Don't Wait: Why Now is the Time for AI in Customer Service
30 Apr 2025
10 min read
Investing in AI for customer service can feel risky — especially when budgets are tight and outcomes aren't guaranteed. But in a world where customer expectations and competition are accelerating, standing still is the biggest risk of all.
After all, if you don’t use AI agents you can simply continue to use human agents. Continuing with a human-only approach is a functional approach, but if you want to keep pace with your competition, you need to consider new ways of working rather than growing your team in line with your business growth.
If you want to be ambitious and truly transform your customer service, the overall customer experience, and ultimately the brand you work for, then you have to take risks.
Remember the ancient Chinese proverb: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
We believe that AI is a risk worth taking, and DigitalGenius is the safest bet you could make. First let’s look at why not doing something is appealing.
The appeal of doing nothing
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” is a famous phrase in tech-buying. It means that picking a well-known solution that appears “safe” can also keep your job safe. For customer service teams, the equivalent would be “No one ever got fired for hiring another agent.”
The point is that if you need extra customer service capacity, you can always hire another person, and no one would bat an eyelid. So if your aim is to simply “not get fired” then sticking with more human agents and ignoring AI does appear to be the safest thing you can do.
However, it is a precarious position. If your brand hits difficulty and needs to make cuts, the customer service department is always at risk. Many executives still have the incorrect impression that customer service is a cost center, rather than a value center. Even if that opinion is wrong (and we think it is) then having a team that looks “over-staffed” is highly risky.
In this case doing the thing that appears least likely to get you fired, may just be the thing that gets you fired. At the time of writing, we are in the middle of the tariff drama, which throws a lot of uncertainty around, and potentially high costs of doing business, so difficult times can be around the corner for any brand.
Even if everything is fine, and you have an executive team that sees the value in customer service, then your aim should not be to avoid being fired. It should be to demonstrate your value even more.
Let’s walk through some scenarios you may find yourself in, and show you how AI, and DigitalGenius can help you to excel in your role. You may find yourself in more than one of these scenarios.
Scenario 1: You are working for a very fast-growing brand
Congratulations! Your brand is going from strength to strength. Having scrapped your way in the beginning, you are now on a rocket ship!
But as your business grows, to keep customers coming back, you have to maintain the quality of customer service you have achieved so far. So that means you have to hire agents at the same ratio.
Doing this stops your margin from growing, meaning growth is harder to maintain. Let’s say you are a $10m brand with 5 customer service agents. As you grow to be a $20m brand, are you going to have 10 agents? Is that really scalable?
Investing in AI can help you to preserve your margins. Having AI fully resolve a conservative 20% of queries means it is doing the work of two agents in a 10-person team. And that 20% could be a low estimate.
Beauty Pie is a fast-growing beauty brand in the UK. By using DigitalGenius, they have not needed to hire the 5 full time employees they otherwise would have – that’s because 40% of enquiries are handled without a human being involved.
Likewise running brand On experienced terrific growth as a business. But despite their customer service team handling 250% more tickets, they only had to increase headcount by 10%.
The fact is, if you want to scale your capacity without eating into margin, then automation and AI is one of the few ways to achieve this.
Scenario 2: You are looking to expand into new markets
If you are well-established at home, but starting to look abroad for new markets then you need to be able to serve them. If you have a customer service team in New York, but sell in Paris, Dubai, or Tokyo, then you will struggle to give them the same customer service experience as a customer in Philadelphia.
The major advantage of AI Agents is that they operate 24/7, meaning you can be handling common queries and issues around the clock. So it doesn’t matter if your agents are sleeping, you can still provide customers with meaningful responses.
The extra advantage that generative AI can provide is its multi-lingual capability. You don’t need a team that speaks Japanese to serve your customers there, when AI can help answer in a native language.
Rapha used DigitalGenius to respond to its customers, and going through the backlog discovered tickets in Japanese and Korean. Now their AI Agent is able to answer those customers, elevating the customer experience.
Organic Basics, a Danish company with agents in Denmark, is expanding into the US market. Having DigitalGenius to help answer questions outside of Danish office hours means that the expansion is going well, and it is maintaining a strong customer service globally.
Scenario 3: Your brand is built on great CX
It’s easy to have the notion that great customer experience is tied to understanding our customers and giving them a human and empathetic experience. But underpinning all of that is speed of response. The most empathetic response to a customer query is no good if it’s too late.
If you look at the kind of tickets you get, you can broadly define them into what we would call “transactional” or “experiential” questions. Transactional questions are ones where the customer just needs a factual answer – how much is shipping, where is my order, how do I return this, etc.
How much value is a human agent adding to these kinds of transactional conversation? Whereas they are much better at dealing with experiential questions – what running shoes do you recommend for me, is this food right for my miniature schnauzer?
If you use AI to deal with transactional questions, customers get answers fast. Plus agents aren’t wading through those simple questions and can get to the experiential ones faster.
Bella+Duke is a pet food subscription brand. It’s a highly competitive market, but for Grant Guffogg their unique difference, beyond the quality of their food, is their customer service. Here he explains how AI helps him.
Grenade had an issue with their warehouse which meant that fulfilling orders was taking longer than usual. For a brand that prides itself on its rapid delivery, they started to expect an impact on their Trustpilot reviews. But by using an automated response that was empathetic, they were able to maintain a high customer satisfaction score, and Trustpilot rating while they sorted out the issue.
To create truly great CX means embracing AI, but using it in the right way alongside human agents.
Scenario 4: You have a high turnover of agents
Customer service is not a job that suits everyone. Dealing with difficult customers, having to work long hours clearing out the backlog of tickets can take its toll on any person. When agents leave, there is then the cost of hiring and training their replacements, which can add up across a year.
In fact we surveyed customer service agents in ecommerce to find out more about their mental health. What we found was that these things had a negative impact on the mental health of agents:
Long wait times – 69% agreed that it made work more difficult
Spikes in tickets – 59% felt worse at the beginning of the day if they saw an unusually high number of tickets
Quantity over quality – 70% would rather have fewer, more complex tickets than a high number of average tickets
These are all things that AI can help with. By giving customers a meaningful response within seconds, customers aren’t left waiting as long. Cutting down an overnight backlog can reduce the impact of ticket spikes. And as discussed, removing repetitive transactional tickets can help agents to focus on quality over quantity.
AllSaints had a team that was sceptical about AI, but when they saw what DigitalGenius could do, they had a change of mind. As SJ Grabiec, Head of CX & Fraud explains: Our previously skeptical team have embraced AI and DigitalGenius, due to the elimination of repetitive tasks, the positive impact on our peak backlog, and also the improved workload quality.”
And here’s Georgia Spears from Beauty Pie explaining how AI has helped kill “clicky” tasks that her team did not enjoy.
Scenario 5: You want to show how customer service can add value
As we mentioned earlier, some executives struggle to look at customer service as anything other than a cost center. That’s usually because the customer service team is so focused on dealing with a backlog of tickets as quickly as possible, that they are not able to devote time to adding value.
But if many of the simpler tickets are being handled by AI, without human intervention, that frees up human agents to be able to add value.
Here is Rosie Duffy from ME+EM explaining how using DigitalGenius is giving her agents the space and time to provide styling advice and form genuine connections with customers.
Rapha is a cycling brand famous for its Cycle Club and sense of community. By using DigitalGenius, they are able to elevate their customer experience. As Rhys Howells, Head of Customer Service puts it: “I’m able to reserve my agents for the more complex cases where I know that they can truly add value.”
Being able to use human agents to drive upsells, cross-sells and make strong connections with customers, turning them into long-term advocates.
Scenario 6: You’ve tried AI or chatbots before and been let down
Of course it’s possible that you’ve been burned before by a project like this. Traditional chatbots are prone to sending customers into loops and providing a terrible customer experience.
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has brought about a huge number of AI solutions for customer service. Like anything, there are good and bad examples out there, plus some solutions that work brilliantly for one brand, and terribly for another. So it’s understandable if you’ve tried this and been let down.
At DigitalGenius, we pride ourselves on our support. Building an AI chatbot yourself using a self-serve platform is going to be time-consuming and painful, which is why we are on hand to help you all the way.
We understand that getting AI to work successfully requires deep integrations with your ecommerce platform, your carriers, and any other system you use. We have a number of pre-built integrations, but also build new ones for our customers, free of charge.
While most ecommerce brands are similar, we know that the differences are what matters most, so we don’t have a one size fits all solution. Instead we work with you to map out your processes and tweak our platform to suit your needs.
Emily Powell, Head of Change at Charles Tyrwhitt the menswear brand, has worked with a number of other AI providers. Here’s what she has to say about the way we work:
Similarly, this is what Christian Peck-Thorsted said about us: “I was sceptical about the world of AI, but working with DigitalGenius has made everything very easy to understand, and much less daunting. The onboarding process was spot on – they’ve held our hand from week one till now and guided us through this amazing journey.”
Finally, this is what Julie Chew, Head of Customer Services at YouGarden says about DigitalGenius: “It has been refreshing to work with DigitalGenius because everything we were sold on seems to be possible, and it’s great that our expectations have been met. We’ve been able to absorb a higher demand without our team feeling the pressure of previous years. The DigitalGenius team are fantastic and I can’t recommend them enough.”
Speak to our team about your concerns, and we will do whatever we can to show you how we are different to what you experienced before.
Scenario 7: You are not convinced that AI can work fast enough
We’ve talked a lot about how AI allows you to respond to customers fast, but what about the speed of implementing AI? When can you see time to value?
The truth is that things can move fast. If everything is aligned, and we are able to connect to your right systems, we can be automating tickets within a week. Here is Jake Pereira from Impact Dog Crates explaining how we were automating within a week.
Likewise with Boardriders we were automating responses after a week.
Beyond that, we will work out a rollout plan to automate as much as possible, as quickly as possible. The major delays that can occur are getting sufficient API access to other platforms, and testing. Testing is important, because we want you to be confident that we are answering your customers’ questions correctly and following the flows that your human agents would. It can take a bit of time to get it right.
But when we get going, we can move quickly. With waterdrop, we were able to go from 0 to 20% automation within 16 weeks.
Here is a graph showing our automation rates of some of our most recent deployments:
So you can see, we can be up and running pretty quickly.
The cost of doing nothing, and the opportunity of doing something
As you can see, there are a lot of ecommerce brands who are making strong moves with AI. This is allowing them to scale customer service to reach new markets, answer customer questions at all hours of the day, while keeping margins as healthy as can be.
The potential upside for an AI project is huge. Air up® estimates that they have seen 600% ROI through DigitalGenius. That’s calculated by how many agents they would have had to hire to do the work that AI is doing. Which is not to mention other long-term benefits like increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention.
In fact, before we started working with air up®they had a score of 3.2 on Trustpilot. That score is now 4.3. Of course it’s not solely to do with customer service, but it has been a contributing factor.
By doing nothing, you risk falling behind your competitors who are able to serve customers better, and cheaper – building long term customers at a fraction of the cost.
But it is still early days for this technology. If you start now, you can be outcompeting your competition. As a customer service leader, you have a chance to show real value to your business and position yourself as an industry leader.
Don't let fear hold you back. Let’s talk about how you can lead your industry with AI-driven customer service.
