Yep, that’s my Kindle nailed to the wall. I had a lot of books, made a number of purchases with Amazon and had their app on all my devices. One attempted purchase went weird and my account was suspended, then cancelled. End of conversation. I tried to contact Amazon in various ways, but to no avail. I still do not know why.  It was the phone conversation with Amazon «customer service» that got me thinking… I concluded that the voice on the other end was either AI or being prompted by one.

Companies’ are rapidly adopting AI in customer service, but more as a cost management solution than to improve the customer experience. The LLM’s driving this technology are still very binary, and cannot reason. So if your problem does not fit a prescribed solution, then good luck trying to get help. In a lot of companies, there simply is no escalation procedure. There is a feeling of complete helplessness that follows the type of response I got from Amazon.

Smaller companies are much better at this… they are more agile, and the staff more engaged. As companies get larger, service gets more and more automated and the personal touch, (the ability to apply reason to a problem) goes away. Amazon have decided they no longer want me as a customer, so my business goes to bookshop.org and Ebay, amongst others.

For me, I now begin my purchases by contacting customer service first. For anyone representing a company that might be reading this, I suggest you make sure there are escalation procedures that sit above your AI solutions. Finally, companies must make sure there is a way to capture customer feedback that is reviewed and measured.