The customer service script everyone dreads - and how AI can finally retire it

 

If reading that made your shoulders tighten, imagine experiencing it: on hold, watching the clock, with no idea how many more questions stand between you and an answer.

 

That’s the customer service experience most people have learned to brace for. For businesses, a single bad interaction can be enough to lose a customer for good.

 

Yet contact centres are still too often perceived primarily as cost centres, rather than recognised for their role in building customer trust and loyalty. Simply expanding headcount to meet demand is rarely sustainable, so organisations are increasingly investing in technology to help their teams work more effectively and deliver better customer interactions. 

 

Recent Five9 research captures the tension at the heart of that investment. While 92% of organisations are implementing or piloting AI in customer service, two-thirds of consumers still prefer speaking to a human. The answer, therefore,  isn’t simply to replace people with AI or add more AI agents. It is to find the right mix of human and artificial intelligence for each interaction: a “humantic” approach that combines AI’s efficiency with human empathy and judgement.  

 

 

Why a zero-human contact centre falls short

Advances in self-service can make a contact centre with little or no human involvement appear increasingly plausible. Customers can already manage tasks such as initiating returns, scheduling appointments, and finding information through richer, more interactive online portals.

 

This can be empowering, putting greater control in the customer’s hands. AI agents can extend these capabilities by managing voice-based interactions and taking appropriate actions to resolve straightforward enquiries. But that does not mean every customer interaction can - or should - be fully automated.

 

Taken to its extreme, automation creates the theoretical prospect of a zero-human contact centre: one that operates around the clock, scales instantly to meet demand, and reports every decision back for analysis. Yet efficiency and availability do not add up to good service on their own. Some interactions need someone who can read the situation, exercise judgement when the standard process does not fit, and genuinely care about how the conversation ends. AI can support that person, but it cannot replace what they bring.

 

 

The agentic gap

Any business considering a zero-human approach should think carefully about what AI has and has not proven itself capable of.

 

One incredibly useful thing AI can do is follow processes in a conversational format, gathering information and applying policies to it in a flexible way to arrive at a decision. That’s a major part of the contact centre’s requirements, and that means that agentic AI will inevitably play a growing role in this context. A routine billing dispute is an example of where AI agents could resolve an interaction end to end – verifying, checking policy, refunding, and confirming, with no human involved.

 

What AI can’t provide, though, is genuine human empathy. AI can detect sentiment and adapt its responses, but it cannot listen with human sincerity or offer the same reassurance and judgement when a situation moves beyond the script.

 

If it is deployed purely as a substitute for human support, this risks leaving customers stranded when things sometimes inevitably go wrong, with nobody available to take ownership or offer meaningful reassurance. Used well, AI can transform the efficiency and quality of customer service. But automation alone should not be the objective.

 

 

The answer? A humantic approach.

The answer isn’t more AI or fewer humans. It is a deliberate combination of both: a humantic approach, where the right question isn’t how much a business can automate, but what the right mix of human and AI is for the interaction in front of you. 

 

High-volume, low-stakes requests - checking an order status, confirming storm hours, resetting a password - can be handled by AI instantly, at any hour, freeing agents from identity checks and repetitive verification that make up much of the traditional support call. By contrast, a cancellation or bereavement call should be led by a person from the first word, with AI working quietly in the background to handle the follow-up once that conversation is done. And in the most complex, high-stakes moments - a service outage affecting thousands of accounts, for instance - a single specialist can direct several AI agents at once, triaging cases and approving resolutions at a scale no human team could match alone. 

 

The key to a humantic approach is that the mix is decided by how sensitive and how complex the interaction actually is, not by how much a business wants to automate. Making that judgement call correctly, every time, and keeping the context intact through every handoff, is the harder problem, and the one that separates a genuine platform from AI bolted onto an existing system.

 

 

When human agents stop repeating and start building relationships

Another way to think of this is that the challenge with call centres isn’t the staff; it’s that those staff have had to behave like agents. Consider the first paragraph of this article again: dictating information to someone so that they can navigate forms and menus is inherently unpleasant, but there are other things happening in those interactions which we should be seeking to maximise. 

 

Rather than a zero-human future, the smarter answer for the contact centre is to redefine what those humans are doing. AI agents can take down details and look up customer information faster and more accurately than human operators. That means that, rather than asking human and digital agents to perform the same work and filling the ‘agent’ job role twice, we can free employees from the routine and allow them to focus on complex problems and higher-value work.

 

Given that customer service can play such a big role in our perception of a brand, it is worth investing in people in a way that means they can spend less time typing and more time talking, providing good experiences, and proactively managing customer relationships. Like a great in-store experience, agents can smoothly step in when they are needed, not just to fix issues, but to give personal advice, make people feel catered for, and humanise the commercial interaction.

 

And, of course, as AI agents and humans work side by side, the interventions that humans make can become a resource for improving how the AI performs. At the same time, AI can efficiently deliver information to human employees that keeps them better informed and more useful to customers. This positive flywheel effect creates a contact centre that gets smarter and more efficient with every interaction.

 

 

Empowering humans to be human

For decades, organisations have viewed the call centre as a cost centre that needs to be minimised, often by replacing humans with digital agents. But that approach is leaving positive outcomes for customers on the table. Instead, combining the best of humans and AI allows organisations to build more trust with customers and improve customer service over time.

 

I believe the future of the contact centre isn’t one without humans, but one where AI agents tackle the routine and enable humans to spend more of their time serving customers in the moments that matter most and behaving in more human ways:

 

“Hi, I can see our AI agent has already rescheduled your delivery. I’m just joining because you mentioned the shoes are for a birthday, and I wanted to make sure the new date still works for you. Great choice, by the way. I really love the limited edition colourways we’ve been doing for these shoes. Everything is now confirmed, and we’ll keep you updated. Have a great day!”

 

This is what a humantic contact centre looks like in practice: AI handles the administration, recognises when a human can add value, and gives the agent the context they need. The human is then free to bring empathy, reassurance, and personality to the interaction, while the customer receives a faster and more personal service.

 

The future of customer service will be defined by how effectively humans and AI work together. Businesses that get that balance right can turn their contact centres from cost centres into engines of trust, loyalty, and long-term growth. 

 

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Ajay Awatramani is Chief Product Officer at Five9

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Tero Vesalainen