My last article examined what the customer experience (CX) execution gap is costing organizations in trust. Now I want to discuss how to close it and why the leaders who get this right won’t have to choose between speed and empathy. They’ll have both.
That might sound straightforward, but most organizations in India are still treating speed and empathy as competing priorities. ServiceNow’s The CX Shift found that 55% of customers expect AI to deliver faster, more efficient service. At the same time, 48% cite a lack of empathy as their top frustration. Most organizations are solving only half the equation.
Business leaders driving customer excellence have swung the pendulum too far on mean time to resolution (MTTR). Speed and efficiency have shaped everything: the training, the technology, and the incentives.
Yet our research found that while 80% of Indian customers say they’d like to self-serve or self-solve routine issues, they want human connection when dealing with complex problems.
Leaders are missing the mark. Customers want empathy most when they’re picking up the phone and talking to someone.
Eight out of 10 business leaders say AI has improved MTTR, according to The CX Shift. That’s meaningful progress. But only 19% have made progress building emotional connections with customers through AI. Speed is moving in the right direction, but empathy isn’t keeping pace.
What gets measured is what gets delivered. For years, empathy hasn’t been measured.
One India consumer in the study noted, "The most frustrating thing about AI service is that it has zero emotions. They don’t connect with you. They don’t feel you. They don’t get what you want to say.”
That’s not an argument against AI. It’s an argument for deploying it differently. The question isn’t whether to use AI in customer service, but whether to use it to amplify human connection or replace it.
The conversation in many boardrooms starts with the wrong question: Can AI replace service reps? Twist that narrative.
Today, service reps are at level X. But with the right AI tools, connected data, and a single view of a customer, they can operate exponentially faster. That’s because AI frees them from navigating systems to find information they should already have.
More than half (53%) of service reps say AI is critical for providing next-level CX, and 52% say it’s already reduced their workload and stress, according to our research. The frontline wants this shift, but fragmented infrastructure prevents AI from helping them the way it should.
Only four out of 10 customers feel their service journeys are quicker and more convenient because of AI.
Speed is improving. The next step is making sure the time that AI saves gets redirected to interactions rather than consumed by the next administrative task in the queue.
ServiceNow, The CX Shift 2026
There’s a useful way to think about this. Some customer interactions are what I call sunny-day conversations: The customer has a routine query, and self-service and AI can resolve it. Those interactions should never require a human.
Other interactions, however, are rainy-day conversations: The customer is frustrated or anxious. The service rep who shows human judgment and can read the customer’s tone, respond to their emotion, and make them feel genuinely heard can make a huge difference.
When an issue can't be resolved by an AI agent and has to be handed over to a service rep, the context sometimes gets lost and the customer has to repeat their problem.
Many times, the rep can’t resolve the issue in a timely manner because they don’t have access to the relevant data in the context of the work they’re doing. That’s not a people failure; it’s an infrastructure failure.
That’s not always the case. “The AI assistant guided me step by step and connected me to a human instantly, which made the whole experience unexpectedly smooth and reassuring,” one India consumer shared.
That’s what good looks like. It’s not AI replacing humans, but knowing when to bring humans in, with full context surfaced so that the conversation can start at the right place.
Here’s the point that often gets lost in the efficiency conversation: When a service rep has everything in front of them before a call begins, they’re able to complete the interaction faster with empathy at the forefront. You’re not trading one for the other. You’re delivering both.
In a conversation I had with Aditya Sudhindranath, chief strategy officer at Deloitte India, he framed it as where the gap between speed and empathy closes by giving service reps the context they need to focus on the customer rather than the system.
Nearly half (44%) of customers say their biggest concern about AI chatbots is a loss of human connection and empathy, our research found. That concern is valid, and it’s solvable.
Those 44% aren’t saying they don’t want AI, but rather they don’t want AI at the expense of feeling understood. The organizations building the infrastructure that lets AI handle what machines do best free service reps to do what only humans can: build trust, demonstrate empathy, and create memorable customer interactions.
ServiceNow, The CX Shift 2026
One argument has been consistent throughout this article series: The disparity between CX ambition and CX reality isn’t a strategy problem, but an execution problem. That execution problem has one root cause: Fragmented systems prevent organizations from acting as one.
When systems and data are connected, service reps have what they need. When service reps have what they need, they can deliver both speed and empathy. And when they deliver both, customers feel understood. Customers who feel understood tend to be loyal.
Nearly seven out of 10 business leaders plan to deploy AI to optimize customer relationship management (CRM) across sales and service in the next three years, according to our research. The organizations that move fastest on the infrastructure underneath that ambition will be the ones that pull ahead.
Get more insights in The CX Shift India report.
