as “The Great Averaging” or “The Great Same-ening.”

Marketers feed the same prompts into the same large language models, trained on the same public data. And then, like the classic definition of insanity, they expect different results.

Generic AI alone can lead to generic outcomes.

BlueOcean AI helps brands stand apart by combining agentic AI with proprietary brand, market, and competitor intelligence (not found in generic AI).

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s that cartoon I drew on customer service in 2011 (back when I called this cartoon Brand Camp):

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-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.