Simple or complex customer service? It's more complex than that

Mar 28, 2025

Some customer service strategies are doomed to failure on the first page.

Dramatic? Maybe, but there are many customer service strategies that take a form similar to:

Simple requests will be handled by automation/AI, complex requests will be handled by humans

It’s hard to dispute this logic: getting humans and machines to take on the tasks that are best suited to them. But this logic, whilst sensible on paper, leads to an assumption that has negative consequences in practice: the assumption that customer requests are innately “simple” or “complex”, and can be classified in that way at the beginning of a customer service interaction.

In practice, customer needs, and our understanding of customer needs, change continuously throughout a customer service journey, and we need to be alert and responsive to these changes.

Some examples, all taken from real-life calls:

Starts simple, becomes complex

Customer calls to check his account balance (simple)
A payment is due on the account (simple)
But customer says he has already paid, having responded to an SMS asking for payment (complex)
It seems the customer has been scammed, has lost money, but still owes the outstanding balance on his account (very complex)

Starts complex, turns out to be simple

Customer has just had a new fibre internet service connected. They have plugged it all in, and nothing seems to be working, even though automated line tests show that the connection should be working (complex)
Customer Service Representative spends 30 minutes running diagnostic tests, getting the customer to reboot the router multiple times, all to no avail. At the end of the call they book an engineer visit to conduct further investigation (complex)
When the engineer visits, she immediately spots that the router had been plugged into the wrong socket (simple)

Shifts more than once between complex and simple

A customer calls up because her card has been unexpectedly declined whilst she is out shopping (potentially complex)
The card has been temporarily blocked because she has reached her monthly spending limit, but she has a good enough credit rating to increase the limit (simple)
But the customer reveals that her partner has been stealing her card and using it against her will (highly complex and sensitive)

In all of these cases, companies need to be sensitive to emerging information from customers, and be able to adapt quickly. Unfortunately, many customer service strategies - and the technologies that are built as a result of these strategies - do not plan for this level of adaptation.

Pathways, not Journeys

My colleague, Sukand Ramachandran, has coined an approach which I find useful to solve this challenge. We should build customer service Pathways, not Journeys. Here’s the difference:

A journey usually involves guiding a customer from a fixed starting point (“I need help”) to a fixed end point (“problem solved”) with a standard process we want the customer to go through. The risk, when building journeys, is that too much emphasis is placed on the “happy path”, with few options to support exceptions

Pathways start from the premise that we cannot control everything a customer chooses to do, and don’t always know everything about a customer’s need at the start of the interaction. Pathways provide a framework for regularly updating what we know about a customer’s need, and providing the customer with the option to switch onto a simpler or more complex pathway, without ever having to repeat themselves.

Next week, I’ll be writing about how AI can improve an organisation’s listening capabilities, so that customers can better be guided along the right path.

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Advising the Advisors Podcast

This week I joined the Advising the Advisors Podcast to discuss how AI is transforming customer service, how people will continue to be vitally important, and how to run pilots that lead towards successful scaling

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