Automation Should Guide Customers to People, Not Away From Them
As AI becomes a new customer-service touchpoint, brands must use automation to remove friction while keeping human support accessible when customers need it most.
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For most companies, customer service begins with a direct message: an email, a WhatsApp chat, a call. And while it’s still common, things are now changing for the first time.
With the proliferation of AI chatbots and assistants, some customers now ask an AI tool what to do before they get the actual humans in the company involved.
The assistant may suggest a refund route, explain a policy or recommend escalation. Even if the brand never sees that first conversation, it still has to deal with the expectation it creates.
Communication through an AI tool is a new customer-service touchpoint for marketers – the one that sits outside the brand’s website and advertising, but can greatly influence what a customer does next.
How is it possible to make sure that the customer experience is as smooth as possible? The answer is not to compete with every AI assistant, but rather to make the underlying experience clear, accessible and human when it matters the most.
Scale Must Not Erase the Person
Every company starts out unable to ignore its customers. When a business is small, almost every complaint comes from a person someone knows by name, and the problem ends up being fixed personally because there is nobody else to pass it to.
Business growth changes that relationship quickly. In a bigger business, a team that once had the capacity to read every message now looks at a dashboard and follows a workflow to manage complaints. Slowly, a customer becomes a percentage in a report, and a frustrated complaint is another number in “ticket volume”.
The process may be more efficient, but the company risks becoming very good at processing complaints without truly hearing them.
This matters especially in the Middle East, where trust is often personal, and reputation travels quickly through family, friendship and professional networks.
A Nielsen survey found that 95 per cent of internet consumers in the UAE trusted recommendations from people they knew, making personal referrals the most trusted form of advertising in the country.
The figure is not a customer-service metric, but it captures an important reality – the way a company handles a difficult moment can travel further than a successful campaign.
The New First Point of Contact
There is another reason human-AI interaction matters now. When something goes wrong, the first thing customers can easily access is an AI assistant. They may ask the assistant how to request a refund, whether a company’s policy applies to their situation, or which department to contact.
They may never even visit the brand’s website to look for an answer there, or call a customer helpline to speak with a human. So, increasingly, there is an intermediary between the company and the customer.
The shift is especially relevant in the GCC, where digital behaviour is developing quickly, and mobile access is deeply embedded in everyday life. AI use in the UAE is no longer limited to technology teams.
Deloitte’s Digital Consumer Trends 2025 report found that 58% of respondents in the UAE and Saudi Arabia had used generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini, while 55% of users engaged with them weekly or daily.
Customers are not waiting for brands to decide whether this change is convenient. They are already using the tools available to them. In this environment, the purpose is to ensure that automation guides people towards the right answer and recognises when a case needs a person.
Why the Hard Cases Need People
Our support team handles a large volume of messages every day across WhatsApp, email, live chat and phone. We have invested in AI to help the team respond faster, find information and manage routine questions more effectively. That is an important part of operating a regional ticketing platform.
But a complicated refund is not always a routine question. A complaint may involve a postponed event, a change of venue, an organiser’s terms, a payment issue or circumstances that the standard policy did not anticipate. Sometimes the customer is simply right in a way that a rule-based process cannot recognise.
Those cases are rare, but they are the ones most likely to be lost in a large system: routed, answered automatically, or closed without anyone considering the full context.
That is why Platinumlist has a dedicated complaint-resolution channel alongside standard support. The channel is reviewed by a dedicated team with management oversight. I also personally review the hardest cases.
That does not mean leadership should replace the support team; it means leadership should remain close enough to understand where the process is failing, where an exception is justified and where a customer needs a clear explanation rather than another template.
The Paradox of Automation
The more ordinary interactions become automated, the more valuable the human ones become. Yes, a chatbot can confirm an event time quickly; AI can help a support agent search a customer’s history and prepare a response. These are useful applications because they remove friction from simple tasks.
Complex or emotional cases are different. Customers want someone to understand what happened, take responsibility for the next step and have enough authority to make a fair decision. At least 68% of UAE consumers preferred interacting with people for customer support, while 47% said their interactions with AI chatbots had not met their expectations.
It does not mean customers reject AI, but they do distinguish between convenience and care. They may welcome automation for tracking a booking, but want a person when money, time or trust is at stake.
For marketers, this has a direct implication – the customer experience is not confined to the moments brands specifically design for advertising. Equally, it includes all the moments a customer searches for help, asks an assistant for guidance, receives an automated response and decides whether the company is worth trusting again.
A Direct Line Still Matters
I don’t see complaint resolution as a separate administrative function. It’s part of the product, especially because a complex platform or superapp is involved in moments people have planned and paid for, often with friends or family.
The principle is simple: automation should move a customer towards the right help, not further away from it. AI can make support quicker and more consistent, but it should not become a convenient way for leadership to stop hearing from customers.
Somewhere in inboxes right now, someone is having a disappointing experience. Whether companies allow that person to disappear into a process or make sure a real human with real authority reads the case says more about the brand than any other action.
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