Stop Automating The Conversation. Start Fixing The Work.
Plus: The fastest CX win is usually hiding in your backlog
To opt-out of receiving DCX AI Today go here and select Decoding Customer Experience in your subscriptions list.
📅 February 18, 2026 | ⏱️ 5 min read
Good Morning!
Today we’re talking about the part of CX that customers hate the most: the limbo between “we got your request” and “it’s done.” The big shift is AI moving from helping conversations to accelerating work items like refunds and exceptions. And for your DCX Stat, a heads-up: voice AI agents aren’t coming “someday.” They’re lining up at your front door.
The Executive Hook:
Here’s the dirty little secret of “great service”: customers don’t actually care how smart your bot sounds if the refund still takes seven days. A lot of loyalty is decided in the quiet back-office moments, the tasks, approvals, exceptions, and follow-ups that nobody markets but everybody feels.
🧠 THE DEEP DIVE: AI Is Moving From “Call Help” To “Work Item Help” In Customer Service
The Big Picture: Amazon Connect added AI-powered overviews and suggested next actions for Tasks, aimed at speeding up non-call work like refunds and form-driven requests.
What’s happening:
AI is showing up where the backlog lives. Tasks are the unglamorous part of service, the “someone needs to do something” bucket. That’s exactly where delays breed repeat contacts.
Agents get a ready-made snapshot. Instead of hunting through notes, orders, and past contacts to rebuild context, the system provides an overview so the work starts closer to “already understood.”
It’s nudging agents toward completion. Suggested next actions sound small, but they can reduce the “What do I do now?” time that quietly stacks up across thousands of cases.
Why it matters: This is how you kill the “still waiting” problem. Customers don’t call back because they love your hold music. They call back because nothing happened. If you can shorten task cycle time, you reduce repeat contacts, lower agent frustration, and improve outcomes without forcing customers into yet another channel.
The takeaway: Stop measuring only first response time. Pick your top three work items (refunds, cancellations, order changes is a common trio) and track: cycle time, rework rate, and repeat contacts. Then use AI to speed up the workflow. If the work moves faster, the channel arguments get a lot quieter.
Source: AWS
📊 CX BY THE NUMBERS: Voice AI Agents Are About To Flood The Frontline
Data Source: NICE – The Agentic AI CX Frontline Report (2026)
15% of organizations are already actively developing voice AI agents. That’s not “testing.” That’s building.
98% of those organizations plan to deploy within 12 months. That’s a wave, not a trend line.
The Insight: Voice isn’t a dusty IVR channel anymore. It’s becoming the primary on-ramp for agentic AI. If your CX roadmap still treats voice as a cost center instead of a strategic automation layer, you’re about to be behind a very real deployment wave.
🧰 THE AI TOOLBOX: Kustomer AI Setup Assistant
The Tool: Kustomer introduced an “AI Setup Assistant” designed to help teams configure AI more reliably and avoid the classic rollout faceplant.
What it does: It guides setup and surfaces gaps so you don’t launch AI into a messy environment and then act surprised when it behaves messily.
CX Use Case:
Pre-launch “Are we actually ready?” check. Use it to pressure-test knowledge coverage, escalation rules, and what the AI is allowed to do before customers find the gaps for you.
Agent assist that doesn’t turn into tone roulette. Align language, policy steps, and “what good looks like” so suggestions feel consistent and safe.
Trust: Most AI failures aren’t “the model is dumb.” They’re “we fed it fuzzy policies and gave it unclear boundaries.” If you want reliability, do the boring things on purpose: define allowed actions, put tighter controls on high-risk intents (billing, identity, cancellations), log outcomes, and make escalation fast and normal. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s recoverability without drama.
Source: Kustomer.com
⚡ SPEED ROUND: Quick Hits
Tealium Earns AWS Generative AI Competency — Translation: “Your data still decides whether your AI experience feels magical or mismatched.”
WilmerHale Flags AI Governance And Disclosure Risk Pressure — The question is shifting from “Can we automate this?” to “Can we justify it when a customer challenges it?”
Continu Expands Its Conversational AI Agent With ‘Experts’ — Packaged expertise can help, but only if you validate outcomes in the real world, not just the demo script.
📡 THE SIGNAL: The Backlog Is Where Trust Gets Built Or Burned
If you want a real CX advantage, stop worrying so much about the front door and start fixing what happens after the customer walks in.
AI is getting better at shrinking the time between when a customer asks for something and when it’s actually done. Customers don’t think of that as a “work gap.” They just notice whether you get things handled or not. That’s where loyalty grows, because people read speed and follow-through as competence.
So ask yourself: what’s the one work item in your business that causes the most “I’m still waiting” frustration? And what’s one change you could make this quarter to cut that wait time in half — without cutting corners?
See you tomorrow,
👥 Share This Issue
If this issue sharpened your thinking about AI in CX, share it with a colleague in customer service, digital operations, or transformation. Alignment builds advantage.
📬 Feedback & Ideas
What’s the biggest AI friction point inside your CX organization right now? Reply in one sentence — I’ll pull real-world examples into future issues.