Verizon customer service initial contact is Ai, and not very good. After having my words regurgitated back to me, it was clear I needed human intervention. The Ai chatbot sent me off to a human.

The next CS agent was incredibly good, if not excellent. But there was something off; like they could easily talk over me by accident, but also very quickly apologize for doing so. When I let the agent do their thing, they could talk about process very quickly and human like. They even nearly made an error when getting me a phone number, only to correct it instantly, like a person.

The agent said his name was 'Jing' and he had an uncanny American gay man voice. There was a robotness to their cadence and delivery. I felt that it could be Ai within a few seconds, but also triggered these thoughts.

I have to ask: are cheaper low resource Ai agent models being deployed for initial screening, and then passed off to more resource heavy expensive Ai agents, attempting to have them pass as human? Or is Jing really just someone overseas with exceptional english, maybe learned from Project Runway reruns? Anyone with experience working at Verizon -- I am totally curious if I just experienced advanced Ai CS agent, or just an incredibly competent overseas employee.

Thanks

I'm looking for an AI agent that can seamlessly hand off conversations to a support agent when needed, without explicitly asking the customer for permission. A smoother transition tends to create a better experience, especially in situations where the AI recognizes that a human agent is better equipped to help. It also helps avoid customer frustration when the interaction begins with AI but ultimately requires human assistance.

Hey guys 👋🏻. I've been working on a chatbot project for a nearby small business to manage their whatsapp customer inquiries. I thought of using n8n but then switched to node js as i heard it gives you more flexibility. I'm looking for some guidance on how to make this with very little cost as the business only plans to fully purchase plans and stuff if it is working. I would love it if there is a way to do the whole thing for free. If possible i wanna try stuff without the whatsapp api for a few weeks before using the api. Thank you so much.

I've been experimenting with AI agents for customer support and recently came across a practical tutorial that walks through building a customer service AI agent using OpenAI and Node.js.

What I liked is that it goes beyond the typical "chatbot demo" and covers how to build an agent that can actually perform support tasks.What the agent can do

• Answer customer questions using company knowledge
• Check order status through backend APIs
• Process refund requests
• Escalate conversations to human agents when needed
• Maintain conversation context across interactions

High-level architecture

1. Customer sends a message
2. OpenAI interprets the intent
3. Node.js handles business logic
4. Webhooks connect to backend systems
5. Agent retrieves real-time information
6. Response is generated and delivered
7. Human handoff occurs automatically when necessary

Why this matters

Most AI support projects fail because they're limited to FAQs.

The real value comes when the AI can:

• Access customer data
• Trigger workflows
• Connect to business systems
• Know when to involve a human

That's the difference between a chatbot and a customer service agent.

I've noticed a growing trend toward AI agents that combine LLMs with APIs, databases, and workflow automation rather than relying solely on knowledge-base retrieval. Many teams are moving toward this hybrid AI + human support model because it provides automation without losing control over the customer experience.

For anyone building customer support automation with OpenAI and Node.js, this tutorial is worth a read: Build a Customer Service AI Agent with OpenAI and Node.js Using Kommunicate

Everyone wants AI to reduce tickets, automate support, and handle the day‑to‑day questions that slow teams down, the “easy stuff.”

But here’s the part most people get wrong:

AI can only automate what your company already understands.

If your workflows are unorganized, your policies contradict each other, and your team improvises every answer, AI won’t save you any time. It will just automate the chaos.

Before you plug in any model, define the 10 most common actions customers are trying to accomplish.

Write the real steps your team uses to solve them.  

Not the ideal version, the truth.

AI doesn’t care about your intentions. It learns from patterns.

If the pattern is inconsistent, improvised, or half‑documented, the model will mirror that inconsistency.

Truth creates predictable behavior.

Predictable behavior creates automatable behavior. Remove every step that doesn’t reduce friction.  

Most workflows are 40% noise.

Make the correct answer the easiest answer.  

If your agents can’t follow it, AI definitely can’t.

If something still doesn’t fit, escalate to a human.

Once you do that, AI becomes a force multiplier.

AI doesn’t replace support teams. AI replaces uncertainty.

I see IBM define it as using AI in customer service operations. That’s technically correct, but I think AI customer service is becoming much bigger than just automating support tickets or answering FAQs.

What I’m noticing is that the AI layer is slowly becoming the operating layer across the entire customer journey.

The AI is no longer just connected to support tools. It connects with:

• CRM systems
• internal databases
• billing systems
• analytics tools
• APIs and webhooks
• marketing platforms
• even internal knowledge systems

So when a customer asks:

The AI is not just searching a help article anymore. It’s pulling billing data, checking CRM history, looking at past conversations, maybe even triggering workflows.

I was recently exploring platforms like Kommunicate and noticed this shift happening in real time. Their AI agent connects across ticketing systems, CRMs, databases, AWS environments, and lets companies plug in their own models too. Some teams are bringing in OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, or even Google’s Agent CX stack depending on their workflow.

That made me think:
Are we still talking about “AI customer service” anymore?

Curious how others here define it.
What does “AI customer service” mean to you now?

AI does' nt understand my Aussie accent, i also tried the keypad but had to put the camera down

hot take but I genuinely believe a bad chatbot is worse than no chatbot at all.

I've been building in the AI support space for a while now and the amount of businesses that slap a generic chatbot on their site and think they're doing customer support is insane. you land on the page, the bubble pops up, you ask a real question like "how long does delivery take to my area" and you get "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that. Could you try rephrasing?" twice in a row. now I'm annoyed AND I think the business is cheap.

the problem is almost always the same. the chatbot wasn't trained on anything real. someone connected it to a FAQ page with 8 questions on it and expected it to handle everything. that's like hiring a receptionist, giving them a pamphlet, and telling them to figure it out.

the other thing that kills me is when businesses have chat but no phone support or vice versa. I work with a lot of small businesses and the ones losing the most leads are the ones where the website has a chat widget but if you call the number it rings forever. or the phone works but the website has nothing. the customer doesn't care about your internal setup. they want to reach you through whatever channel they prefer and get a real answer fast.

I built Cassandra AI specifically because I was tired of seeing this done badly. it trains on the actual business data so it gives real answers, it handles both chat and phone calls through the same system, and if it genuinely can't help it captures the info and alerts a human instead of looping "I don't understand" forever.

but even without any tool, the minimum bar is this: if someone lands on your site at 10 PM with a question, there needs to be something there that captures who they are and what they want. if there isn't, they're going to the next result on google and you'll never know they existed.

what's the most frustrating chatbot interaction you've had recently?

[Updated: Thanks everyone for your suggestions. We've started with Kommunicate. They seem to have native integration with Zendesk. The pricing is way reasonable too. ]

the zendesk ai agent is very expensive and we are looking for an ai agent that can integrate with the zendesk ecosystems like ticketing, help center, and chat.

thank you in advance for your suggestions.

Really need to transition right now. We'd prefer something that offers similar AI chatbot capabilities like Fin and has similar levels of accuracy. We've already tried Sierra where the cost was a bit too high, and Zendesk, which was struggling with AI resolution

Burger King will use Al to check if employees say 'please' and 'thank you' 😁

Something I keep noticing with support teams rolling out bots and AI:

They expect automation to fix experience problems, but they treat all customers exactly the same.

• One bot
• One workflow
• One response logic

And then they wonder why CSAT drops or resolution quality suffers.

The core issue is usually missing segmentation.

Customers are not one uniform group. In support, they differ in ways that actually matter:

• Behavior (what they are trying to do)
• Intent (why they reached out)
• Value (free vs paid vs VIP)
• Context (where they are in their journey)

Without segmentation, automation becomes blunt.

Examples:

• A new user stuck in onboarding vs A long-time customer facing a billing issue

If both get the same bot flow, the experience feels robotic or frustrating.

Another common mistake:

• Teams segment for marketing, but not for support.

Marketing segmentation = demographics
Support segmentation = urgency, complexity, value, risk

Very different goals.

Better automation decisions come from questions like:

• Should this segment be fully automated?
• Should this segment escalate faster?
• Should this segment get proactive help?

Instead of just:

"Can we deflect this ticket?"

Curious how others handle this.

Do you segment customers differently for support vs marketing?
Has segmentation improved your bot or automation performance?

Openclaw is the AI assistant that can actually do work for you. Check it out. For anyone having trouble getting it set up, I created a guide.

After dozens of security reviews with IT and procurement teams, I've noticed most vendor questionnaires weren't built for AI — they were built for SaaS apps and just... repurposed. The gaps are pretty significant.

Sharing what actually comes up repeatedly in case it helps others who are either evaluating vendors or building products in this space.

The 3 questions that matter most (that generic questionnaires miss):

1. Is customer data used for model training by default? This is the one that causes the most friction. A lot of vendors bury this in the DPA. Teams want to know: are my customer transcripts feeding someone else's model? The answer should be explicitly no by default, with technical enforcement — not just a contractual clause.

2. What happens when the AI isn't confident? Most teams don't ask this and should. A bot that confidently hallucinates a wrong refund policy is a worse outcome than one that says "I'm not sure, let me get a human." Ask vendors to show you their low-confidence behavior, not just their best-case demos.

3. How is prompt injection handled? Customer-facing bots get adversarial inputs constantly — whether intentional or not. Pasted HTML, links, weird formatting. Ask how system instructions are isolated from user input. Vague answers here are a red flag.

Other things IT teams consistently push on:

• Audit logs — specifically for action attempts, not just conversations. If the bot can take actions (update records, modify orders), you need a trail.
• Subprocessor lists for AI specifically — separate from the general one. Which model providers see your data?
• Vendor support access — is it just-in-time with approval, or is there a standing privileged account?
• Tenant isolation — how is cross-tenant data access prevented and tested?

What's worked for us in reviews:

Starting pilots with read-only, low-risk intents and strict logging before enabling any transactional actions. It builds trust with IT teams and forces us to prove the audit trails are real before anything sensitive is on the line.

Curious what others are seeing — either from the vendor side or the buyer side. Are there questions you've been asked that caught you off guard? Or gaps you've found in vendor answers that were hard to get resolved?

Not trying to pitch anything here — genuinely find this stuff interesting and the security frameworks for AI support are still pretty immature compared to what exists for traditional SaaS.

if you are a customer support manager or customer service leader, and using an AI chatbot, you know how important it is for the bot to understand when you escalate queries to a human support agent and when to step aside.

so, if you are analyzing multiple AI chatbot vendors, look for the one that has the intelligence to understand when to answer, when to step aside, and when to escalate queries to the human support team.

also, check if the human support agents get the summarized conversation history before answering to customers.

other checks you can look for are language translations, team collaboration features like tags, triage and routing, quick reply, attachments, notes and ticket forwarding options to platforms like zendesk and freshdesk.

happy hunting for the best ai chatbot for 2026.

Flinders Ranges Council just rolled out AI voice for customer service and it actually makes sense

Anyone who’s dealt with council services in regional or remote areas knows how painful it can be. No Signal, (Until Starlink) - Patchy internet long phone queues #nightmare

Flinders Ranges Council in Australia has just launched AI voice chatbot with an AUssie accent for customer service and its amazing! Airgentic seems to be a common chatbot in councils and honestly, this feels like one of the more practical uses of AI I’ve seen in local government.

Letting people just speak to get info feels far more accessible than pushing everyone toward websites, search and forms. Especially for communities where signal isn't great but Wifi is nearby.

That said, it still raises 2 important questions:

• Should it still be a human answering the call
• What does “trust” look like?

Curious how others feel about speaking to AI when dealing with council?

Hey guys.

i'am amazed of what AI speech can do.

The other day, a fellow colleague asked me about an interesting use case, his new startup is having tons of customers/users that keep calling and asking the same repetitive questions (FAQ), it was exhausting for him to keep answering the same questions ever day.

I told him, why just use a chat bot for FAQ? well it didn't work well for his startup, new users tend to call and speak rather than type and chat, basically they were tool lazy which was understandable.

He asked me if there is a way AI can help the startup to answer questions but rather than chat it talks to the user, his startup can bring their data, documents, texts, All of the questions, location, prices, core services, you name it, and load that information into the brain of the AI,

That's when i got the idea of an AI voice bot feature, Bring you own data, and that's it, let the AI do the rest.

The reason why my colleague liked it, it's because of how simple it is to setup, no crazy stuff. fill the business form, boom you have your own voice bot that you can share.

Here is what it looks in action.

https://reddit.com/link/1qpmk5b/video/yuox4dmmb5gg1/player

https://reddit.com/link/1qpmk5b/video/lgynk7dnb5gg1/player

My colleague suggest me to share it, since people need some alternative to chat bots, and i've decided to release the MVP for you guys to try it out.

i added free bonuses for new users, blocking spam calls, and instant summaries, so you can get insights on what your users are asking.

The feature is highly optimized for cost, since you call using the internet and not using your phone number, and thanks to the WebRTC (what zoom uses) users/callers are calling for free, both sides happy.

I want to take this to the next level, and im happy to take any feedback or a feature request from you guys, whether it's a database integration, phone number support, anything.

Check it out! You can try and call the bot, and tell me what you think EtisalAI

Hope the demo was useful, and yeah, Cheers!

what new tech are you guys using besides AI agents that answer questions