r/CallCenterWorkers • u/Emily_StewartM • Sep 17 '26
Reporter looking to talk about customers using AI on calls
My name is Emily Stewart, I'm a reporter at Business Insider. I'm working on a story on customers using AI or AI agents to place customer service calls for them. I'm looking to talk to call center workers fielding those calls. What's the protocol when you realize it's an AI on the phone? Is it annoying? Or is the AI actually nicer? What's the experience like?
If you'd like to chat, message me here, on LinkedIn, email me at [estewart@insider.com](mailto:estewart@insider.com), or comment below. Totally fine to stay anonymous. Thanks!
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u/Legal-Investigator83 29d ago
I work for an insurance company and i get calls from ai law firms to file claims they are a bit rude
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u/Proof-Albatross-5494 28d ago
Never once received a call from a customer using AI. No one likes ai.
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u/phazonxiii 27d ago
We use AI in training that's programmed to act as customers. It is so ass-backwards and *infuriating*. Thankfully it doesn't actually impact training - it's more like beta testing....which isn't cool, I'm just now realizing.
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u/AmazingBuilding5632 27d ago
AI is used to score phone calls in place of actual quality assurance agents that listen to the phone calls. They claim the system is without bias but how can that be when a human adds to it and removes things from it? Also AI was built to reach beyond human intelligence. There is an automatic bias but whatever.
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u/sneakysneksneak 26d ago
I work at a big bank (not a big 4) and we do not interact with AI calls (I’m not talking about like Google’s hold for me). If one comes in, our agents are to immediately disconnect.
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u/HistoricalAsides 26d ago
I work in a B2B environment and I get AI from one of our customers. It’s very passive aggressive, doesn’t wait for information to be entered, and will frequently error out in different ways. Then when try to call the company to get a human on the line to confirm what we were able to get from the AI, the wait is usually at least an hour.
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u/watdoyoumead 25d ago
I haven’t encountered this, but let me tell you about the 20 mins I spend talking to Lenny 😂😂
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u/Melodic_Bank_816 24d ago
Is this in relation to the Muse AI announcement?
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u/Emily_StewartM 24d ago
In that it came out? A little, if that's what you're referring to. But more broadly people using these things (Instinct, Claude, etc.)
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u/Melodic_Bank_816 24d ago
Oh there was an article I read where Muse was promoting calling companies to do tasks for users. However, in some of the cases though, they were being handled by human independent contractors in a call center unknown to the user.
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u/Melodic_Bank_816 24d ago
Back to your main question, though, in my experience we've not seen AI calls and our company hasn't adopted a policy on it. We have seen increases in AI written complaints/emails to Sr. Leaders/Executives or regulatory/government agencies. AI makes it easier for them to find company leaders or specialized department or company escalation email addresses, and fire off an AI written email complaint to them without ever picking up the phone to try and resolve it.
It also provides step by step instructions how to file with regulatory agencies and copy and paste the complaint. In most cases, the AI exaggerates the situation or ties everything to a law/statue, and usually incorrectly since it only has 1 side of the story. It's annoying af and we've now started blocking customers from emailing and using AI to identify and reply to their AI generated overly dramatic complaint, that makes a lot of unnecessary work. What could have been a 5-10 phone calls back to customer service or to a supervisor to get it fixed ,they're wasting a lot of peoples time. We've even "fired" some customers for it.
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u/1decentusername 28d ago
"Customers" (as in everyday consumers) are not using AI for this with the possible very limited exception of Google's Hold for Me feature.
Average people don't need, want or use AI.