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A human customer service agent might have all the empathy in the world, but if it's not permitted under their company policy then it is unhelpful.

The point I'm making is that empathetic outcome in customer service interactions is the outcome of explicit and implicit decisions by the organization. Empathy can only be used if the employee knows he or she won't face a negative impact.

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Sometimes bending explicit policy is part of providing exceptional customer service. Not every situation is the same. If companies never bent the rules, you would never get these wonderful PR stories that companies love -- as an example.

intrinsically this is part of the problem -- we are reducing decisions down to basically a hard set fast of rules that I am sure AI will implement and arrive to the correct rules better than any human can -- but we aren't robots. There is no correct set of levers to pull, and you can't take emotion out of decisions that are made. Nobody likes strict legalism, and you can't possibly make rules for every single situation.

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