Here's a quick way to get a perfect score for your customer service.
Take your phone number off your website. Delete your email address. Switch off the chat. Nobody can contact you, so every query that reaches you has been handled automatically. One hundred percent automation.
Vik Lakhotia, Group Product Manager at car insurer Marshmallow, said exactly that at aiblLIVE in London on 20 October. "If you want to achieve a 100% automation rate," he said, "you can get rid of your chat, you can delete your phone number, delete your email address from your website, you'll just have perfection, right?"
And he made the serious point. "That's not what you want to do. What you want to do is think about what really, really matters to your business."
The number that tricks you
Marshmallow built an AI agent called Marsha to help customers. Vik says it now handles around 60% of conversations on its own and talks to almost everyone who uses their chat.
You'd expect him to lead with that figure. He didn't. He called the automation rate "so misleading".
The reason came down to simple maths. By Vik's figures, a chat handled by a human cost Marshmallow about £10. The margin on a customer who renews is many times that. He put it at 20 to 50 times the cost of the chat.
So the real risk sat somewhere else: the AI saving £10 and losing a customer worth hundreds. Or, as happened with an early version of Marsha, handing out discounts too freely. Vik said it over-discounted by 10 to 20% at first.
That's why they judged Marsha on business results, mainly whether customers stayed. How many chats it closed without a human came second.
Put it where it matters
The other part of his talk was about how AI projects die. He called it "the POC graveyard", where proofs of concept go to be forgotten.
His description will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a busy company. A senior leader says "we want to go all in on AI", and "then there is a 2-week news cycle where everyone's really excited". After that, "there's a fire burning here, there's a fire burning there, and everyone gets distracted."
Marshmallow's answer was twofold. First, give the AI your hardest problem, so the people who doubt it see it work where it counts. Second, put it in a workflow that is commercially critical, in their case keeping customers, so nobody can quietly drop it when the excitement fades.
Your chatbot, your rules
You probably aren't building your own AI agent. You might be thinking about a chatbot on your site, an automated email sequence or a tool that answers enquiries out of hours.
The same rule applies. It's tempting to measure what the tool is good at, how many messages it sent or how many questions it answered. The useful question is what happened to the business: whether more enquiries turned into customers, fewer customers left, or anyone got annoyed and went elsewhere.
Now think about the version where you get this right. Your AI handles the simple stuff and your people handle the moments that decide whether someone stays. And you can see in your numbers that customers are happier for it. That's worth far more than a shiny percentage on a dashboard.
If you're about to switch on any kind of automation, it might be worth deciding first which one business number it should move. Revenue, renewals, repeat orders, reviews. What would yours be?
