When Both Sides of the Ticket Are Bots
Somewhere in your support queue this quarter, a conversation happened with no humans in it. Your customer's procurement agent opened a ticket about an invoice discrepancy, your support agent answered with the refund policy, and the two of them went back and forth eleven times before the thread died — unresolved, unescalated, and invisible to both companies until the customer's CFO asked why the credit never arrived. Neither bot did anything wrong by its own rules. That's the problem.
Everything we've built for AI customer support assumes a human on the other end. Sentiment detection, frustration thresholds, "would you like to speak to a person?" — all of it models a customer who gets tired, gets angry, or gives up. A customer's agent does none of those things. It is infinitely patient, procedurally polite, and relentlessly on-script. When it meets your equally patient, equally on-script support agent, you don't get a resolution or a complaint. You get a stalemate that looks, in every dashboard, like a healthy conversation.
