When your AI tool for customer service causes so much frustration that it’s featured in the nation’s largest newspaper, you know you’ve got a problem. That’s where Walmart finds itself this week.
The leading brick-and-mortar retailer, and second-biggest company on earth by revenue (recently edged out by Amazon), left a New York Times writer with no choice but to cancel her Walmart account altogether.
The story of what happened is instructive. So is the solution. There’s an easy way to avoid this problem. And small businesses that do so are in a position to grab market share from the giants in their fields.
‘Over an hour attempting to get help from a human’
Ivy Liscomb is a writer for Wirecutter, an independent review site that’s part of the Times. She recently shared her all-too-familiar story of contacting a company for a customer service issue and getting caught in an endless AI loop.
Walmart no longer carried a product she wanted, so she tried to cancel her delivery subscription online. But there was no button to do so. So she called customer support. “A bright, automated voice insisted that I could cancel my subscription online, even after I explained that I couldn’t. At some point, Walmartbot appeared to accept that I was ‘experiencing a glitch.’ And then it dropped the bomb: I could reload the page and try again, or delete my Walmart account.”
She set about trying the usual methods to get a real person on the phone—saying the right word or phrase, pressing the right buttons, even hanging up and calling back. “Finally, after spending over an hour attempting to get help from a human, I deleted my account. In an age of countless digital storefronts vying for my cart, it seemed unbelievable that such a successful brand would allow faulty AI to cost it a customer.”
She’s far from alone. Recent surveys show how critical this issue is: 87% of consumers “say it is essential for companies to provide an option to reach a human agent when using genAI,” Gartner reported. And just this week, Consumer Cellular released results of its survey of consumers 50 and older: More than 80% said they’d consider leaving a company if its automated system kept them in a loop.
Escalation is table stakes
None of this should scare companies away from using AI for the customer experience (CX). In fact, people increasingly like interfacing with AI. In the Gartner survey, half of consumers said their interactions are even easier with generative AI than they are with humans.
The key is to establish simple, rapid methods for people to break out of AI. This takes the right programming. CX tools are designed to be helpful. They’re taught to handle as many queries as possible autonomously. Usually, this pays off. They process huge amounts of data so rapidly that there’s often very little wait to bring customers from one step to the next.
But that benefit becomes a drawback when things go awry. Many AI receptionists prioritize solving problems for customers, so they keep searching for a way to do so even when they can’t find one. Think of it as a “never give up” attitude taken to an extreme.
The best AI receptionists avoid this by establishing clear protocols for multistage escalation. First, when a customer starts to express any kind of frustration, a human agent is alerted. The person oversees the interaction and tries to guide the AI voice toward the right solution. If that doesn’t work, the call is transferred instantly to a human agent, with full context provided.
This clearly was not in place for Liscomb’s calls to Walmart. In fact, she wrote, not only did the Walmart AI bot rebuff her efforts to find a real person, it also forgot her issue after every few questions.
Small and medium-size businesses: See this as an opportunity. This CX gap in the marketplace provides you with the chance to win people over. Be the organizations that provide optimal AI tools and seamless access to real people. Provide the care and solution-oriented design that people crave.
Customers are ready and willing to leave a brand if it doesn’t keep earning their business. With the right AI answering service, you can take the lead.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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