88% of consumers prefer human interaction over AI

At a time when AI is increasingly used by businesses to transform customer experience (CX), a new report highlights the widening gap between operational gains and consumer satisfaction. 

Verizon’s latest CX Annual Insights report demonstrates how the future of CX lies in mindfully integrating AI to enhance and not replace human connections. While companies have been using AI for CX in the form of chatbots for years, generative AI has opened new possibilities such as hyper-personalization, faster customer support, real-time prompts for agents and even predicting customer needs.  

As part of the report, the team surveyed 500 executives and 5,000 consumers across seven countries to see how well AI-led CX systems are working.  

AI is helping companies, but customers are hardly impressed. The report states from the brands’ side, over 70% of executives say customer experience has improved in the past two years with AI. On the other side, 60% of customers admitted that they are satisfied with AI-driven interactions. However, 88% said they preferred human-led interaction. As many as 47% of consumers said that their biggest frustration has been not being able to reach a human.  

Another key finding is that personalization, which is one of AI’s main uses, is a problem. About 44% of executives said that AI is helping, while only 26 per cent of consumers feel personalization has improved. About 30% of consumers said that it has gotten worse. 

According to the report, AI is helping the most in use cases such as customer support (75%), personalization (71%), and data collection and analysis (69%).The report also shows the challenges that are holding companies back, such as poor data quality, privacy restrictions, lack of AI skills in staff, and difficulty in measuring AI’s true impact. 

One of the key highlights of the report is that human roles are here to stay. Only 7% of the surveyed companies think CX will be entirely AI-driven in the future. The report found that about 44% will balance investments between AI and human improvements. A majority of the companies are training their staff to handle complaints about AI, understand AI prompts and address data privacy concerns.  

The study also recommends companies train employees to work alongside AI, use AI to predict problems before they happen, and develop new ways to measure AI’s impact. It also asks companies to be transparent about personalization, especially about how the customer data is used.