Can Customers Trust AI Answers

Jeannie Walters 0:00

Your AI just answered a customer. Do you know if they did it correctly? Do you know if they made a mistake? And more importantly, how does your customer know to trust it? If it's wrong, will your customer trust your brand in the future? In this world that we're living in, we need to build and earn trust across the board. But it's not as easy as just being accurate and consistent. We need to make sure that we're living up to it in our messaging, in the way that we interact with customers, in the way that we're building our processes for the future. We've talked about the leadership gap before when we discover how many executives and leaders believe they're delivering great customer experiences. But when you ask their customers, they don't all think that way. Well, we have the same thing happening with trust. 90% of executives believe that their customers highly trust their brands, but only 30% of consumers actually agree with that. Now, that is a gap, and it's one that's going to expand. We are in a world where we can't always trust what we see or what we understand.

The Trust Gap And New Data

Jeannie Walters 1:23

Answer Connect recently released an AI Customer Service Attitudes report. And 57% of consumers now trust brands less. Now, this is a big jump. It's up from 53% a year earlier. I believe that number will keep growing. 73% of consumers say they feel more loyalty toward companies that use real people in service interactions, up from 69%. Now, does this mean we're going to stop using AI? Absolutely not. We're going to live in a world where customers have AI agents who are dealing directly with the brands that they interact with. In just a few years, the predictions are saying that traditional customer service calls, the ones that we know, the ones that mean customers are calling in to get some information or resolve an issue, those are going to go away. There's no reason an agent will have to call on the telephone to get another agent. That will all be happening behind the scenes almost constantly.

When AI Agents Replace Service Calls

Jeannie Walters 2:30

So if we are building trust today for the future, we have to make sure that our brands are representing that level of trust every step of the journey. If 70% of our customers are saying, we're not sure if we trust you, that's a big wake-up call. We have to make sure that we are reassuring customers along the way. Now that switch between humans picking up the phone and calling versus AI agents really handling all parts of the transaction, it's not here today, but it's coming pretty quickly. In the meantime, we can leverage this data to tell us that we need some real people involved to reassure customers, even when things are automated. Once we build that trust that yes, this automation works, that yes, you're going to get the right information, that yes, you can actually trust our brand, then we won't need as much reassurance for our customers. But it's an important question to think about right now.

Authenticity Means Disclosing AI Use

Jeannie Walters 3:37

Where in the journey should we be reassuring our customers? So, right now, today, what can you do? Well, the number one thing people talk about is that they want brands to be authentic. They want to know when they're actually dealing with AI. If you are not disclosing that information to your customers today, you are missing an opportunity to actually build trust. More than half of consumers say they'd stop buying from a brand entirely after one inauthentic experience. A third would leave a negative review. That's from Emplifi and Alchemer from April of this year, 2026. If we know that people are on the lookout for how they don't trust us, we have to really over-index on being proactive about how they can. And that includes disclosing when AI is involved. So when and how should you disclose? Well, one way to think about it is that if you are using AI to support your team and they're interacting with real people in your contact center through your customer service, uh chats, things like that, I think it's perfectly fine for those conversations to not necessarily have a label about disclosure because there's still that person using critical thought, understanding, okay, even if AI serves up the information to use, they might second guess it. They have the agency to say, you know what, we're not going to do it this way, we're going to do it this other way. So if that's the case, it doesn't mean disclosing every minute of every day. But if you are using AI in a way that could be interpreted as impersonation, I would highly recommend you disclose that. Now, most people are getting used to these ideas of the named chatbots that we have, the named agents that we use maybe in our personal life through ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot or Claude, all those things. People are getting more experience with this, which means they're getting savvier about identifying when it's used and when it's not. But we know that we are really on the precipice of a possible trust crisis. And so if you want to be proactive about that, get authentic right now, today. That also means training your people to understand when and how they should disclose and how to best use AI along with their own critical thought. And that sometimes means making sure the people that we're empowering to use it have different training, different guardrails, different governance around it. All of that will help us continue to build trust with our customers, our employees, and our brand. So

Three Trust Questions To Audit Now

Jeannie Walters 6:37

a quick three questions for you. Number one, does your customer know who they're talking to? This is the big one. This is what people say breaks trust very quickly. If they believe they're talking to a live person, but they're actually talking to an AI agent, that can feel very deceptive. That's a great way to break trust quickly. So audit all of your touch points, your AI touch points, and consider could this be really interpreted in a way that is inauthentic or is even feeling like impersonation. We want to make sure that people know exactly who they're talking to. Now, this is true with video as well these days. There are some amazing AI avatars out there. They do a great job of scaling information and training. But if people are watching something that they think is a real person and it's actually an AI avatar, it's important to disclose that as well. Number two, what happens when the AI agent gets it wrong? Do you have guardrails? Are you auditing? Are there practical steps in place to make sure that you are not just looking at something like resolution rate as the end all? We have to make sure that we are looking at the quality and not just the quantity of resolutions. That requires human oversight, human in the loop, all of those things because AI is not going to be right 100% of the time. We know that well by now. Not only that, but things change. And if we don't have the right data going into these models, then the right data won't be coming out. We have to stay on top of that. Also, are we training and empowering the people who hear about those mistakes, who discover when things aren't as accurate as they should be? Do they have a way to communicate within the organization to say this is not working the way we think it is? I've seen a lot of frontline folks, people like cashiers, salespeople, contact center agents, who have no way of sharing when they discover something like that. If nothing else, ask yourself where in the customer's journey would a frontline customer-facing person get some information about what's working. What should they do about it? Where can they report that? How can they make sure actions are being taken? How can we close the loop, not only with the customer, but also with the person who's sharing those issues? And this final one is tricky, but I would ask: are you measuring trust? Are you really looking for ways to build trust? Trust shows up in a lot of different behaviors based on your organization and your industry. It can show up in renewal rates, it can show up in repeat visits, it can show up in user reviews. So we need to look at the behaviors that are also attached to customer trust. And if we see things changing, we need to address why they're changing. Why is trust decreasing? Is something going awry within the journey that maybe we've said it and forget it and we aren't doing our due diligence around audits and making sure that things are working the way we think they are. Trust is a big one. I think we're in an age where trust has a big capital T. We need to build it with every step along the journey. That's with our actions, our behaviors, our words, everything. And that means we have to make sure that the AI and automations that we're releasing into the journey have guardrails around them so that we continue to build trust. If nothing else, ask yourself: is this authentic to the customer? And authentic simply means I know who I'm talking to. I can trust that my issue will be resolved in a way that I'm expecting from your brand. So go out there, look around, make sure that you're showing up as you want your brand represented. Because right now, customers are looking for ways not to trust you. And it's very easy on the inside of organizations to assume, well, we're doing just fine. Everybody trusts us. But this is a big one, folks. I encourage you to really think about it, apply it to your 2027 planning, apply it to how you measure success, and keep fighting the good fight on behalf of your customers. Thanks for

Planning For 2027 And Next Steps

Jeannie Walters 11:10

being here. Don't forget, you can always leave me a message, askjeannie.vip, with either comments or questions. And if you love this podcast or this particular episode struck a chord with you, please share it with the people that you think need to hear it. And we love your ratings and reviews. That helps other people find this podcast because experience is everything. And we're glad you're here. Thanks. See you next time. If you're ready to turn insights into action, join CXI Membership, our community for customer experience investigators just like you. Get the tools, support, and inspiration to move from ideas to true impact. And don't miss my book, Experience is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations. A USA Today bestseller. And if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, share with your team, and leave a quick review to help others find us. Until next time, keep asking questions, keep improving, and keep leading with experience.