When it matters, customers still want to talk to someone

This article originally appeared on Forbes Business Council (opens in a new tab).

For years, customer experience leaders have been told a convenient story: Customers want self-service. They want FAQ pages instead of phone calls, chats instead of conversations and speed instead of human interaction.

So, in the name of efficiency, we optimized everything around not talking to customers. We built experiences designed to deflect, contain and reroute. And for a while, we convinced ourselves that was what customers preferred. But if we’re being honest, we all know it’s not a better experience. It was just easier to scale.

That’s clear to anyone who’s ever tried to resolve a real issue through a chatbot or a maze of help articles. When something actually matters, nothing is more frustrating than trying to chat your way to clarity and getting pre-canned replies (which are based on the FAQ content that didn’t answer your question in the first place).

At that point, people don’t want to click. They don’t want to search. They want to talk.

Speech is our most natural technology

Humans didn’t invent speech for convenience. We evolved it for survival.

Long before symbols were scratched on cave walls, spoken language allowed us to coordinate, negotiate, warn and build trust. Anthropologists and linguists generally agree that speech developed as humans became more social and cooperative, driven by the need to share context quickly and accurately.

Context is the keyword here. Speech carries far more information than text ever can. Tone, pace, hesitation, urgency and emotion are all signals that help us understand what someone is really trying to get at, not just what they’re saying. That’s why misunderstandings are so common in chat and email and why they’re often resolved in minutes, voice-to-voice.

We can all think of a time we misread someone’s tone over text. Maybe a few extra exclamation points made you think your mother-in-law was furious, when in reality she was just deeply enthusiastic about the potato salad she wanted you to bring to the picnic.

Or worse, the reverse can happen. You take her “Sure, that’s fine” at face value—only to show up and realize it was very much not fine.

Now imagine that dynamic playing out with a customer. You see an issue has been marked “resolved” and the case closed, only to find a major Instagram influencer posting about how infuriating the experience was.

From an evolutionary standpoint, talking isn’t a legacy channel. It’s the most information-rich form of communication we have.

The costly mistake we made in customer experience

If voice is so powerful, why did so many companies push customers away from it? The honest answer is cost.

Voice support has always been hard to staff at scale. Demand is unpredictable. Language coverage is expensive. Training and scheduling are complex. Faced with those constraints, many organizations reframed the problem and decided that customers preferred self-service. Over time, efficiency became the primary goal instead of resolution.

Voice didn’t disappear. It was deliberately deflected.

The answer is not interactive voice response (IVR)

When people hear “voice in customer experience,” they often picture rigid phone trees and robotic prompts. That’s understandable. But if ineffective web chats frustrate customers, non-answers and circular logic from IVR make their blood boil.

Traditional IVR systems were built to route calls, not resolve problems. They optimized for containment, not understanding. Asking customers to “press 1 for billing” was never a conversation; it was an obstacle course.

What customers want is actually very simple. They want to explain what’s happening, feel understood and reach a resolution, without repeating themselves every time they get transferred from one system to another or from a system to a human. That requires authentic conversation, not prescribed navigation workflows.

The generational myth about voice

Another assumption worth challenging is the idea that voice is only for older generations. Yes, many baby boomers are more comfortable than Gen Zers calling for help. But research and real-world behavior increasingly show that younger generations aren’t anti-voice, they’re anti-friction.

Gen Z grew up speaking to technology (“Alexa, play Kidz Bop!” “Hey Siri, tell my mom we’re out of toilet paper!”). Voice assistants, audio messaging and conversational interfaces are completely normal to them. What they don’t tolerate is waiting, repeating themselves or being forced through unnecessary steps to get what they want.

In customer experience, preference has far less to do with age than with effort. When speaking is the fastest path to resolution, people choose it, regardless of what generation they’re part of.

AI reduces the trade-off we’ve lived with

For decades, companies had to choose between scale and conversation. That trade-off no longer exists.

Advances in AI now make it possible to support natural, spoken interactions across languages, accents and volumes without the staffing constraints that once made voice impractical. Conversations don’t have to follow rigid scripts. They can adapt. They can carry context forward. They can listen as much as they respond.

This is why I’m excited about AI, not just for the cost savings alone. I’m excited about what it enables: better conversations with customers at make-or-break moments.

Redefining what success looks like

Reintroducing voice thoughtfully forces a broader rethink of how we measure customer experience. Deflection rates and containment metrics tell us how effectively we avoid customers. They don’t tell us how well we help them.

A more meaningful question is: How easy (or how frustrating) was it for the customer to resolve their issue?

When customers can speak naturally, explain their situation once and reach a clear outcome, effort drops. Trust increases. Loyalty follows, whether you’re serving consumers, prospects or long-term clients.

Sometimes, people just want to talk

Customer experience doesn’t fail because companies lack data, tools or intent. It fails when we forget how humans naturally communicate.

Sometimes, people don’t want to search, click or type. They just want to talk to someone and sort it out.

For the first time in decades, technology allows us to meet that need at scale. The opportunity now is to stop trying to automate conversations away and instead bring them back, better than ever.