Don’t Automate the Relationship
Why great customer service becomes even more valuable in the age of AI
I showed up to my hotel six hours before check-in with a suitcase, a half-charged phone, and that quiet, familiar question I’ve learned to ask in new places: Is this going to be easy… or am I about to spend the day negotiating with policies?
I wasn’t asking for special treatment. I was asking for something more basic—someone to treat the situation like a human situation.
The woman at the front desk looked up, smiled, and said, “I’ll do my best to check you in early.”
It’s a small sentence. But the way she said it mattered. It didn’t sound like a script. It sounded like ownership.
The lobby had that early-day energy—people coming and going, grabbing coffee to start their day, backpacks and briefcases weaving between rolling suitcases. A couple looked like they were headed to the beach—easy clothes, sunhats, that unbothered vacation pace. It made me feel even more aware of my in-between status: I wasn’t quite “arrived” yet.
I wandered around and tried to look relaxed—like a person who definitely wasn’t doing suitcase math in his head. And then my phone rang maybe thirty minutes later.
“I found a room for you,” she said. “And I was able to upgrade you.”
Right there, my whole trip changed—not because the room was bigger, but because my nervous system unclenched. I wasn’t stuck killing time, hauling luggage, hovering around a city I hadn’t settled into yet. I was in. I could breathe. I could start my day like a person, not a problem.
And almost immediately, something else happened inside me: loyalty.
Not “I’ll leave a nice review” loyalty. The deeper kind. The kind that makes you think, When I’m in this city again, I’m staying here. The kind that turns a transaction into trust.
And that’s the protected good I’m arguing for here: trust—basic dignity in everyday commerce—the ability to reach a competent human being when it actually matters. Not because customers deserve luxury. Because they deserve not to be treated like a ticket in a maze.
Customer service isn’t just answering questions. It’s relieving anxiety. It’s reducing friction. It’s restoring confidence that the company is still on the other side of the exchange.
Most people aren’t asking for perfection. They’re asking not to be abandoned.
Frontier Airlines and the Maze
Which is why a recent experience with Frontier Airlines hit me so hard.
I had a flight scheduled at 7:00 p.m. Earlier in the day, I did a little digging online and it looked increasingly likely the flight would be significantly delayed. That’s not the end of the world—delays happen. Weather happens. Mechanical issues happen. People get it.
But what I wanted was simple: fresh information and a real conversation about what to do next.
I checked Frontier’s app. I checked the website. The information didn’t feel tethered to reality. So I did what any reasonable customer does when the situation gets even slightly complicated: I tried to reach a human being.
I couldn’t find a real path to one.
The only option I could locate was an online chat. Fine. I’m not above chat. But the “chat” wasn’t a conversation—it was a script. A narrow menu of pre-approved options that didn’t include the question I actually had. I kept trying to phrase it differently, trying to find the right door in the maze, and it became clear there wasn’t a door.
No “talk to a person” button. No “call us.” No “here’s what we know right now.”
And then the flight was delayed by almost two hours—with no meaningful communication from the airline.
I sat there staring at that chat window for a second, feeling the strange mix of irritation and helplessness that comes from not being able to reach anyone who can actually help.
To be clear: my frustration wasn’t primarily the delay. It was the silence paired with the inaccessibility. It was the feeling that the company had decided the best way to handle uncertainty was to make itself unreachable. And I don’t blame whichever frontline employees end up absorbing that frustration in the airport—this feels like a customer-service design choice made far upstream.
That experience keeps sticking with me because we’re about to see more of it—because we’re entering the age of AI.
The AI Temptation
There’s a lot of good to be seen with AI. Used well, it can reduce busywork, improve workflows, and help teams move faster. I’m not anti-technology. In fact, I’m drawn to tools that create clarity and remove unnecessary friction.
But I’m increasingly convinced many businesses don’t see AI as a tool that supports customer service. They see it as a way to manage customer service—often meaning: contain it, constrain it, and reduce the number of human conversations.
AI as a cost-cutting shield.
And I don’t say that like it’s simple. Running support is hard. Staffing is expensive. Customers can be unreasonable. Expectations are 24/7 now, and a lot of teams are stretched thin.
But it’s still short-sighted.
Because what great service does—what the hotel employee did in thirty minutes—isn’t “information retrieval.” It’s judgment. It’s initiative. It’s ownership. It’s presence. It’s a human being choosing to carry responsibility for an outcome.
AI can triage. It can route. It can collect basic context. It can summarize a case so the next person doesn’t start from scratch.
But AI can’t carry responsibility.
And I think this connects to a broader drift in how many modern systems are built. A lot of them are designed to manage people, not serve them—keep them moving, keep them quiet, keep them from reaching the part of the organization that can actually make things right. That may scale operations. But it shrinks relationship.
And when things go sideways—when a customer is confused, stuck, anxious, or dealing with money and time—that’s the moment that determines loyalty.
The Business Case for Being Reachable
Here’s the irony: the “AI as replacement” mindset often presents itself as financially savvy. But it misunderstands the economics of trust.
Winning customers is expensive. Keeping customers is where the payoff lives. And customers are less patient than leaders often assume. PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 52% of consumers stopped using or buying from a brand because of a bad experience with its products or services, and 29% stopped due to poor customer experience—online or in-person. (pwc.com)
That’s not a minor “CX issue.” That’s customer flight.
So when you put a bot between you and a customer who needs help—and you make it hard to reach a competent human—you may save money in the short term. But you’re spending trust like it’s a renewable resource.
It isn’t.
Cost-cutting that erodes trust isn’t savings. It’s deferred revenue loss.
I also know how tempting it is—personally—to choose efficiency over care. It happens at work. It happens at home. It happens any time you’re tired and trying to keep things moving. We’ve all sent the “quick reply” instead of making the call. We’ve all optimized something and called it “progress,” even when it quietly thinned out the relationship.
So I’m not writing this as a scold. I’m writing it as a plea for clarity.
A Better Way to Use AI
If you want to use AI well in customer service, here’s the principle that matters:
Use AI behind the scenes to support humans—not in front of the relationship to hide them.
Use AI for:
Triage and routing (get the customer to the right place fast)
Collecting context (order number, screenshots, symptoms—so customers don’t repeat themselves)
Summarizing cases (so a human starts at 70%, not 0%)
Agent-assist (policies, next steps, draft responses)
But don’t use AI to create a maze.
Don’t use AI to force customers into a “happy path” that collapses the moment life gets slightly messy.
And please don’t use AI to handle the exact categories where humans most need a human: billing disputes, cancellations, travel disruptions, safety concerns, anything emotionally charged, anything requiring judgment.
Three Rules You Can Implement Tomorrow
A visible escape hatch
“Talk to a person” should be obvious and fast—not buried, not disguised, not withheld until someone has performed the ritual of frustration long enough to “qualify” for humanity.Smart escalation
If the customer repeats themselves twice, escalate. If sentiment turns negative, escalate. If it involves money, safety, or time sensitivity, escalate.Empower the human
Nothing is worse than finally reaching a person who can’t do anything. If you escalate, escalate to someone who can actually resolve the issue—or who can own the next step with authority and clarity.
A customer should never have to fight to be understood.
Closing Encouragement
That hotel employee didn’t create loyalty because she was perfect. She created loyalty because she was present. She treated a policy as a tool—not a shield. She carried responsibility for the moment.
That’s the killer app.
And in the age of AI—when it will be easier than ever to automate the front door—being reachable might become the rarest form of excellence.
So here’s my strong encouragement, especially to leaders: don’t automate the relationship.
Automate the busywork. Automate the sorting. Automate the summarizing.
But when someone is confused, stuck, or anxious—let a competent human being show up.
Because if your customers can’t reach you when things go sideways, you’re not scaling service.
You’re scaling distance. And that distance is what erodes the protected good in the first place: trust—basic dignity in everyday commerce—and the simple reassurance that a competent human can still be reached when it matters.
And in a world where everyone can copy features and deploy the same tools, protecting trust—through real, competent, human closeness—may be the advantage that actually lasts.