Stop me if you've heard this one before: you explain your issue to a chatbot, answer a few questions, and get transferred to an agent; then comes the familiar request: “Can you tell me what happened?”
The more Zen amongst you will calmly take a deep breath before repeating the information, while those of you with a shorter fuse might well mutter a curse or two under your breath.
Regardless of your disposition, we can all agree that it's really annoying.
For all the progress in contact center AI, this remains one of its biggest service failures. The technology may be new, but customers are still being asked to act as the link between disconnected systems.
Indeed, Twilio research found that 74% of consumers have had to repeat information to an AI assistant.
Unfortunately, according to Sam Richardson, Director of Executive Engagement at Twilio, there is rarely a simple fix to this issue.
In an interview with CX Today, she quipped that, "there could well be as many reasons as there are contact centers and their different setups, right?"
So, what can organizations realistically do to combat this area of frustration?
The AI Handoff Problem
Many businesses have moved quickly to deploy AI assistants, voice bots, and automated customer-service workflows.
There is a good reason for that. Richardson noted that 81% of customers said bots had saved them time.
For routine questions, including checking an order, resetting a password, or finding basic information, automation can remove effort for customers and pressure for service teams.
Yet the handoff remains a weak point.
Richardson believes many organizations introduced the technology without being adequately prepared:
“People wanted to get this technology in. They saw the benefits of it and started implementing voice bots and all sorts of other things. But they hadn’t necessarily connected it to the rest of the platforms or systems or knowledge bases in order to be able to pull everything up.”
That is understandable. Connecting data and legacy technology is harder than launching a new AI tool, and service leaders are under pressure to prove value quickly.
However, when the bot, agent, and back-office teams all hold different parts of the story, the customer becomes the integration layer. They repeat the problem, restate their account details, and attempt to explain which steps have already failed.
Identity Adds Another Layer of Friction
Data is only one side of the handoff.
Richardson also pointed to identity verification and fraud prevention as a growing obstacle to a seamless customer journey.
As companies face rising fraud risks, they have good reason to verify who they are speaking to. That becomes more complicated when an automated assistant, a human agent, and eventually personal AI agents are involved in the same interaction.
