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When frustration goes viral: Lessons for CX leaders

Covering a viral TikTok video, how brands are seeing success with gen AI for agents, and the intersection of customer support and client success.

Hope Dorman

Dec 11, 2024

4 min read

CX Insights

Nightmare fuel: A video went viral this week of a customer-facing role pushing back on a customer. A customer called a restaurant asking how far it was from the airport, and TikTok user @chckpeass, a hostess, decided to push back to “train customers not to ask dumb questions.” She said she would look it up on Google Maps - but then let the customer stay on hold rather than returning to answer.

The commenters online seemed to rally around her, being able to relate to the struggle having to help customers who need substantial assistance.

Frustrations like these can boil over when agents are disincentivized from providing actual support - such as if they are overly evaluated (and compensated) on metrics like handle time rather than quality of service provided.

So, what could have been done differently? Some tactics might include using call recording for quality assurance, but it’s more important to be proactive. Structure compensation plans and reward employees who deliver great service, even if takes a while or goes outside of their normal service requests.

Plus, set your customers up for success by answering common questions ahead of time online or in a FAQ, as most customers try to self-serve. However, it’s a helpful reminder that your customers span a wide range of comfort with technical systems and orientation toward self-service.

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AI Insights

We’re starting to see how AI can impact a CX team’s efficiency rather than using it just to deflect incoming conversations. A professor at Dartmouth analyzed a study of Chinese e-commerce site Taobao and its adoption of AI to empower customer support agents.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that with the tool, agents spent less time in customer chats and customer satisfaction increased.

But interestingly, the researchers found “the gen AI assistant served to augment the human agents rather than replace them” - because the human agents didn’t slack off. The typing volume stayed about the same but the volume of messages from agents increased.

The final notable finding is that the AI helped improve the low-performing human agents, but it negatively impacted the top-performing agents.

How a financial services provider uses AI

Capital One’s approach to using AI for customer service is similar, launching a generative AI tools to enhance the support agent’s work.

Right now, its agent tool has produced relevant and accurate information for 85% of the results - reflecting the reality that customers don’t always input their questions or concerns in a way that sets the AI up for success. The tool will likely get more effective over time as it learns how customers communicate.

The results from Taobao and Capital One show why keeping a human in the loop is so important. AI can augment teams, and agents can use it to be more effective, but it’s not outperforming true customer service professionals - so it shouldn’t replace them.

Customer facing-AI

We’re moving from talk to action: a new study from Gartner found that 85% of CX leaders will explore or pilot a customer-facing gen AI system in 2025, with 44% using a voice related element.

As CX leaders face pressure to implement AI in their support functions, it means you can harness influence over this game-changing initiative.

It’s clear: in 2025, you should get up to speed on the options for AI-powered CX tools and start making your plan for how they’ll fit in your support workflow.