Most people now approach a support line with a sense of dread, and the reason is not complicated. There are two well-established ways to make support worse. One is to outsource it to a vendor whose staff know little about the product and cannot communicate clearly with the customer. The other is to put a poorly built automated agent in front of every caller and keep them in a loop until they give up. AI has made the second option cheap, and a great many companies have taken it.
What the word means
Support is help provided to someone. Help is making it easier for someone to do something by offering one's own services or resources.
The possessive matters. The party providing help is expected to contribute something of its own. When a customer contacts a company for support, that is what they are owed, and it is as central to the business as sales or collections. A model deployed to deflect inconvenient requests does not reduce the number of inconvenient requests. It produces more of them, from angrier customers, with a support ticket now attached to a churn risk.
The competitive consequence
Consider the position from the other side. A company that has replaced its first line of support with a model has handed every competitor a script:
You are currently a customer of a firm that answers support with an automated agent. We offer the same service with two differences. We are somewhat more expensive, and when you call, a person in this country answers.
That pitch closes. Customers will pay a premium for a competent human on the line, and the premium is large relative to the cost of providing it. Any company that answers the phone can take customers from a company that does not.
Scale is not the argument
The models that make automated support rational for the largest platforms do not apply to a company receiving ten calls a day. Those companies do not need an electronic holding pen. They need someone to pick up, resolve the issue, and, while the customer is satisfied and on the line, offer them the next thing they need. That is not a cost center. It is one of the most reliable sales channels a small or mid-sized company has.
Where a model does belong in support
None of this means AI has no role in a support operation. It has a useful one, behind the person rather than in front of the customer:
- Drafting the reply to a routine question, for a person to review and send.
- Retrieving the relevant order, invoice or account history so the person answering does not have to search for it.
- Classifying and routing incoming requests so the right person sees them first.
- Summarizing a long thread for whoever picks it up next.
In each case the model makes the human faster. The human still provides the help. That is the same division of labor we apply when we put AI into finance systems: the model proposes, the person is responsible, and the customer never has to find out which is which.