Last October, my daughter was laid off, and the company named AI as the reason. I wrote about her last week, about the months of applications that went nowhere and the federal case that finally said her suspicions deserved to be heard.
So believe me when I tell you I have thought hard about what
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I left my mammogram appointment today the way I leave it every year, a little amazed at how easy they made it. Same clinic, same yearly visit, and every time the morning runs like it was designed by someone who thought about me before I arrived. Because it was. What looks like a smooth hour is act
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Most customer service training prepares you for anger. Almost none of it prepares you for tears. Everything changes the moment a customer stops shouting and starts crying. The script you were trained on goes quiet, and human biology takes the wheel. This is where empathetic de-escalation lives, in
...An AI taught me the most disarming word in customer service. When I am frustrated with the AI I work with every day, I correct it, and sometimes I vent. It never matches my energy. It does not get defensive. It says one word, "Understood," tells me what it is doing next, and fixes the thing. Every
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There is a customer in my training room who does not exist. She joins the breakout room already hot, a 5 out of 5 on my intensity scale. She talks over the agents, demands a supervisor, and threatens to take it public. The four people in the room have one job: bring her from a 5 down to a 1, togethe...
It is the call you brace for. The customer is shouting before you finish your greeting, the words are sharp and personal, and every instinct says defend yourself or rush to a fix. In a call center, that moment decides the entire interaction. De-escalation is the skill that turns it around, and it
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The industry calls them AI agents. I call them an AI workforce. That is not a small distinction, and I want to start here, because the word you choose shapes how your team feels walking into this change.
When you say "AI agents," your frontline hears "the thing that replaces me." When you say "AI
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You are mid-shift. A customer is hot. The chat window is blinking, the phone line is live, or the email is sitting there in all caps, and you have about ten seconds to say something that lowers the temperature instead of raising it. You know how to de-escalate angry customers over chat, phone, and
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In live chat, you don't have your voice to soften the message. There's no warm tone, no pause, no reassuring "mm-hmm." The customer reads your words flat on a screen, and an angry customer reads them at their worst. So the words you choose carry the whole weight of the de-escalation. These 27 ph
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Section Manager.
I had no idea what that meant. So I asked. And here is what I learned, at least at that company. A Section Manager did not manage people. No direct reports. What you managed was a process or a function. In my case, I was a Training Section Manager. I researched, designed, and built...
Ā In 1998, a man named Doug Wojcieszak lost his oldest brother.
Jim went into the hospital. The staff mixed up his chart with their father's chart. His heart attack was misdiagnosed. And Jim, who should have walked back out, did not.
What happened next is the part I want you to sit with.
The hospi...
A service provider I had worked with for two years failed me last Tuesday. For two years, this company had handled a piece of my business I did not have to think about. Until they could not deliver anymore.
By Friday afternoon, I had replaced them.
Not with another service provider. With an AI emp...
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