United scandal and robot agents: Did customer service lose the human touch in 2017?

Cast your mind back to April, and the image of a United passenger being ejected from an overbooked plane, wrestled to the ground by security guards and then forcibly dragged, kicking and screaming, from the flight he was about to take home. Such an unsavoury incident was deeply damaging for the United brand, but it also cast a shadow over the customer service profession as a whole. How could an established business like United misread a situation so badly? Had the humanity of customer service become so far-removed that rigid procedure replaced common sense? In many ways, 2017 has been a year defined by the customer service profession questioning its own humanity. The proliferation of chatbots, artificial intelligence and voice assistants has increasingly raised the question of where humans fit into the service function in their business.