Can AI deliver the emotional intelligence customers crave?

When organisations assume AI can’t manage emotionally charged situations, they miss an opportunity to enhance the customer experience. Discover how to build emotionally intelligent AI into your customer journeys and lead the way on service excellence. 

A customer facing redundancy calls their bank to explain they will struggle to meet their mortgage payments. Already reeling from the shock of losing their job, the customer is transferred three times by an automated phone system, each time forced to re-tell their story. Shame, distress and humiliation mount with every repetition.  

Or take another example. It’s a winter evening. A customer turns to a chatbot for help with a broken boiler. The boiler may only need repressurising – a simple fix – but the earliest available engineer visit is two days away. As the cold sets in, frustration turns to despair, and despair turns to anger. 

Organisations don’t trust AI to handle messy emotions 

In high-stress, emotionally sensitive situations like these, many organisations default to human agents. Intuitively, this feels right – and customers are likely to agree. In our in-depth research into the service experience of 1,000+ real-life customers, almost 74% agreed that AI is never appropriate in distressing or emotional situations and over 60% said emotional issues should always be handled by a human. Fewer than one per cent believed AI should handle emotionally sensitive issues.  

Another piece of research, analysing 37,500 customer reviews, backs this up. In this study, we found that ‘empathy’ is the lowest-performing aspect of AI-driven service. Across all industries, it scored just 1.05/5. In other words, customers experience a major ‘empathy gap’ when it comes to today’s AI-driven service.  

But what if all this is about to change? 

Advanced AI can provide consistency, clarity and discretion  

Advanced AI is evolving quickly.  Today’s systems can often detect subtle cues – like hesitation, frustration or distress – in a customer’s voice tone or chat and interacts faster and more reliably than a tired human agent. These emotionally intelligent AI solutions can then escalate to a specialist, real-time prompt an agent on the best approach or even resolve issues directly – removing friction without ignoring emotion. They never lose patience, never deviate from protocol and always escalate based on rules set by the business, providing the consistency, clarity and discretion customers need in difficult and emotional moments. 

Emotionally intelligent orchestration is the future – here’s where to begin 

We are already helping leading organisations embed emotionally intelligent capabilities into their customer journeys. This isn’t about replacing human empathy with robot efficiency. It’s about using AI to amplify empathy at scale – bringing emotional intelligence into every interaction, consistently and at pace.  

This is the next evolution of customer service. For organisations looking to lead on empathy and service excellence, it is where they need to be.  

While unlocking the full potential of emotionally intelligent AI takes time, the first steps can deliver tangible improvements quickly. Here are three priorities to guide your journey: 

Design around customer needs 

Great service starts with a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and mindset – and making these the focus of service design. Skipping this stage and designing purely for speed or simplicity risks missing the factors that drive trust and satisfaction: 

• Accessibility – Can everyone use your AI solution, regardless of digital literacy, language or ability? Think of older adults still adapting to digital systems, the millions in the UK for whom English isn’t their first language or those without reliable connectivity or smart devices. For example, older adults (65+) are more than twice as likely to describe AI solutions as frustrating or stressful than younger adults (<35). Accessibility isn’t an add-on – it’s foundational for emotionally intelligent engagement.  
• Vulnerability – Can your AI solution detect when someone is struggling emotionally, financially or otherwise?  Whether it’s a customer in crisis, experiencing grief or dealing with financial stress, these are moment that demand clarity, consistency and discretion – not a generic chatbot loop. In our research, one third of respondents said AI’s ability to detect emotion and react accordingly would determine whether they would use AI in service scenarios in future.  
• Urgency – Can your system recognise and respond to critical situations quickly and safely? If someone contacts you while stranded on a motorway or because they can smell gas at home – can your AI detect the urgency and escalate appropriately? These moments demand fast, human-led resolution, not standard processing. In our survey, the ability to recognise urgency and route to a human agent was the improvement to AI that customers mentioned most. 

Don’t under-estimate the data challenge  

Emotionally intelligent tools – like sentiment analysis, voice tone detection and behavioural analytics – need clean data to power them. Without a foundation of clean, well-labelled, customer-specific data, even the most advanced tools struggle to deliver meaningful insights. 

Over time, building that data foundation will be essential. But even now, organisations can create real impact with more straightforward solutions – especially those that support human agents to deliver faster, more emotionally attuned service. 

For example, our work with a major financial services organisation, which helps more than 280,000 consumers every year, deployed AI that helps agents get to the heart of each case faster. Many consumers contacting the organisation are anxious or frustrated. With AI supporting triage and context-gathering, agents are empowered to focus on what matters most to consumers: resolving complaints with speed, empathy and precision. 

Be clear on when to escalate 

Emotionally intelligent AI isn’t about replacing human empathy – it’s about routing for it. The best systems orchestrate the customer journey with clear guardrails that define when AI should assist and when a human should take the lead. 

Think of this as a spectrum: 

• Some situations can be handled fully by AI. 
• Others should offer customers a choice. 
• Critical cases should default to human. 

When AI can sense when human judgement or empathy is needed and hand customers off seamlessly to a human agent, the technology becomes an important asset. In our survey, half of customers (50.4%) said they’re likely to use AI if it can recognise urgent or sensitive situations and route them to humans at the right moment. 

Whatever your orchestration strategy, embed feedback loops to measure customer outcomes and continuously refine the balance between automation and human care. 

Why it matters 

AI can’t feel, but it can learn to recognise when feelings matter. This is important, because AI that lacks emotional intelligence doesn’t just frustrate customers – it erodes trust.  

With the right design, data and orchestration, AI can help deliver service that is emotionally aware, responsive and trustworthy. That’s not just a better customer experience – it’s a competitive advantage. Let us help you explore what’s possible.