
Customer Experience
|Oct 6th 2025
7 min
Written by: Karl Evans
CEO
Chatbots vs real people. It’s a conversation I hear more and more, like we’re being asked to pick a side.
One side says chatbots are the future. The other swears by the human touch.
They’re both missing the point.
In the rush to scale, cut costs, and tick innovation boxes, companies fall into a trap. They treat automation and people like a decision they need to make, either-or.
Here’s the my view: mindset is the problem.
Support should be built around what the user actually needs in the moment. And that almost never means choosing just one way to help.
Automation’s job is to get out of the way. Fast answers. No friction. Simple stuff handled before it becomes a distraction.
Bots work when:
Used well, they’re helpful. Used poorly, they’re a wall.
Now flip it.
A customer is frustrated. Or confused. Or stuck. They don’t want a menu. They want help.
That’s the moment where trust is built.
Humans matter when:
Bots don’t do empathy. They don’t read between the lines. They don’t rebuild trust.
Your people do.
We don’t believe in false choices. We believe in building systems where automation clears the noise and humans show the care.
Here’s how I approach it:
And behind the scenes? Automation gives your team what they need, when they need it, not more busywork.
If you want support that works, for your team and your users, start here:
Think about where they are and what they need. Not what’s cheapest or flashiest.
Need a new invoice? Automate it. Delivery stuck and the customer is panicking? Get a human involved.
Don’t waste your best team members on copy-paste answers. Free them up to listen, think, solve, and calm down angry users.
That’s where they make the difference.
If a bot hands over to a human, that person should already know the context. What’s been said. What’s been tried. What the user needs next.
Forget obsessing over deflection rates or bot click-throughs. In my experience, the companies that get this balance right see better results across the board, faster service, happier users, and teams who aren’t drowning in noise.
Instead, ask:
When you get the balance right, users feel cared for. Your team does work that actually matters. That kind of seamless support is backed by research, for example, Nielsen Norman Group shows that trusting chatbot interactions fall apart when users hit uncertainty or dead ends. That’s when real empathy from humans matters most.
AI isn’t the enemy. Bad decisions are.
When you try to automate everything, you lose the moments that matter. You make things faster, but colder. Efficient, but empty.
But when you design support around real moments, and use tech to make that easier, something better happens:
You create loyalty.
Support isn’t a back office function. It’s the moment the customer sees who you really are.
So give them:
That’s not compromise. That’s clarity.
That’s the kind of support people remember, and talk about.