We’ve all been there: repeating “Representative!” into the phone.
Not because we love human interaction, but because we want resolution. We escalate because experience has taught us that it’s often the only way to get something actually solved.
Human support is expensive and hard to scale, so most service models are built around deflection, containment, and delayed escalation. Customers push harder to get help. Systems push harder to keep them out. The result is a tug-of-war that frustrates everyone and erodes trust.
This sole focus on cost control at scale, combined with a lack of available solutions, has caused many organizations to miss the bigger opportunity: delivering service that builds trust—and earns loyalty—at scale.
Escalation is Failure. The Customer Journey is Broken.
Customer support originally worked because customers could talk to a human and get things done. But as organizations scaled and business models became more complex, this one-on-one support model became increasingly inefficient and unsustainable.
Deflection and automation became the answer. Self-service portals, FAQs, chatbots, and copilots were layered in to answer standard customer questions while helping to manage scale and costs. Paths for customers to explain exactly what they need were narrowed or closed off. Escalation emerged when these deflection-first models failed under real-world complexity.
When deflection paths fail, customers are forced to figure out how the business operates to navigate their way forward: repeated handoffs, lost context, and frustration mounting at every turn.
Escalation isn’t a fix; it’s a band-aid. Over time, it’s become the norm despite rising dissatisfaction.
Make no mistake: escalation is failure. It signals a failed first-attempt at resolution and a service model that can’t handle complexity.
Rising Expectations, Broken Models
At the same time, customer expectations have only increased.
- Same-day delivery.
- Immediate response times.
- Personalization.
Delivering against these expectations requires operational coordination, not just faster replies.
So far, AI hasn’t resolved these issues, not because it can’t, but because we’ve used it to reinforce the same broken, deflection-first model.
AI copilots and task-based AI agents have largely been designed to support this existing workflow, not rethink customer engagement end-to-end in a way that leverages the full potential of AI.
An apt analogy might be the early days of online banking.
At first, banks simply digitized paper statements and branch forms. Customers could view balances but couldn’t truly transact, resolve disputes, or manage finances end-to-end. The experience was digital, but not transformed.
Only when banks redesigned processes around what the Internet made possible–real-time transfers, mobile deposits, proactive fraud alerts, and more–did the true value appear.
AI in customer service is at the same inflection point.
Escalation doesn’t fix broken service.
It exposes it.
As automation scales, the escalation model simply doesn’t hold. According to CMP’s 2026 January Market Study: Emerging Contact Center Technology, three in five consumers feel customer experience regressed in 2025. The mandates for 2026 are clear:
- Trust will be the differentiator as automation expands
- Self-service will either get smarter or get ignored
- AI is moving from experimentation to execution
AI will play a bigger role in service. But success depends entirely on what role we ask it to play.
The New Model: AI Customer Advocacy
We believe the future of service isn’t escalation. It’s advocacy.
What if every customer had their own advocate: attentive, knowledgeable, working on their behalf across your organization?
Every experience would be customer-led. Whether it’s:
- Food delivery or a regular meal-kit service for a hungry family,
- A new part to fix an outage in a critical data center, hospital, or warehouse,
- A legal appeal for an expiring visa, or
- A tow in the midst of a snowstorm.
With AI Customer Advocacy, that’s possible – at scale.
Imagine your customer engaging with a GPT-like AI: natural, conversational, and intuitive. But this AI goes beyond answering questions (based on what it knows) and taking actions (based on what it can do). Advocates have a third capability: while speaking with the customer, they can also ask others for help.
With this superpower, AI advocates aren’t just given a task. They’re given the purpose to orchestrate organizations through multiple conversations, as needed, with teams, systems, and partners to drive resolutions on the customer’s behalf.
While the customer is talking to an AI advocate, it’s simultaneously coordinating behind the scenes with:
- Agents and subject-matter experts to get the right answers
- Supply chain partners, dispatchers, or field technicians to coordinate and schedule activities
- Enterprise CRM systems and workflows to update and source automatically
It’s this behind-the-scenes orchestration that empowers AI advocates to work within even the most complex organizational models. Not retrieving static answers, but driving outcomes.
AI Customer Advocates don’t give up and escalate. They stay with customers: persistent, context-aware, outcome-focused, and accountable, representing the customer throughout the entire journey.
Customers don’t shout “Representative” because their advocate is already speaking to the right people for them.
With AI Customer Advocates, your business is always present for and responsive to your customers; they’re heard, their questions answered, their issues resolved, and their situation shared as needed. Their journey is theirs, led continuously by them because the advocate is navigating the complexity of your business on their behalf.
AI Customer Advocacy delivers trust and happy customers at scale.
A Deeper Look at Advocacy
We recently hosted a live session exploring the shift from escalation to AI Customer Advocacy.
The first half breaks down the advocacy model and how it differs from deflection-first service. The session concludes with a live Q&A between Doug Marinaro, CEO of Riptide, and Joe Russo, Assistant Vice President of Automotive Services at AAA – The Auto Club Group, on how this approach is working at scale.
Advocacy in Action: Real-World Impact at Scale
At AAA The Auto Club Group, AI Customer Advocacy is already transforming roadside assistance for 13 million members.
Riptide’s AI Customer Advocate, Ripley, integrates directly with Salesforce Service Cloud to coordinate in real time across members, contact centers, dispatchers, and technicians.
The result:
- Scale: 30,000+ daily customer-facing conversations managed by an AI Advocate
- Satisfaction: 10x reduction in response time and +4% lift in CSAT across the network
- Efficiency: 50% reduction in average handle time and 3X concurrency on omnichannel cases
- Empowered teams: 20% increase in agent retention
- Advocacy (a new metric): 95% of conversations managed by AI without human-to-human interaction
As Scott VerBracken, Vice President of Automotive Services, AAA The Auto Club Group, explains:
“Finally, we can involve members at scale because Ripley intelligently handles their replies—whether that’s additional information about their location or questions about the technician’s ETA. Meanwhile, our staff only steps in when Ripley isn’t certain, which reduces our dispatch handling time by 50% while increasing overall member satisfaction.”
The Future of Service Is Advocacy
Escalation is failure—a symptom of a broken customer journey and a relic of service models built for a human-only powered contact center.
Advocacy is AI built for today’s operational reality—where complexity is the norm, expectations are higher than ever, and customer-led journeys are finally possible.
Happier customers.
Happier teams.
Greater efficiency.
No escalation required.