We do the mash (sweet potato mash)

It’s spooooky Halloween time! Retrieve the plastic skeletons and spray on the canned cobwebs! Inexplicably make pies with sweet potato and marshmallows! I assume that’s what you do, anyway. It’s less of a thing here in Australia.

Speaking of spookiness, I am back from New Zealand, which doesn’t have any of the scary animals on which Australia has built an entire entertainment industry. The scariest animal in New Zealand is probably the Kea, an endangered parrot that has learned to use traffic cones to stop cars, seemingly in order to beg for food, although possibly as part of a larger plan to capture and train humans to do tricks for them.

In past years I have shared some scary Halloween support stories, but this year it feels like reality might be scary enough for many support professionals. There is a real and present threat to customer support delivered by skilled, empathetic humans. That threat isn’t AI—well, not really. Artificial intelligence is currently on a path to becoming a new, complex, expensive tool to be deployed by people.

The real threat is leaders who want to replace human support with generative AI tools before they really understand the full breadth of the tasks and activities that their current support team are providing. 

We’ve shared our own customer support job descriptions before, but every experienced support person knows that what’s written in the description often represents only a portion of what actually needs doing. Support teams often perform frontline sales, customer success, product management, finance, and customer counseling roles.

The people who consider replacing humans with AI very rarely understand the complex juggling act performed daily by their teams. The consequences of hiring an AI juggler who can barely keep one ball in the air might not be felt for some time. And even then, it will be the customer who feels the pain.

So the scariest thing might be to wake up in a few years to discover that really good service is harder to find, pushed out by a mediocre form of service that is now so cheap it can't be replaced.

That’s what I’m scared about. It’s only one possible future, but it is plausible. So let’s not be the person in the horror movie who makes a dumb decision and gets immediately murdered.

Let’s be smart, pay attention, and make some noise about the dangers we see and the safe places we can go.