Assistants Lift CX While Untested Bots Burn Trust
PLUS: Two prompts to pressure-test features and choose assist vs automate
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🗓️ August 22, 2025 ⏱️ Read Time: ~5 minutes
👋 Welcome
Out in the field, I keep seeing the same pattern. When AI helps your people, customers feel the lift right away. When AI tries to replace people without guardrails, it creates demand you did not plan for.
🔎 Signal in the noise
Build for operations, not the demo. The teams that win pair assistive AI with clear failure paths and the ability to change course fast.
🎯 Executive lens
Your fastest wins are sitting in agent-assist, store-assist, and orchestration. Tighten governance and consolidate where compliance, QA, and journey visibility now come standard. Never greenlight a customer-facing bot without a rollback plan and a human safety net.
📌 Stories That Matter
🚗 AI features lift satisfaction and expose hidden friction
CX Focus: AI feature design and UX
J.D. Power’s latest TXI shows AI-based features can raise satisfaction while surfacing new usability and reliability issues. If you have shipped “smart” features, you know the real battle is discoverability, speed, and failure handling. If customers need a manual to use it, your queues will tell you what the roadmap missed.
Why this matters: Delight that is hard to find becomes a contact driver and a churn risk.
Try this: Pick one AI feature and cut the steps to value in half, then add a 20-second inline “show me” walkthrough that appears the first two times a customer tries it.
Source: J.D. Power
🧩 8x8 ships AI compliance, intelligence, and orchestration in one platform
CX Focus: Platform consolidation and compliance
8x8 announced AI-assisted compliance, analytics, and workflow orchestration that pull more of the contact center stack under one roof. If you are juggling point tools, this reduces the tax of tool sprawl and makes policy and audit work easier. The practical upside is simple pilots with fewer integration headaches.
Why this matters: When coaching, compliance, and routing live together, you can improve outcomes without stitching seven vendors.
Try this: Map one priority journey against the new capabilities and run a 30-day pilot that measures AHT, FCR, and QA variance by queue.
Source: Business Wire
🧰 Lowe’s says associate AI app is boosting satisfaction scores
CX Focus: Associate-assist and EX to CX
Lowe’s credited its MyLow Companion associate app for faster ramp times and higher customer satisfaction in Q2. Giving floor staff instant answers and guidance improves first-touch resolution in the aisle, not just in the dashboard. If you want a fast CSAT lift, put better coaching in the worker’s hand.
Why this matters: Coaching in the worker’s hand moves CSAT faster than more reporting in the manager’s inbox.
Try this: Stand up a four-week store-assist or agent-assist sprint on one intent and publish the before-after on helpfulness and AHT.
Source: Lowe’s
☎️ Commonwealth Bank backtracks after a failed bot trial raised call volume
CX Focus: Automation risk and ops testing
Commonwealth Bank reversed plans to replace 45 roles with an AI voice bot when the pilot drove more calls and overtime. The bank apologized and recommitted to staff after the trial exposed avoidable demand and trust issues. This is what launches look like without hard exit criteria, human escalation, and demand modeling.
Why this matters: A broken bot does not just fail quietly, it creates work and erodes trust.
Try this: Require a go-live kill switch, weekly demand variance tracking, and a staffed human fallback within 30 seconds for every new bot.
Source: ABC News Australia
🧭 Laivly and ProcedureFlow team up on AI guidance plus documented best paths
CX Focus: Agent-assist workflow and process mapping
The partnership pairs real-time AI prompts with living process maps and calculators that agents can follow confidently. That pairing matters in regulated environments where “right the first time” beats “fast and loose.” If you want measurable gains in AHT, FCR, and QA, put AI prompts on top of a process agents already trust.
Why this matters: AI suggestions only stick when they sit on top of a process agents trust.
Try this: Document the gold-path for one high-volume reason in ProcedureFlow-style steps, then layer agent prompts and track error rate and handle time.
Source: GlobeNewswire
✍️ Prompt of the Day
Design guardrails before you ship AI features
You are my Head of CX Engineering. Audit our top three AI-powered customer features for discoverability, latency, reliability, and failure handling.
For each feature:
• List the user’s intent and the expected happy path.
• Identify where a user could get stuck or confused.
• Set redlines for max latency, max retries, and acceptable error messages.
• Define the auto-escalation path to a human or simpler flow.
• Recommend one micro-instruction or inline “teach me” that runs in 20 seconds.
Output as a one-page checklist for product and care.
What this uncovers: Where “cool” turns into contacts.
How to apply: Run pre-release on one feature per sprint.
Where to test: Any AI feature with low adoption or high drop-offs.
🛠️ Try This Prompt
Run an assist vs automate bake-off on one intent
You are my CX Ops Analyst. Using the last 8 weeks of data, compare two treatments on the same intent (e.g., password reset, order status):
• T1: Agent-assist with real-time suggestions
• T2: Fully automated bot
Report AHT, FCR, containment, CSAT sub-score “helpfulness,” and repeat contacts within 72 hours.
Call a winner and recommend next actions for scale or rollback. Keep it to a one-page briefing with a chart and a decision.
Immediate use case: Decide where to scale assist and where to automate.
Tactical benefit: Protects CSAT while freeing capacity.
How to incorporate quickly: Pilot on one intent with identical eligibility rules.
📝 CX note to self
Assist first, automate second, measure always.
🙌 See you Monday!
If one idea hit home, reply and tell me where you will test it. If this helped your team, forward it to one CX leader who needs a nudge.
-Mark
💡 P.S. Want more prompts? Grab the FREE 32 Power Prompts That Will Change Your CX Strategy - Forever to start transforming your team, now. 👉 FREE 32 Power Prompts That Will Change Your CX Strategy - Forever - https://dcx.kit.com/32prompts
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