Yelling “Representative!” doesn’t work as well as it used to. Recently, I had to contact a vendor to get support for a billing issue. It started with a string of red flags:

• Red Flag #1: I had to perform a deep Google search just to figure out how to reach support. The option was intentionally hidden, completely absent from an obvious place on their website or inside their application.
• Red Flag #2: To open a ticket, I was forced into a rigid contact form that required me to choose from highly limited dropdown menus. There was no “other” bucket, forcing me to waste time arbitrarily forcing my issue into a category where it didn’t belong.
• Red Flag #3: The form demanded administrative time. Along with an account number, it featured a mandatory question I have never seen on a customer service form in my life: “What date did you become a customer?” I have been a client of this business for years. Whoever built this workflow clearly didn’t want people to contact them. 

The final straw, the one that nearly made me crash out, came right after I spent all that time filling out the information and hit submit. A message popped up to let me know they would get back to me in 7 to 10 business days.

IKYFL.

AI & Scaling Blind Spots

This isn’t just an isolated story (rant) about terrible customer service. It is a symptom of a systemic, industry-wide operational trap. In an aggressive effort to use technology (AI) to improve margins, companies are scaling revenue without scaling the support infrastructure needed to serve the customers generating it.

Companies have placed automated bots and AI agents on the front lines of support, celebrating the immediate drop in human capital budgets. But many remain completely blind (or indifferent) to the long-term, unintended consequence of severing the customer feedback loop.

When you eliminate the human oversight from customer operations, you lose the ability to capture nuance. You miss the loud sighs, the stories and patterns of specific frustrations, and the critical context of why people are reaching out. Leadership teams love to blame the high cost of support users bothering their help desks with simple questions that could easily be Googled or found in a knowledge base. But if a high volume of paying users are opening tickets to ask “simple”questions, the fault may not lie with the customer. Perhaps it’s a signal that your user experience is designed in a way that is confusing to people who don’t work in your business every day.

When companies hide behind automation, they can miss these signals entirely. Is it a great thing if your customers are forced to eventually patch together a solution on a Reddit forum in lieu of an adequate support channel? I suppose if the company is “too-big-to-fail” they are banking on the assumption that the pain of leaving their platform is greater than the pain of navigating their support.

Your Highest Leverage: Proximity to Reality

If you are an entrepreneur or leader in a smaller, growing, or resource-constrained organization, you cannot operate by the rules of these massive too-big-to-fail corporations. Nor should you want to. You have an unfair advantage that they are gleefully automating away: proximity to reality.

In systems thinking, feedback loops dictate whether your organization is operating in a virtuous cycle of customer growth or a vicious cycle of hidden resentment. Automation should optimize your ability to understand how to better serve your customers, not shield your and your product team from reality.

Four Questions to Ask Before Putting AI Between You and Your Customers

To build a genuine feedback loop instead of a system that shields you from reality, you need to answer four core questions:

1. When should a customer be able to talk to a human?
This is both a philosophical question and an operational one. Not every issue needs a human response, but some do. The question is whether you have clearly defined when a human needs to be involved, and whether the path to that person is always visible or intentionally blocked.

2. How are you discovering what customers actually need?
Let customers describe their pain points in their own words instead of forcing them through canned workflows with your assumptions baked in. The words they use, and the workarounds they create can tell you a lot about the values and pain points.

3. How are customer touch points becoming customer intelligence?
Support requests, complaints, onboarding questions, churn reasons, sales objections, and repeated “simple” questions are not just operational noise. They are opportunities to learn how to serve your audience, improve your offering, and decide where to best focus limited resources.

4. How do you know whether you are actually meeting customer needs?
It is not a great long-term sign if customers are ultimately seeking answers to questions you should answer on Reddit, in private forums, through peer networks, or from a competitor. Tools should help you see where customers are getting stuck, whether you were able to resolve their issues, and where your current systems are falling short.

Too many companies completely fail all four of these leading practices. They offer no path past the machine, their knowledge bases are just generic user manuals rather than answers to nuanced or complex scenarios, and they don’t even bother to ask if your problem was solved. That isn’t technological efficiency; it is the definitive mark of a company that simply doesn’t give a damn.

Your leverage is not in the tools you use, but in how you use them to be better to the humans you serve.