The 1 Big Mistake Companies Are Making by Adding AI to Customer Service

Jim Eckes says that when he founded telecom business TieTechnology in 2006, customer service was “truly a miserable experience.” When artificial intelligence tools started popping up nearly two decades later, it seemed like business owners could finally solve this issue. But AI has, in many cases, made customer service even worse, according to Eckes. “You can’t really slap an AI tag on [the] terrible experience that customers are having right now, take out the human element by adding a bot—because that’s going to further infuriate the customer—and then try to call it progress,” he says. Customer surveys support this. Research by advisory firm Gartner, for example, found that 64 percent of consumers don’t want businesses to use AI in customer service. More than half of the 5,700-plus survey respondents said that if they discovered a company was planning to implement AI in this sector, they’d consider “switching to a competitor.” The problem, Eckes says, is that business owners are “skipping right to an AI solution” before addressing the root of their issue, “which is the customer relationship.” Recently, he adds, “customers have been treated so poorly due to cost-cutting, outsourcing, inadequate phone systems training, and—in our opinion, most importantly—the lack of CRM integration.” TieTechnology helps businesses connect their phone systems to their customer relationship management systems. Replacing human customer service agents with AI chatbots won’t fix this, according to Eckes, because at the end of the day, customers are still going to pick up the phone. Nearly two thirds—61 percent—of customers prefer to complete customer service tasks by calling, messaging or meeting with a human, according Qualtrics’ 2025 State of the Contact Center report. What customers “truly want,” Eckes says, “is a personalized experience.” That’s why he’s betting that solutions that can “successfully marry” customer data, customer experience, and phone systems “are going to be the winners in this AI race.” BY ANNABEL BURBA @ANNIEBURBA