A survey from Salesforce found that nearly 75% of consumers want to know if they’re communicating with an AI agent, but 45% are also more likely to use an AI agent if there’s a “clear escalation path” to resolving a customer service issue.
The global survey of more than 15,000 consumers taken over July and August found that AI technology overall is raising the stakes around trust for brands, with 60% of consumers believing advances in AI make trust even more important. Nearly three-quarters (72%) trust companies less than they did a year ago, while 65% feel like companies are reckless with customer data.
Yet the survey shows some consumers are willing to work with AI agents if it more quickly resolves their problem:
- Over a third of consumers would work with an AI agent instead of a person to avoid repeating themselves.
- 30% of respondents — or 37% for Gen Z and millennials — would work with an AI agent instead of a person for faster service.
- A quarter of consumers — roughly one-third for Gen Z and millennials — would share their personal information with an AI agent so it can better anticipate their needs.
Salesforce wrote in a press release, “From alleviating clunky purchase experiences to difficult return processes, there’s an agent for that. But to build trusted customer relationships, brands need trusted AI agents that are grounded in transparency and the right data.”
The survey comes as Salesforce in September announced plans to roll out its Agentforce suite of AI-powered autonomous agents at Saks Fifth Avenue.
More pessimistically, a Gartner survey of nearly 6,000 U.S. consumers conducted in December 2023 found that 64% would prefer that companies didn’t use AI in their customer service. About half (53%) indicated they would consider switching to a competitor if they found out a company was going to use AI for customer service.
Their top concern about AI in customer service was that AI will make it more difficult to reach a live person, cited by 60%; followed by AI displacing people’s jobs, 46%; AI providing the wrong answers, 42%; their data being less secure, 34%; and AI biases not treating customers equally, 25%. The same survey found that only 14% of customer service and support issues are fully resolved in self-service.
“Once customers exhaust self-service options, they’re ready to reach out to a person,” said Keith McIntosh, senior principal of research, in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Many customers fear that GenAI will simply become another obstacle between them and an agent. The onus is on service and support leaders to show customers that AI can streamline the service experience.”
A survey of 1,000 U.S. adults taken in July and commissioned by the AI customer service company Cogito found that 39% of respondents believed talking with a chatbot or automated system is worse than talking with a real human, while 33% said it’s better.
Most respondents (77%) said that when engaging with customer service, they’d rather interact with a human using AI “in the background” than a fully automated chatbot. About a quarter (22%) were uncomfortable with a customer service agent using AI behind the scenes of a call in any way.
“While AI tools are seen as valuable for streamlining tasks behind the scenes, a clear preference exists for human customer service agents,” Cogito wrote in its analysis of the results. “Net-net: AI is best seen as a tool to empower agents, not replace them.”