46 percent of organizations are funneling more AI investment into customer service than any other customer-facing function.
That’s according to a 2025 CX Today study entitled: “AI in Customer Experience: Where Are We Now, and Where Are We Going?”
The statistic underscores how the contact center has become ground zero, a test bed for AI.
A cynical take on this is that many businesses sense the opportunity to cut costs in customer service by replacing live agents with AI.
Recent service team layoffs at the likes of Sky, Zalando, and even Salesforce embolden this view.
Meanwhile, some CX vendors have promised to help companies replace their service staff. One even underscored its goal to help brands automate the entirety of their support operations.
However, if customer service is still “the new marketing”, is this a sensible objective?
Revisiting the “Customer Service Is the New Marketing” Concept
The “customer service is the new marketing” principle implies that excellent support experiences lead to happy customers who will advocate for the brand.
It also underscores how service teams can help retain customers. That’s highly beneficial. After all, decades-old studies suggest that acquiring a customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer – as noted in the Harvard Business Review.
Given all this, the concept of “customer service is the new marketing” has much merit.
However, in 2025, is a digital, AI-led experience memorable enough to create advocates and retain existing customers?
Maybe, for now. After all, the space is still swamped with previous-generation chatbots that stumble, forget, and frustrate.
Nevertheless, as AI becomes increasingly advanced, an excellent customer service experience may not be fully automated. Instead, human agents will take more of a strategic role, add extra value, and deliver something special.
AI & Orchestration: The Best Path Forward
Across transactional engagements, customers generally want a fully automated experience.
However, by aiming to automate everything, contact centers miss out on opportunities to further customer relationships, generate value, and act as the new marketing department.
As such, contact centers should not only consider where is best to deploy automation but also where is best not to.
That process starts with understanding the contact center’s demand drivers, considering each’s value and repetitiveness.
Contact centers should aspire to automate low-value, highly repetitive queries first.
In doing so, they can gain that breathing space to reconsider high-value, highly repetitive queries. These are where loyalty is won and lost.
Consider how the current service experience goes, and instead of removing the pain point that drives the contact or employing automation, ask: can we respond with a human to uplevel the experience?
If that human can deliver invaluable empathy, reassurance, or up/cross-sell, redesign the customer journey, give live agents the tools they need, and empower them to become value drivers.
Aramex: A Case Study
Aramex, a prominent global logistics and transportation brand, moved to the Sprinklr Service CCaaS platform in 2022 with the aim to reimagine its contact center operations.
Many industry onlookers value Sprinklr for its conversational AI prowess and ability to bridge contact center experiences with what is happening on social media and third-party review sites.
By targeting those low-value, high-repetition contacts, Amarex worked with Sprinklr to handle 20.2MN customer queries automatically in less than three years. It has also saved 1.3MN hours of agent time annually.
Yet, it has not only applied conversational AI; Amarex has reimagined customer experiences with proactive messaging and journey orchestration.
With proactive messaging, it has gone beyond contact automation to stop contacts before the customer can reach out. That’s more memorable than a pleasant bot engagement.
Regarding journey orchestration, Amarex has empowered its agents with new solutions to guide them through contacts, spotlighting the opportune moments to add that all-important human touch.
As a result, the company not only improved operational efficiency but enhanced the overall customer experience, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
Final Thoughts: People Will Remember How You Make Them Feel
Customer experience isn’t just about the product or service, it’s about how a business makes someone feel throughout the journey and long after the purchase.
Maya Angelou said it best:
“People will forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”
Emotional customer service engagements offer an opportunity to make a human-to-human connection that leaves a memorable imprint on the customer.
Human agents that engage intelligently in the moments that matter will be a brand’s best marketers.
With its CCaaS and AI expertise, Sprinklr supports businesses in automating transactional interactions, giving them breathing room to think more strategically, and delivering human-led value.
Indeed, it helps service teams understand what’s valuable and what’s not before orchestrating new experiences that benefit the customer and human agent, who starts to play a more strategic business role.
For more on Sprinklr’s broad customer experience portfolio, visit: www.sprinklr.com
